8,000

Days like today are exactly why I ride a motorcycle. Woke up this morning and for the first time in weeks, no months, it was nice outside and I was pretty excited to go riding. Met up with Brad (on his white 848) and Dave (on his yellow 1098) in the morning and headed out to Port Angeles. It was a little chilly out, but otherwise uneventful. In PA we met up with our friend Pete on a Ninja and from there bombed out Hwy 112 twords the coast. Somewhere along the way we passed a small group of guys on sportbikes on the side of the road who apparently were some locals because they passed us with ease. Eventually we all stopped at the Hwy 112/113 intersection and they were in fact a group of local riders from Port Angeles. Very cool guys. Even though they know that road like the back of their hands Brand and I were able to hold our own and keep up with them for the most part.

They told us that it wasn't worth riding all the way out to Neah Bay because the road wasn't very good. I knew better, so the three of us took off that way anyway. Apparently all they do is ride 112 back and forth all day long. It's a great road and all, but eh, even that would get old after awhile. The last 20 miles out to Neah Bay are very technical and yes, some parts of the road weren't that great, but overall man, it was an amazing ride. We passed through Neah Bay and headed out all the way to Cape Flatery which is the NW most point of the continental US. The road from Neah Bay out to the Cape is only about 5 miles, but it was unquestionably the best section of road we hit all day. It was repaved recently so the road was absolutely perfect. It started out with a nice section of high speed corners and gradually tightened up with slower corners until we made it all the way out there.

Unfortunately the road ends rather abruptly in a parking lot surrounded by trees. It was nice and all, but we came all that way and we wanted to see the ocean damnit. So we set out down the hiking path with all the best intentions of seeing the damn ocean. It was pretty cool hiking through the woods on a nice trail with some really cool wooden bridges over some of the swampy portions. We made it all the way out there and got some really awesome pictures. We managed to hit it on one of the rare days when it was nice and sunny out rather than totally foggy and rainy. By the time we got back to the bikes we were all pretty tired. Motorcycle boots are great for riding, but lets just say they are less than ideal for hiking through the forest.

Did just under 300 miles for the day, and I even broke 8,000 total miles on the 848. Not too shabby for a bike I've only had for 5 months.

A few pics are below, the rest can be found here.

Meeting up with the locals from Port Angeles:


The three Ducatis:


Cape Flatery


Brad


Dave

Recap: Day Eight

Day Eight Route - 318 miles - Pullman, WA to Silverdale, WA

I never thought when I left on this trip that I would come home to an empty house, but thats what happened. The ride home was uneventful as I made my way across almost the entire state of Washington.

It never really hit me about what happened with Kathie while I was gone, probably because it wasn't 100% real just yet. Now that I'm home and am sitting here alone it's starting to sink in a lot more.

I've posted a number of pictures of my trip here, but there are quite a few more. If you want to see them, check out my photobucket page.

Recap: Day Seven

Day Seven Route - 602miles - Ogden, UT to Pullman, WA

Got up at the crack of dawn and headed out right away. I had called my friend Kevin who located a motorcycle shop for me in Twin Falls, ID where I could get a new front tire put on the bike. It was worn down to the point where all of the tread was gone and the front end was sliding all over the place on me as I rode. I stopped in at Action Cycle Sports in Twin Falls at 9am just as they were opening and they were able to get me right in and replace the tire in just over a half hour. They were fantastic and I can't say enough good things about them. The first half of the day was boring as shit as I covered 300 miles of freeway between Ogden and Boise.

I grabbed some lunch in Boise and headed out to find a gas station. Unfortunately I came up a block and a half short. The damn bike ran out of gas with a Chevron right down the road. I was forced to walk the bike down the street, across a cross walk and over a grass embankment to get gas for the damn thing. That musta been a crazy sight.

From there I headed North to try to get to Pullman where my friend Kevin lives so I could crash at his place for the night. Somewhere along the way I managed to pick up two more tickets. One for 95 in a 65 and another for 84 in a 65. Pretty fabulous end to a tiring day.

Recap: Day Six

Day Six Route - 381 miles - Washington, UT to Ogden, UT

Today is when things got really fucked up. I had been instructed the night before that the rest of the crew would be coming up from Vegas in the morning and that I was to meet up with them at 11am at the main entrance to Zion National Park. Since I knew they would totally forget about the time change that meant they would be there at noon. This meant I had some time on my hands in the morning.

