Second day, May 29: motorcycles, Santa Fe’

The next morning, when I woke up, very early as said before (I will have slept four hours, maybe, but with the time zone of the place), I stayed in my room for a while and looked out the window: from the eleventh floor I could see the streets below and in particular an intersection where everyone (ALL) stopped at the stop signal, then they decided who had to pass according to rules that only they knew. In reality, the rule would be that whoever arrives first at an intersection has priority over anyone else who arrives later, so progressively after the first comer passes the second, then the third and so on.

Around 7 I go down to have breakfast, breakfast in America, the first real American breakfast: scrambled eggs, bacon, beans, sausage, toast and coffee! I brush everything (I hadn’t had dinner), I leave the first tip (in America it’s very customary to leave the tip, if you want but it’s almost an obligation), I go back to my room to get my luggage and go down to the hall to wait for the Eagle Rider guide to pick me up. In the lobby I notice some people who seem really likely to be travel companions and when I hear the Italian language the first small concern falls: will there be other Italians who will make the trip less complicated? Yes, they are Marco and Chiara, a couple from Lombardy who chose the same itinerary as me. Then it turns out that there are two Paraguayans and two French people living in Spain (or were they two Spaniards living in France? I never understood it, they spoke both languages indifferently!).

Stefano arrives, Stefano Trampetti, an Italian Eagle Rider guide, who welcomes us to the journey on Route 66 West. With the van driven by the very nice Mike Bernhard we all go to the Harley Davidson Thunderbird dealership, where there is also an Eagle Rider headquarters, in a gigantic building. First purchase of Harley Davidson t-shirt with a dealership, then I bought more in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, plus others in small towns along Route 66. We perfected the documentation and insurance for the rental motorcycles and they gave us a personalized motorcycle jacket, with shoulder, elbow and back protections, removable and rainproof internal thermal lining. We chose the helmet and were assigned the motorcycle, for the most part all new with a few thousand km. I had a Street Glide even though I had asked for an Ultra (like the one I drove in 2025), so we left for Santa Fe’, for the first stop of the tour. First driving experience on American roads, with the American traffic!

In America you travel and behave differently than in Italy and Europe: there is no rule of overtaking on the right, you walk freely in one lane rather than in another, you overtake indistinctly on the left or right. In fact, while we were traveling on a two-lane road, a Big Rig passed us on the right. Most vehicles respect a large safety distance, the speed is almost completely homogeneous and in the speed limits, which are between 55 and 80 mph, it depends on the roads. Sometimes during the tour we also reached 95 mph, which is about 150 km/h. I have mainly traveled deserted streets and crossed small towns, I imagine that in big cities there is heavy traffic as in the whole world. You have to pay attention to the powerful Big Rigs or so-called trucks, the gigantic trucks: they generally go fast (there are no specific speed limits for trucks, they are the same as those of cars) and they are not used to guides different from those common in America, so, as Stefano told us, if a car or a motorcycle were to brake for no reason or cut their way there is a risk of ending up under the wheels of the truck. However, with Stefano’s safe and reliable driving, we have never taken any risk. Trucks in the United States are so big because they do heavy transport over long distances. The photograph below gives an idea of the majesty of a Big Rig, a Western Star 574 with a Kentucky (rest area on the New Mexico-Arizona border).

In Santa Fe’ we met the group of motorcyclists from Chicago who, as planned, joined us to complete together the second stretch of Route 66. They, poor things, told us that they had spent at least a whole day in torrential rain. Meanwhile I realize that the bike they had given me had an oil leak around the air filter at the height of the rear cylinder, Stefano told me that he would work on it and in case I would have taken the spare motorcycle from the van’s trolley. We had some free time to wander around the historic center, see a small native craft market. They were all sitting on the ground in a row under a colonnade in the square of the historic center, it was a bit of sadness to see them like that. We were in the club to eat a terrible burrito (we are in New Mexico, but anyway the burritos chased us the whole trip) and then we went back to the hotel where we three Italian friends ate a good pizza. To sleep relatively early, tomorrow we can expect a little longer stop.