Mark and I were back in the Southeast from July 11-18 on the Blue Ridge Parkway, Deals Gap and surrounding areas. We can't seem to get enough of the roads down here. The purpose of the trip was to hit the BMW MOA rally in Johnson City, TN. Total distance was 2,156 miles.

Mark is taking a solo trip on the Blue Ridge Parkway this week on his BMW R1100S.

The original shocks on my RT were starting to feel a little soft so I decided to replace them. Since I am planning to keep this bike a while, I figured I would spring for some quality shocks and looked at Wilburs and Ohlins. My first decision was to purchase Wilburs from Ted Porter BMW in CA, but then I got a great deal^* on a set of Ohlins from Kyle racing through group buy pricing on advrider.com http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=408664

Winter 2008/2009

My 2004 BMW R1150RT was exhibiting signs that the original OEM battery was about to fail. It was starting to crank a little slow and needed extra time on the battery tender. Five years is outside the service lifetime for this battery, so I decided to replace it before it failed while I was out on a trip somewhere.

My wife and I spent a week in Maui in early October. It was a great trip with great weather. We did some snorkeling and listened to a lot of Hawaiian music at the Kaanapali Beach Hotel.

Looks like rain for the weekend, so I took Friday off from work and headed up to Mt Baker on my BMW R1150RT. This is one of the best motorcyle rides in Western Washington.

The goal for the day

Smokey Mountains Motorcycle Trip 2008 6/27/2008 - 7/2/2008

The Goal
The goals of this trip are simple: Spend 6 days riding through the mountains of the Southeast, USA.
See some great sites. Avoid radar toting police and park rangers. Don't crash or run into any suicidal deer.

I spent the last week of May in Amsterdam. My wife had to travel there on business and I tagged along for a short vacation. This was my first visit to Amsterdam. I did not do any research in advance of the trip, deciding to just take everything in on first impressions. Here is what I found.

Mark sent me this picture from his 70F Thanksgiving Day ride in DE.

Carmel By The Sea looking back at the Carmel Beach City Park. The finest white sand beach on the West coast.

xs-adventure.com is back on the air. We were down for a while after our hosting provider did a major OS upgrade and broke our drupal installation. After some fiddling the site is back. Oh well, what can you do - there are still a few bits and pieces to fix, but we are mostly back in business and no data appears to have been lost.

I've been neglecting this website lately. So I finally get around to doing some maintenance work this morning and after filtering through the 500#@#! spam messages in my inbox I see a note from kick-ass programmer and all-around nice guy, Russell. He bought a really sweet looking all black K1200R. Nice bike! It's always great to see another BMW rider in Seattle.

I spent the week of May 13, 2007 at the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo. My wife attended a conference there and I traveled along to sit beside the pool and get some much needed sun.

Buccaneer Island at Ocean Reef Club

Two interesting open ocean heavy weather sailing videos.

From the Volvo Ocean Race. Turn the volume all the way up for this one to get the full impact.

April 22 is Earth Day!

I like Earth Day. It gives one a sense of hope for the future. Unfortunately, the environmental problems we face today are even more daunting than the ones that precipitated the original Earth Day in 1970. The issues at that time mostly centered around point source pollution problems (DDT, dirty smokestacks, polluted rivers, etc). These issues are fairly easy to understand and not very controversial unless you own a chemical company or a power plant.