Maui Trip 2008

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.

La Perouse Bay in south Maui. It was too windy to snorkel on this day, but was still beautiful to visit.

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.

I like this picture.

I spent the week before Christmas 2006 on the island of Maui in Hawaii. My wife was attending a conference at the Sheraton Maui and I tagged along to keep her company and to get a much needed break from work. The Sheraton turned out to be at one of the nicest locations in west Maui - just north of Lahaina on Ka'anapali beach. The snorkeling around Black Rock in front of the hotel was great.

I got in a quick ride today between monster rain storms. Rode around Alki Beach in West Seattle, then south towards Tacoma. Here are a few pics.

Seattle from Alki in West Seattle, near Salties restaurant:

After reading the posts of some of the other people that I crewed a fireworks show with on the 4th of July I thought I might detail some of my own thoughts on the experience.

Greg, our fearless leader and pyro dealer, kept a running blog of the events as the show was prepared so I feel no need to go over them again.(Entry 1, 2, 3) Mine will be an account of what goes through my head after all the prep work is done and the show is about to begin.