My interest in the Dakar Rally started just a few years ago after watching some of the stages on TV. I have always been a street rider with not much interest in dirt bikes. Lately, thoughts of heading to far off, out of the way places has got me looking at enduro motorcycles and the possibilities. Races like the Dakar and Baja 1000 only fuel the fire. In 2008 the Dakar was canceled due to the possibility of violence in that part of the world. I found this pretty upsetting but understood the reasons. Next month the race is back on, hurray! The rally has been moved to Argentina and Chile. South America should provide a good variety of terrain for the 3,728 mile race. The Dakar starts in Buenos Aires Argentina on January 3rd and finishes back in Buenos Aires. I hope I can find enough coverage of the race on the TV and internet to follow along. Here is a link to the Dakar website http://www.dakar.com/index_DAKus.html
It was not that long ago that the thought of going on a 2,000 mile motorcycle ride seemed a bit beyond my comfort level. Now with a couple long rides under my belt, I am thinking what is next and where will my journeys take me. Steve, Ed, and I have been tossing around the idea of riding US Route 20 from coast to coast as a story project. The ride would cover over 6500 miles in about twenty days. We are calling it the 20-20 Project right now. It is still only a dream, but who knows, maybe the paper Steve and I work at will come on board and see the potential for our readers in this motorcycle adventure.
If I am willing to go 6,500 miles, where else would I go? If time were not a factor, I could come up with some other dream rides. The desert Southwest would be a good trip visiting the national parks in Utah and Arizona. A natural direction from my home in the Northwest would be head south to mexico, why not go big, how about South America. Patagonia would be awesome. Then there is North, Alaska would be cool and I even speak the language. The reality is for me at least, time is the biggest factor. I will keep on dreaming and who knows, maybe someday I will find some of my dreams have come true.
My baby (Motorcycle) stopped working last week and I traced it back to the side stand cutoff switch. In the old days my bikes did not even have a side stand kill switch so it was possible to take off down the road with the side stand down. That can be a dangerous situation. I have heard of riders getting hurt when they for got to raise the kick stand but it had never happened to me. With my eagerness to get back on the road I started devising ways to bypass the switch and just hard wire it. Common sense got the best of me, so I decided to fix the switch instead. It is true I have never crashed because of a lowered side stand but why push my luck. At least now I have figured out how to bypass the switch. If it fails again I should be able to get it going well enough to get me home and order a new switch. Now that I am getting older and hopefully wiser I am more incline to adhere to the motto, safety first.
I just finished recording a song I started writing on a 2,000 mile motorcycle trip in the summer of 2007. The first ideas for the song popped into my head somewhere between Vale and Baker Oregon, during the On the Edge Project. I remember that day pretty well. I woke up at 4 am on a ranch in Jordan Valley to shoot some video and photographs of ranch life. It was hot, about a 100 degrees. We where about halfway through the trip and I was starting to feel the combination of high temperatures and lack of sleep. I was feeling a little home sick, then all of a sudden I started singing this tune inside my helmet, rollin down the highway got miles to make before we're through... I must have been delirious. I kept singing the lyrics over and over trying not to forget the melody. When we finally got pulled over I franticly scribbled the fragments of song ideas onto a piece of crumpled paper, stuffed it into my tank bag and went on my way and promptly forgot what I was singing. Once the trip was over I didn't give much thought to the song. It wasn't till about 6 months later when I started my Riding the Edge website that I thought it would be cool to have a song, a sort of theme song for the site. Then I remembered the scribbled piece of paper I stuffed in a pocket in my tank bag. I wondered, could it still be there after all this time? Sure enough, it was crammed way back into the pocket. A year later I had finished The Long Way Home for my website. I guess you could call this a ride music video.
A few months ago I found this self publishing online printing company called LuLu.com. I have to admit I was very skeptical to what the quality may be. So recently I thought I would give them a try, they print books and calenders so I figured I would start with something small like a calender for my first project. I decided to use photography from my galleries at ridingtheedge.net which feature scenic locations in the Pacific Northwest. When I got home from work last night I had my copy of the 2009 Riding the Edge Calender sitting on the table. Wow! My expectations where pretty low but the calender in front of me looked pretty darn good. I liked it so well that I made a link that would allow visitors to to my website can preview or even purchase the calender. Here is a photo on the cover and is also the photo for the month of May.
