Michigan to Arizona - part 1

Well i just got home from my 2 week trip to across the United States. The main part of the trip was me riding my 1972 Honda CB500 from Phoenix to Michigan. But before i get to that , the week before i left with my friend John, we went up to Bad Axe and spent some time with his relatives on their farm. I got to help milk cows and plow a field. They actually let me drive that thing for almost half the day, by myself. I think i plowed around 60 acres.




Now on to the trip. Basically it was three days of driving:
Michigan to Nashville
Nashville to Texas
Texas to Phoenix

Before getting to Nashville though we went to the Louisville Slugger factory and got bats made with our names on them. But Nashville was really great. John and i went to the Country Music Hall of Fame, saw some of the Montreal Canadians players walking from the hotel to the ice arena, went to a concert at the Grand Ole Opry and hung out downtown afterwords.

Carrie Underwood was just one of the people singing that night

Main street in downtown Nashville, there was live country music in just about every bar

Oh ya and we played putt-putt and rode go-carts every chance we could

Happy 40th Birthday

This October my 1972 Honda CB500 motorcycle will be 40 years old. It is 4-cylinder and 50 horse power that gets around 45-55 miles per gallon. I've had it for 11 years. When i first got it, it had 12,062 miles. Today it's at 21,595 miles.
Here's what it looked like when i first got it in 1999. It had a big old seat and tall mirrors. Other than the exhaust it was pretty much original.
Since then i've learned a lot from working on it. Usually the process is: something breaks, i try to fix it, i make it worse, i try fixing it several more times before i realize what i'm doing wrong then fix it properly.
This is probably the furthest i've had it taken apart. Over the years i've replaced a few things: brakes, tires, oil filter, screws and bolts, chain and sprockets hand grips, jets for the carburetors (I had them apart and took 6 tries to get them back together before i realized i had the overflow needle upside down) throttle cable which broke in Arizona and lots more.
I wrapped the exhaust. This is my idea of form and function working perfectly. The exhaust works better because it stays cooler and i think it looks better too.
I made a new seat. It's thinner then the old one and a little bit harder, but it's easier to ride and the center of gravity is lower which helps.
Mackinaw Bridge
The 45th parallel near Traverse City. This was on the same trip to Mackinaw. I rode around the outer edge of Michigan, about 900 miles in 4 days.
The biggest thing i've ever done is my 2,600 mile, 13 day ride from Arizona to Michigan.
Continental Divide somewhere in New Mexico.
Camping on Thanksgiving by Foss Lake Oklahoma at sunset.
Just outside of Phoenix Arizona.
Riding through the Petrified Forest.
I don't remember where this was. Maybe Texas?
This is a picture of every state border i crossed on my ride from Arizona. The only 2 i missed were Arizona and Ohio. The Ohio border is on a bridge, over a river, in 4 lanes of traffic, i didn't stop. For that entire trip the only thing that went wrong with the bike was the throttle cable breaking as we unloaded it from the truck. It's quite amazing that a 40 year old motorcycle rode 2,600 miles (most of that at 7,000rpm) without any problems. And still today it's running great.