Road Trippin’
Arturo Flores’ Summer Adventure
December 9, 2016
Peter Parker. Bruce Wayne. Matt Murdock. What do they have in common? They lead double lives. They have secret identities. And they are not who they appear to be. They are also all superheroes.
You may not know it, but at Laguna we have somebody who, like those heroes, has a secret identity. During the school year, you may know Senior Flores as purely a mild-mannered Spanish teacher.
Every summer, however, Flores embodies a different persona, accompanied by his cousin, he embarks on an asphalt odyssey through one of our nation’s great national parks. They have taken these voyages together for the past five years, each time exploring a different facet of the American wilderness.
They’ve been to, “Arches, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Utah; Great Basin National Park, Nevada; Craters of the Moon, Priest Lake, the Snake River and others in Idaho; Grand Tetons, Yellow Stone, and others that escape my mind in Wyoming; Glacier Park in Montana and Glacier Park in Alberta, Canada,” Flores recounts.
The summer of 2016, Flores boarded his Valkyrie Interstate in Santa Barbara and cruised all the way to Olympia, Washington and back. Making plenty of stops along the way. He enjoyed “feeling the wind and covering space and admiring the immense terrain.”
It would be hard to take these trips without seeing some amazing things. Flores has seen “plenty of wild life: bears, eagles, Salmon, wolves and buffalo,” over the years, and has “been through thunder and lightning storms.”
“Motorcycle riding can be very dangerous” Flores warns. “It is very important to concentrate and be well rested for long rides. As such, he made many stops along the way. On his way to Olympia, he rested in “Sacramento, Eugene, Oregon and finally Olympia on the third day.”
After meeting up with his cousin in Olympia, the two made their way back down the coast. A much more stretched out trip, they stopped frequently to see landmarks along the coast. For the next 11 days they traveled the 1,548 miles from Olympia to Crescent Coast, CA, planning to stop at “one lighthouse a day.”
The pair visited eight lighthouses along the way, but a few particularly stood out.
Cape Mares, in Oregon, is “a stunning lighthouse because it just stands out of the cape as a beacon of hope,” says Flores. Yaquina Head is the tallest lighthouse on the Oregon coast. Yaquina Head has what Flores calls an “impressive interpretative center.”
If he were to take another trip, he said that he has “been contemplating going to Alaska or the opposite way, Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. I have also thought about going back to the Utah National Parks. Another thought has been to send the bikes to Cuba and ride the entire island and get to know music and rhythms from Cuba along the way.”
“I definitely would recommend [students take this trip], if students and family like the National Parks, camping and lighthouses; it would be a very interesting time,” Flores said. “Lighthouses are a beacon of hope.”