I jumped on my brother's computer and checked my email and found a message from Jessica, the daughter of my roommate Kathie. It turns out that Kathie passed away on Sunday and no one had been able to get ahold of me until then to tell me. Apparently she had been drinking Saturday evening and was sitting in the hot tub when she passed out and drown. She was found on Sunday evening when her friend came by the house to check on her after not hearing from her all day.

I freaked out and tried to call both her daughter and her son to find out what the hell had happened. Neither answered their phone, but that wasn't entirely surprising as it was only 7am. I called my friends Lenna and Gillian and they were able to swing by the house and make sure it was locked up and everything was ok. They found a card for the detective in charge of the investigation who I called and was given the details. She also suggested that we get a company out to clean up the hot tub as that was where she was found. I made the proper arrangements and it turned out that they had to completely dispose of the entire hot tub.

I didn't know Kathie for very long, but she turned out to be a very good friend and one of the very best roommates I've ever had. She even gave me a little St Christopher medallion to attach to my motorcycle key. Somehow it fell off, but was miraculously recovered by some stranger who found it in my driveway. I made sure to take it with me on my trip to keep me safe and as a little piece of her to keep with me. She and I made a great team and had become very good friends, and occasional lovers, over the few months we lived together. She loved hockey and allowed me the pleasure of taking her to her first hockey game ever. I know I can be kind of a cold hearted callous jerk sometimes (my friend Lenna chewed me out pretty good tonight about that, rightfully so), but I loved Kathie and I know I'll miss her.

So anyway, after meeting up with everyone else, I decided that it just wasn't right to continue on with the vacation so as everyone turned South to head to the Grand Canyon, I turned North and punched it up to Mach 2 as I crossed Utah, finally stopping in Ogden for the night.

Recap: Day Five

Ahhh, a day off, how sweet it is. Got up Tuesday morning and exchanged text messages with JD and found out that the BMW dealer in Bakersfield did not have the necessary part to fix his bike, so they were renting a U-Haul and bringing the bike up to the dealer in Vegas who did in fact have the part. This basically meant that the whole day was going to be spent fixing bikes rather than riding, which was just fine by me, I needed a day off to rest and recoup. Turned out that one of the other BMW riders had his shift lever fall off somewhere and he needed to get that replaced as well. So the guys got those fixed and they also got new tires put on their bikes just to be safe.

Since my brother had the day off we were able to spend the day goofing off. We washed the bike up and my brother (the photographer) used a Super Clamp and mounted his Canon 5D along with a remote trigger to the frame of my bike. We headed off outside of town to a nice road and were able to get some really awesome pictures. Basically I would ride past Chris and he would use his camera to take some pictures causing both his camera and the one mounted to my bike to fire simultaneously. I was under strict orders not to take any left hand corners too hard seeing as how four thousand dollars worth of camera gear were hanging off the side of my bike! We did a few runs with the super clamp on the bike, but it was really getting in my way and making it difficult to change gears so we took it off and did several more passes without them.

Grilled up some steaks for dinner and topped it all off with a couple margaritas. Not a bad way to spend the day. It was great seeing my brother again. I've only got to spend a few days with him since he moved to Utah so we got in some good brotherly bonding time.

Recap: Day Four

Day Four Route - 620 miles - Carson City, NV to Washington, UT

We blasted off and headed South along the Eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada mountain range for the first part of Day Four. We were going to take a detour up into the mountains to hit some good twisties, but as we sat on the side of the road we could actually see the road we wanted to take snake up the side of the mountain and it was just this little squiggly white line. We weren't about to willingly take our bikes up into the snow so that little detour was quickly shelved. We grabbed some breakfast and continued to head South until we ran into Hwy 120. Well, we ran PAST it due to some very poor signage, but we got turned around and made it down the right road. This turned out to be a very interesting road. We got some nice shots of the bikes in the snow (and I think Bong got one of JD peeing in the snow even) as we crossed over the summit of some random mountain. Once we headed down the back side we hit a long straight downhill stretch so Mark and I just gunned it. I got it up to 150 before backing off. After this the road turned into a crazy stretch of some wicked dips. I can't adequately describe this road, it was totally insane with dozens of incredibly sharp dips in the road followed immediately by a quick rise. It felt as though you could easily just launch off the top of one of the dips only to completely ram the bike into the following rise they were so close together. In fact, I about shit myself when I caught air at 120 coming off the top of one of the rises.

Eventually we made our way all the way South and gassed up just before hitting Death Valley. We were all geared up for cold weather as we had been riding in the mountains and so we all took turns in the men's room at the gas station in Lone Pine, CA changing out of our cold gear and into our warm weather gear in preparation for the heat we knew would be coming. Pretty entertaining to see a bunch of motorcycle guys all file in and out of the john all changing clothes.

