Dad and I took a whirlwind motorcycle trip a couple months ago. I started writing it up… and didn’t finish.

It was unbelievable there, and looked more beautiful than anything can. The sky alone was perfect. Here’s an example as we approached the North rim:

This will be updated as time allows!

More pics are in my Flickr album.

The leather “wiper” on the index finger of my left glove was no longer wiping my face shield clean. Admittedly I was making some pretty weak wipe-attemps, as every time I removed my hand from the heated grip, my fingertips went instantly from stinging cold to aching cold. I could see a hazy red dot ahead of me – either Dad’s KLR650 taillight, or the mouth of Hell – and where my shield wasn’t totally fogged, I could see snow pouring down.  Illuminated as it was by 200 watts of twin PIAA 910s, and coming at me at roughly 60 miles an hour, the blur of flakes made it look like I was entering light speed in the Millennium Falcon. I bet Han Solo’s hands never hurt this bad.

After the 300th time trying to clear my face shield, it hit me: I can’t get this water off, because it isn’t water anymore. My shield has frozen over. Oh hell, my GLOVE has frozen over.

My life was about to end at 9,000 feet, crossing the frozen Sierras, and my Dad was going to have to explain to my Mom and Incredibly Understanding Wife that I had ridden bravely, but ultimately not quickly enough to clear the Sonora pass before the storm came and froze my arms and legs off, leaving my torso to balance precariously on a rock-hard, freezing cold Sargent saddle, and my bike then careened into the woods behind Strawberry.

I needed some dry clothes, a hot shower, and an evening with a beautiful woman. I made do by thawing my gloves on the jutting cylinders of the GS as I pounded a slushy Red Bull.  After four straight days of riding, and in blistering cold, I wasn’t sure that that Red Bull was going to be enough to get me home.

When we left, I knew there was a risk that we wouldn’t make it back by Tuesday.  On that last day, I was confronted wit the possibility that if the weather got worse, or I stopped paying attention, I might not make it back at all…

What had started as a four day pleasure cruise with Dad had become a full-on race against time. We had decided that we’d “try to make it to the Grand Canyon,” but if we saw that we were not going to be able to do it, we’d just turn around after two days and head back. Yeah. Like that’s gonna happen.

Dad and I had managed to get Friday and Monday off, making a nice long weekend for a fun fall trip. Maybe a little camping, maybe a little dirt, maybe see some sights and explore. Then we both realized we had explored everything nearby. And everything that was near that, too. If we were going to go anywhere, we were going to have to really GO somewhere. In four days. With the first good winter storm of the season coming in from the North.

So, South it was. Baja seems cool, but I had never seen Zion National Park, and neither of us had seen the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. How far can it be? We have FOUR WHOLE DAYS. That’s a lot, right?

Well, it was nearly enough. So we cheated and left our jobs at 3:00 on Thursday to get a head start and beat the traffic out of the Bay Area.

Keep checking sundaybender.com for more updates here – you have to read the part about the Clown Motel. We stayed there. It’s for real. And it is worth a visit…

Five days, ~1,671 miles
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Day one – 226 miles

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Day two – 471 miles

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Day three – ~ 121 miles

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Day four – 449 miles

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Day five – 404 miles

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I was in Chicago last week.

When I got back to SFO on Thursday, I got in the E30, and drove down to bottom of the parking structure. Since I had lost my ticket (clownish move) I had to park in the 15 minute spot, and talk to “the guy.” The guy was efficient. He found my plate on the entrance camera, checked the timestamp, and we were done. Exit ticket issued. Sweet. Easy. Unusual.

Back to the e30, whistling a little Bill Champlin, and the car doesn’t start. Cranks away enthusiastically, but no payoff. I turn the car to the “run” position and strain to listen over the roar of passenger jet takeoff. No fuel pump noise. Damn.

I’m a little handy with cars (read: obsessed and stupid about taking them apart), so out comes the back seat. Tappy tap on fuel pump, no noise. Open the hood, tappy tap on the relays, no noise. Well, lots of noise from me muttering and swearing, but no fuel pump noise. Called AAA. Tow coming in 40 minutes. Nice.

Sitting and waiting is not for me.

I continue to fiddle around, and suddenly the car springs to life. Hurray! I am a hero. I leave the car running, and then go about canceling the tow, getting another new card to exit since the previous card has now expired (you have 20 minutes to leave the garage). Again, easy. Surprising.

I am on my way, feeling a little proud – almost smug – having repaired my car with nothing more than a phillips head screwdriver, some ingenuity, and a little percussive maintenance. Smug doesn’t last long when you have less than an eighth of a tank of gas, and a car that doesn’t like starting. Uh-oh.

I need gas. Badly. I stop at the Woodside Chevron (which I choose because of the nice slope to the lot, which will allow me to coast the car into a parking place if it won’t stop after filling up) and get 12.7 gallons of gas. In a 12 gallon tank. That’s low fuel.

Car cranks away again, but no joy. Damn it. having planned for this, I coast away from the pump, park, and start reading the Internet on the trusty iPhone, looking for fuel pump prices. No one has one locally… how much for overnight shipping? Man, the 3G is fast in Woodsi…

The car is rocked violently from side to side, and I look up to see a horse trailer filling my window. I have been backed into, WHILE PARKED, by a diesel Dodge, towing roughly 13 horses.

Argh.

