I pulled into the lonely gas station with the sun sinking on the horizon.  I had just ridden many, many miles of new roads, new experiences, and I was nearing the 500 mile mark since I set out early that morning.  I topped up the tank, and headed for the intersection.  Turn right, 100 miles to Monticello, turn left, 150 miles to Monticello.  I turned right.

A small smattering of southern Utah mesas crowded the horizon to my right, a line of mountains to my left.  A quick hand check on the sun showed 2 fingers to the horizon: about 30 minutes of daylight left.  Already, the reds of the desert were going into subtle overdrive, balanced against the dark grey of the storm cloud holding fast to the mountains to the left.  I opened up the throttle, hoping to put on a few more miles before it all went black.

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This is going to be a somewhat random post, but that’s how it goes sometimes.

I was listening to Car Talk today in the pickup, and they were talking about some of the results of a contest they held in regards to the worst road trip ever.  This was mostly about the car breaking down a lot or whatnot, and there are some impressive stories.  I’d enter the contest, but these are moldy podcasts from May, so… kind of out of the loop.  Instead, I thought I would share some fun stuff here with you guys.

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The weather is getting colder, and the drivers are turning into mutant morons around here.  This morning, there was a big pickup in front of me, which moved to the lane to the left, but left his right tires in my lane, and then looked at me like I was in his way.  He went behind me, moved over to the right lane, started into an exit, and then pulled out back behind me and took the exit I was on.  What the hell?  Don’t even get me started on cell phone users, or the morons who prefer to just kinda pull into interstate traffic and speed up at the last possible second.  Sheeesh!

It rained earlier this week, and the car crashes locked up most of the interstates.  A semi was jacknifed across my commute, and I had to seek an alternate route.  Talking with Mike Scott, I’ve become convinced they have mucked up the concrete suface, putting grooves going with the traffic and thus retaining water, vs across and shedding water.  The arguement here is that snow plows would catch the little sideways grooves, but man… when it gets wet around here, the interstates are like skating rinks.  Plus, parallel grooves push you all over the place on a motorcycle.

Speaking of bikes, the project bike is slowly coming along.  Seeing as I have next to no budget for it, I’ve been machining parts at work after hours.  This works out pretty well for me, and since Amanda works until midnight, no one is yelling at me for staying late.  Brian helped me get the tank prepped and painted this week, and it looks damn sexy if I say so myself.  I’ll post pictures once I get it closer to being on the bike.  Going to attempt drag racing this weekend, but I just found out that Rocky Mountain ATV failed to ship my new chain last night even though I ordered before 5, and now I am unsure if I will have one to race on.  Turns out that is important   I might be able to make the stock one work, we’ll see.

UPDATE:  Here’s a google map of my journey

So I’m back in the office today, after a week on vacation, and some 4000 miles of traveling complete.  I’m kind of easing back into things, and no one has spotted me come in yet, so I think I might have a few minutes before I find myself with 12 new things to do.

I left out of here Saturday before last, slightly sleep deprived from the stressful week leading up to departure.  Of course, I waited to the last minute to finally get around to machining up the mounts for my new side cases (start here and click forward), and the bike servicing was last minute and didn’t include a valve lash adjustment like I planned on.  The usual amount of stress before a trip, I guess you could say.  I managed to leave home by 6am, and ran well ahead of schedule.  Thanks to the Camelbak, I drank 4 liters of water on my 680 mile ride and managed to arrive just a little before 2pm PDT.  Thank goodness for mesh riding pants, I was feeling good despite the almost 100 degree heat in Nevada/California.  Other than almost being run off the road once just as soon as I crossed into CA, the trip was fairly uneventful.  My fuel economy suffered with the new bags and the 85mph+ average: I don’t think I managed better than 38 the whole way.

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I found some interesting open source software for tracking beer brewing, so… I installed it on the server.  As such, I’ll be yakking about my brews there, so feel free to check out what is going on at the ‘brewery’ as it were.

As always, I’m open to suggestions as to what to brew and the like.

In other news, I found some pretty interesting designs for using a small dorm style fridge to chill a couple of 5 gallon Corny kegs, complete with spigots.  I sense a project in the not so distant future.