San Francisco to New Orleans on a Harley

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• Locations: New Orleans, San Francisco
• Holiday Types: City break, Getting there

• by: johnbownas
• on: Thu 09 Feb 2012

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My Harley Davidson adventure took me from San Francisco to New Orleans, where I wrote this from the opulent grandeur of The Biscuit Palace Hotel – in stark contrast to the lives of the boxcar-travelling hippies who we partied with on a jazz-bar balcony the previous night.

We spent the night before that in a colonial cabin on a Louisiana bayou, lying in a jacuzzi, listening to a local jazz station and ducking mosquitoes after a day chasing tornados and being buffeted by the gales blowing in off the Mexican Gulf...

Previously on the trip... other memories include eating the best chowder of my life on Fisherman's Wharf whilst sipping Californian chardonnay (stayed in the Hotel des Arts and loved the customised mural-clad rooms), drinking in Venice Beach with a Dutch bar-owner (stayed cheap on-the-beach in the Cotel hostel...good to rough it for one night), saw The Doors up close with 200 people in the Hard Rock in Vegas; stayed with the chipmunks and possums in Kopokelli's Cave, 300 feet up a sheer cliff face; got adopted by a rocking ghost town (Terlingua, Texas), helped out at a pirate radio fundraiser, sat around campfires listening to cowboy music and telling bad jokes in the utter darkness, argued with Mexicans in the cocktail bar of the Artisan Hotel in El Paso, stood everyone a round of shots - and got them all back.

I also spent a night checking out the bands in Austin's infamous 6th street, rode a ten hour, non-stop day after two hours sleep, got off a speeding fine from a surly Texan policeman with my winning smile, had a rib almost broken by a dive-bombing bird impact, had more margaritas than most people consume in a lifetime of trying, walked miles the wrong way down an interstate in the pouring rain to retrieve some lost luggage and got rescued by a 60 year old catholic nun/biker-chick, shared the most expensive bottle of wine of my life completely by accident, saw a really big tiger who lives at a gas station on the side of Interstate 10 (t-shirts read 'animal activists all taste like chicken to me...') and loved every mile of it - even the long ones.

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