Saul V

“After the Phoenix show, Greg rode with us on the bus to a truck stop in Kingman, and next morning we set out for the MGM Grand in Vegas (where it was fiercely hot, 107°F, but still nothing like as uncomfortable as that South Texas swelter). Once again, I had planned an adventurous detour, on a dirt road ending at a remote shore of Lake Mead.”
― Neil Peart, Far and Away: A Prize Every Time

“Larry was the most talented, experienced and competent motorcyclist in the country, but this is the one thing he knew he couldn’t do anything about,” said his girlfriend, Maryann Puglisi, with whom he lived in Squirrel Hill and Washington, D.C., and who helped run his business. “Just a few weeks ago he said to me, ‘That’s how I’m going to go, it’s going to be a deer.’ He could deal with all the idiot drivers, but at night when a deer jumps in your path, that’s it and he knew that.”
― Neil Peart, Far and Away: A Prize Every Time

“I actually spend far more time in the saddle than I do on the drum throne. That takes its toll, too—in the sore spots that Michael and I call “saddle tats”; in the tired mind from making a million decisions about traffic and road surfaces as you ride hour after hour; and in a body beaten by wind, vibration, and the physical activity of motorcycling, especially in the mountains, with so much braking, shifting, accelerating, and moving your body on the bike for more effective cornering. Then there was the heat—in the 100s for many days, especially in the Southwest. Desert heat is one thing, but when the humidity is also high, as in South Texas, and you’re wearing the armored suit, helmet, gloves, and boots, you get to feel like you’re covered in a coat of slime, riding past a small-town bank clock showing 105°. We have seen some fantastically scenic parts of the country, though. This western swing carried us through the Rockies, the Cascades, the Sierra Nevada, Northern and Southern California, the Great Basin, a broad swath of northern Arizona, across Colorado (or “Cop-orado,” as I have christened the state, for its overzealous enforcement of artificially low speed limits), and some of Texas’s prettiest landscapes, the Hill Country and Gulf Coast.”
― Neil Peart, Far and Away: A Prize Every Time