Shortly after entering the park we all stopped along the side of the road and got some great pictures of the bikes at the top of a cliff overlooking the Northern part of Death Valley. After this, three of us (Marv, JD and myself) busted ass out of there and hit some gnarly twisties on our way into the heart of the valley. Death Valley has twisties (and good ones!), who knew?!?! I got a pic of my bike at the sea level elevation point and continued on till I hit the main museum at the bottom of the valley. Managed to meet a very sweet officer Jennifer who for some reason didn't like the fact that I was travelling at 93mph in a 60mph zone. Met up with JD and Marv at the museum and waited for the rest of the crew to show up.

And waited....

And waited...

After about 2 hours of waiting we were getting pretty concerned and figured something had to have gone wrong. Marv was able to get the Rangers at the museum to radio ahead and found out that Marks brand new '08 BMW was having an ignition problem. Basically his key has a little RFID chip and the sensor around the ignition wasn't picking it up so the bike wouldn't start at all. We waited around for a couple more hours hoping the guys would get it fixed and we'd be ok, but that never happened. The three of us decided to head back up to find the rest of the guys to get some more info, but shortly after leaving we ran into Steve who was on his way to get to us. It had been decided that the four of us would ride on to Vegas (our scheduled end point for the day) while the rest of the guys stayed behind waiting for a truck to show up and get the bike out of there. At this point I decided to just continue on to Utah and stay the night at my brother's house so I took off ahead of everyone else to try to make good time to get there. I went through Pahrump, NV and was hoping to get a picture of my bike in front of a brothel, but I wasn't able to locate a single one. Total bummer. Stopped off in Vegas for gas and to get a bite to eat at the Spearmint Rhino and eventually pried myself out of there and took off across the desert in the middle of the night for my brothers house. I made it there somewhere around 1:30am and promptly passed the fuck out.

Turns out that the guys in the desert had a pretty miserable time. They waited for who knows how fucking long before finally getting a truck out there in the dead of night to get the bike out of there. The only problem was they were headed the wrong way and went into California instead of Nevada! They spent the night somewhere near Bakersfield after they finally got the fuck out of there.

Recap: Day Three

Day Three - 409 miles - Redding, CA to Carson City, NV

Sunday was a mix of some of the absolute best riding of my life combined with some of the most miserable. We headed out in the morning from Redding anticipating to head up and over Lassen Volcanic National Park, however due to all of the rain (did I mention we were being rained on yet AGAIN?) it had been snowing for several days up on the mountain and the road was closed. this caused us to have to detour up and around. After that we jumped on Hwy 32 into Chico which once we got out of the rain turned into some of the best roads ever. Bong led the way and I was right behind him and we railed the corners through the forest, absolutely amazing stuff.

Once in Chico we busted out the GPS units and managed to locate a good set of twisty roads to get us East over the mountains. JD led the way and yet again we were able to slay the corners. The first half of this ride was great, but it quickly transitioned into, yep you guessed it, MORE FUCKING RAIN.

That's not even the best part. Once we got down to Truckee and were about to head up to Lake Tahoe before cutting over to Carson City the skies opened up and it started pouring rain. Not your typical West Coast rain that I'm used to, I'm talking a complete driving rainstorm. Fun stuff. We managed to talk to someone who had just come from Tahoe and told us that it was actively snowing up there so we detoured down the freeway to Reno and then South into Carson City. The ride from Truckee to Reno was a good half hour in the worst rainstorm I've ever been in. We were hauling ass down the freeway through curves in a pouring down rainstorm at a good 90mph, totally insane. Anyway, it dried out by the time we hit Reno, but all the rain was too much for my little GPS unit as it died a wet and dreary death on the road.

Helmet Hair FTW!


Motorcycle Ninja!

Recap: Day Two

Day Two Route - 431 miles - Florence, OR to Redding, CA

We got up and headed out from Florence at 7am and went straight South on 101. It was early enough that there was almost no traffic so I was able to buzz past the other guys and set a pretty good pace up through some of the mountains until we stopped in Coos Bay for breakfast. After that we continued to make our way South until we hit Gold Beach and then turned East for Grants Pass. This was a pretty damn scary road, but at the same time quite entertaining and exciting. Hwy 23 leads up and over the coast range from Gold Beach to Grants Pass and is a 1.5 lane road with no lane markings of any kind so we had to be on our toes to watch for any oncoming traffic. The road was also a total mess with all kinds of dirt, pine needles and rocks all over the place so the pace was rather slow as we were all being very careful. All of us except Mark H on his Multistrada that is. His bike was basically made for roads exactly like that so he was able to haul ass and basically dirt bike it all the way up the mountain. Once we reached the top there were 6 foot walls of snow on both sides of the road so it was like riding down a tunnel of snow. I was able to stick my right foot out a few times and drag my toe along the snow banks they were so close. Probably not the brightest idea in the world. We found out later that road had just opened that very morning, so our timing was impeccable. Oh yeah, did I mention that we had been rained on AGAIN? This was starting to get old.

