Being a bad-ass is harder than it looks.

On the third day we woke up early to finish the last leg of the ride. Neither one of us slept all that well, and I wanted to get the ride over with — the more time that passed since I was last on the bike, the less I wanted to climb back aboard.

I need to pause right here to let you know that if you haven’t ever ridden a bike for multiple days on end, it’s hard. Plain and simple. You get physically tired of the wind whipping you around, your butt hurts, you ache all over — hands, wrists, feet, they all ache. And because you’ve got to concentrate when you’re riding, you don’t have the luxury of zoning out like you do in a car, so you’re mentally tired, too.

But all that said, nothing could have prepared me for the last two hours into Vegas. The road from St. George winds through the northern tip of Arizona, then it becomes a windy long stretch to Vegas and when you finally get into Vegas, it becomes a busy three or four lane highway, packed with tourists who don’t know where they’re going and locals who want to get there faster.

So the next time you see some weathered biker dude, with a rolled sleeping bag on the back of his bike, give him the thumbs up, buy him a beer, or step aside and let his bad-ass pass by, because now you know takes more than just a Harley Davidson or Von Dutch T-shirt to make you tough.