Waiting for my Flight out of PDX

Heading to the Portland airport now after visiting parents and family on the HUT shuttle (with wireless Internet). I had considered renting a bike for the week but bike rental rates are astronomical and the selection is slim. Bobskoot mentioned in a comment that I should just consider picking up a second bike and just leaving it in Oregon but I don't come down here that often. Maybe it just seems like that over the past year since I think that this is the third time I've been in Oregon. Much more often than normal.


This is a shot of Sundial Bridge in Redding, CA. We stopped here for dinner on the drive north. The bridge decking is tempered glass panels but they are no longer transparent as some of the pictures of the bridge show. The visit was generally enjoyable though the challenges my mom, my sister, her husband and their family have to deal with on a daily basis caring for my dad are very real and difficult. I was thinking on the rods trip north that my dad is only thirty five years older than I. The thought that this could be myself later in life was very disturbing. Seeing all the my cousins again was great. Meeting them at the farm was interesting since it stirred up many memories as Most of the time I've spent with them has been when I was pretty young and we were all just getting started in life. Kind of odd to see them all talking about retirement. I kind of feel that I've missed out on a lot of things while living in Alaska for the last twenty eight years. Starting to feel a little selfish...

Goodbye to the Farm

No motorbike content in the post...

Today was the "Good-bye to the Farm" party put on by my aunt and her family. The Farmhouse was built in 1926 and the property has been sold to the gravel pit surrounding the small farm on three sides. I have a lot of pleasant memories associated with visits here while growing up. In fact, the very first memory I have is arriving here early in the morning after travelling all night in the car. While growing up, we visited here many times and visited many of the tourist sites in the area ranging from the capitol building to the placer gold mining areas to the east. I remember playing basketball in on the gravel driveway (I wasn't very good) and a lot of exploring in the buildings and the grape fields behind the house.

This is a small barn on the property and there were several tractors stored here. Many hours were spent playing on the equipment trying to figure out what the equipment was supposed to do.

There was also a Japanese style bath (o-furo) in a small building behind the house. The bathhouse no longer exists but the steel tub and the fire pit are still there. I remember having to use it when I was a little kid and getting the feeling that we were being cooked in a steel pot just like the cartoons. I'm told that the bath house was one of the first buildings put up by my grandparents. One of my cousins mentioned that going to bed still covered by dirt and sweat was never done.

This eucalyptus tree used to have a tire swing, and I remember just sitting there watching traffic out on the main road passing the farm. The road seems a lot closer now than it did back then. I guess my memory remembers things looking through a wide angle lens. The farmhouse rooms feel smaller but very familiar. Kind of sad to realize that this is the last time I will be visiting this farmhouse with all of the pleasant memories. It was also great to see all of my relatives again even those I just saw at the reunion in July.

I have been leaving the Google Latitude public badge set to detailed just to see what is displayed on the website. The phone app is set to update every 30 minutes and I must admit, the app seems to work pretty well. Obviously as long as there is some sort of cellular data connectivity. As far as tracking, this seems to work as well as a SPOT type of device as long as you stick to areas with cellular coverage. We have been trying out the SPOT devices on the north coast of Alaska and coverage is at best spotty. Of course, there is no cellular coverage either and Sat phones barely work that far north.

Red Eye to Oregon

Sitting in the Seattle airport at 5:00 am is not my idea of a fun time. At least I got a free upgrade for the flight between Anchorage and Seattle. Unfortunately, the flight wasn't long enough to get much sleep. The flight from Fairbanks to Anchorage was on AS 52, and was a combi (half freight half passengers). I sat next to a couple on vacation returning from a couple of days in Barrow. They were telling me all about the tours they took and had a lot of questions about the aurora. Fortunately, I still remember some of the physics of the aurora from my grad student days at the university. I'm on my way to Oregon to spend some family time. The farm where my dad grew up has been sold in California and I'm meeting up with other family members for a time of sharing memorable experiences on the farm. I modified the Google Latitude settings to show more accuracy and downloaded an app called Longitude on my phone that will do updates automatically based on a schedule. When we actually head down the road, I was going to increase the update frequency and see how well it works. Right now it shows me sitting in the middle of SeaTac. When I tried it at the University, it had me sitting at a cell tower. I guess the gps couldn't get a good location. On the drive down to California, the problem will be AT&T data availability.

I've managed to got in some riding since I've been back from Barrow and have been trying to focus more on my cornering. I noticed that this summer, I've been reluctant to lean very far. I guess I don't trust the link between the tires and the road. This has been especially true with the wet roads we've had lately. I picked up Proficient Motorcycling by David Hough at the rally and started going through it while in Barrow. Lots of material there and not enough of a riding season to practice.

Interesting, I'm at PDX and Google Latitude has me across the river in Vancouver, WA. Maybe that's the nearest cell tower. Probably no gps signal inside the airport.

Amazing! There is wireless network access on the HUT Shuttle to Corvallis. I didn't expect that at all. Unfortunately, that means that I'll not get much sleep on the 100 mile trip.

Riding Season Ending?

Motorcycle parking at my building is still busy even though mornings are starting to get pretty cool. According to the "Motorcycle Parking only" signs, the reserved parking will only be in place for a couple more days, then the spaces will be available for anyone to use. I think folks are trying to get in a bit more riding before summer ends. Classes start up later this week and traffic has really picked up around campus. Student housing has been available as general hotel space for the summer and it was advertised on both the BMWMOA and ADVrider forums since the housing director is an active participant on both. Throughout the summer, there were always a number of riders staying in housing. I think the final number was about 350 riders taking advantage of the bargain priced housing. It seemed to be an especially popular choice with riders heading up or returning from Prudhoe Bay.

In my email I found a message from the local BMW riders list of a "End of The Year Chena Hot Springs Ride" scheduled for September 19th. Last year, there must have been four or five of these "Last Ride of the Season" scheduled due to the lack of snow or ice on the road until November. Hopefully this year will be a repeat of that. Several of the riders have sidecar rigs and continue through most of the winter only stopping when the temperatures are significantly below zero. I think it's significant that all of these year-round rigs are either BMW airheads or Royal Enfields. Nothing modern...

After spending some time during the rally in Redmond at the Airheads tent, a couple of us decided to look into starting an Alaska chapter. There used to be one in Anchorage but it sort of faded away. After some announcements went out on a couple of email lists, the first meeting was held last week at a local microbrewery. About fifteen people showed up and that seemed more than sufficient to process the paperwork to get a new chapter set up. The purpose of the chapters seems to be a place to share maintenance and repair information for these old BMW "R" bikes with air-cooled heads and cylinders like my R100RT.