From Grants Pass we hit I-5 and headed South once again. Once we passed Ashland and started to make our way up and over the Siskyou mountains the weather finally cleared up so a couple of us led by Bong cranked it up a notch and proceeded to tear ass up and over the mountains for the first real nice high speed run of the trip.

Originally we had planned to continue South on I-5 to Redding where we had hotel reservations, but we were running a little early (quite a change of pace) so once we made it into California we turned off onto Hwy 3 for some more back road goodness. It started out great as we made our way up into the mountains, but yet again, as we headed out of the mountains it started raining on us. We did manage to get a little bit of luck when a CHP passed us going the other way as we weren't going nearly as fast as before due to the rain.

Finally we made our way into the hotel in Redding and were told by the lady running the place that there was a good Mexican food joint "about a half mile down the road" so we set out on foot to find the place in the dark only to find that it had closed only minutes earlier as it was 9:08PM. Heaven forbid a restaurant stay open past 9pm. Not only that, but we were walking for a long ass way and were sure that it was a hell of a lot farther than a half mile. After finding that it was closed we called in a pizza order and called it a night.

Recap: Day One

Day One Route - 403 miles - Silverdale, WA to Florence, OR

Friday marked the beginning of our big adventure, and as is typical for Ducatisti we met up at a Starbucks to start our day. I headed out a little before 7am and met up with the guys at the Starbucks in Dupont, WA. I was actually able to spend the night in my own bed as we had decided the night before to head South into Oregon instead of East into Idaho due to some bad thunderstorms. Here is the list of miscreants who were on the journey:

Me - '08 Ducati 848
Mark H - Ducati Multistrada 1000 DS
Bong - '06 BMW K1200S
JD - '06 BMW K1200S
Mark C - '08 BMW K1200S (Brand new, he picked it up only 2 days prior)
Marv - Honda Blackbird
Steve - Honda (not sure of the exact model, but it was some sort of sport touring bike)
Kurt - Yamaha (again, not sure of the model, but it was a big cruiser)

I was moderately disappointed that only two Ducatis showed up, especially since this was a ride organized by members of a Ducati Owners Club! Oh well, I got big points for being the only one on a crotch rocket.

After leaving the Starbucks we headed directly out to the coast and down into Astoria at which point we headed inland to hit some really nice twisties only to have it start raining on us which meant we weren't able to go nearly as fast as we would have liked, but it was still very nice to be out and running. It was a nice road through the forest and you could easily tell that this was lumberjack territory. After that we made our way down to Hwy 26 and had lunch out at Camp 18 which was a big hit with the guys. We sat inside and watched it rain on our bikes, but it started to clear up just as we were finishing and headed back out once again.

From there we found some really nice roads that led us into Tillamook. Would have been cool to stop in at the cheese factory, but we were running a little late already so we just kept on running. After that it was down to Newport (again, missing the Rogue brewery, total bummer) and we just continued on down 101 all the way to Florence.

All in all a fairly uneventful day other than the rain. My bike was completely filthy by the end of the day due to all of the rain and crap. The last 2 hours or so on 101 were pretty boring due to lots of traffic and people driving along 5-10mph below the damn speed limit. Very frustrating.

We stayed at the Three Rivers Casino in Florence and had a rather exciting evening. After dinner, Mark C wanted me to teach him how to play Craps so several of us headed over and shortly after we got there I started rolling and went on one hell of a hot streak. I must have been rolling for 20 minutes straight. I walked up with $50 and walked away after more than tripling my money at $160!

SPOT

One of the guys on our big trip (Mark) will be carrying a SPOT Tracker GPS device that tracks his progress and plots it via Google Maps. It's some pretty cool stuff, the only downside is that it only has the last 24hrs of data available. So if you want to keep tabs on me and my compatriots you'll just have to keep checking it.

Here is the link to the appropriate page. Mark lives in Port Angeles and has already left for the evening and is heading into Seattle so you can get a decent idea of what he's been up to. Check it every day or so and you'll see what we've been up to.