The rear quarter is smashed, the rear bumper broken, just like my dreams and spirit, respectively.

There is only one solution. I must have a paintless guy remove the dent. I must get a new bumper. And, of course, the ol’ fuel Pump needs to replaced. Easy enough. But what will I drive in the meantime?

Again, there is only one solution. Rent a car. Maybe an altima, or some other Japanese sedan that will run no matter what, and prove to me just how reliable cars can be.

That’s what a reasonable person would do.

So I bought this (bad pics – from PO. I will take some good ones after the rain stops):

2003 540i M-Sport 6-speed. A car for old men. Like me.

290 HP and 326 Lb/ft of torque is a lot. So are six gears. I can’t stop smiling.

I am not sure what impresses me most about the pictures I just took (below). It’s either how badly fouled the plug is (there is NO gap at all. It’s no wonder my car was running poorly!), or how good my new camera is (that’s a pretty decent quality picture!).

I’ll let you decide.

Regardless, don’t run platinum plugs in a 20-year-old motor that burns oil like Richard Simmons does calories. They get crap-ified.

After a (fairly long) performance hiatus of sorts, I apparently became so grumpy and difficult to live with that the Incredibly Understanding Wife (IUW) assigned to me the task of finding a band to satisfy my musical jones.

What the IUW didn’t plan for, was that my first step would be to recruit her!

And so it was that Certifiable was formed. With the IUW on backing and lead vocals, Stand Up Eight alumni Mikey T and Tony on guitar and saxaphone, and a host of musical geniuses bolstering the grooves, we are the movingest dance band ever there was. Hire us for your parties, weddings, or other dance-oriented activities. We love it.

With the cover band angle, well… covered, I still needed a creative outlet for improvisation and songcraft. Enter The Wildwood Brothers. Part Americana, part Jam, these fellas needed a bass player, and that’s me. Super great guys, really fun tunes, and a nice musical direction to boot. Someday I’ll even appear on the website. Unless they can me first for trashing the hotel room and crashing the Bentley into the mayor’s prized gardenias. Or whatever it is that rock stars do these days.

Check the websites linked in this post (and in the “Links” section of sundaybender.com for you facebookers) for gig schedules, new tunes, and related musical business.

2010 is the yeah of the Blog! Well, okay, who knows. Maybe it’s the year of the dog? Call it poetic license.

In any case, I hereby decree I will be posting crap on sundaybender for all seven of you who care. Well, for you seven, and the thousands (okay, dozens) of random strangers who seem to have found the site useful for breaking, er, modifying their cars and motorcycles.

To that end:

I have another new car. It’s rad. It’s red. It’s old-ish. Any bets on how long it lasts?

I have more trips planned on the GS, and a write-up from the recent Grand Canyon blast (see the pics) coming.

In any case, stay tuned. And thanks for reading!

It wasn’t always this way. At one point I had a Subaru GL hatchback, and I didn’t know an alternator from alternative medicine. And then everything changed.

I bought a little red BMW. I had no idea it would lead to this. That BMW, a 1991 318is, should never have left my care. With the passage of time that car has become something of a legend to me, “The one that got away,” as they say.

Of late my pining became unbearable, and thanks to an incredibly fortunate series of events involving what amounts to an auto philanthropist from Arizona, a flatbed truck, and a handshake deal that harkens back to the days when a man’s word was his bond, I find myself in possession of the spiritual successor to my first BMW.

It’s Brilliantrot, it’s a 1991, and like the 318is of yore, it makes me smile every time I see it. It’s packing a little something extra though. Like two more doors, and two more cylinders. That adds up to a few more pounds of road-hugging weight, but after all these years, I too have packed on some extra doors and cylinders of my own, if you’ll pardon the stretched metaphor, and overlook the stretched pants.

And so the E30 has returned to me. Red and Brilliant.

If you can’t ever go home again, you can sure get damned close.

Updated with more in-process pics below – though still not current…

I have always had a knack for collecting stuff. Not useful stuff, mind you; things like baseball cards, comic books, vocational skills, and manners were never things I was interested in having. No, I collect things that are likely only valuable to me, and are usually very awkward to store.

Bass guitars, drumsets, car parts, tools, motorcycles and debt are the types of things I seem to amass without really even trying. It’s pretty ridiculous, especially when you consider that I live in a 600 square foot house with no garage.

The solution? Move into a grownup house with a garage! Perfect.

Instead I built a shed. Well, my dad and Megan and Kevict and I built a shed. It will house the bikes, and the tools and helmets and leathers and gadgets and whiz-bangery attendant thereto, as well as a full set of race wheels and tires for the E30, and whatever other business I can cram in there.

The process? Dig a bunch of holes, fill ‘em with concrete, measure and set piers, build a floor, raise some walls, and roof it. Simple, right? Well, as long as you have a dad who’s a biulding genius and knows how to do all that, and has the tools and skill to get it done right, it is at least not impossible.

Check out the progress below.

		“Siding phase” pics follow below

The Incredibly Understanding Wife (IUW) is more “I” than ever before! Well, okay, she isn’t more incredibly. That makes no sense. She is more incrediBLE.

Why, you ask? (Do it, ask.)

Because she got on the back of the GS, and let me pilot her from La Honda out to the coast, down to Pescadero for a sandwich (which was awesome and a half, by the way) and down Pescadero Creek road back to our house.

For non-natives, imagine the second half of the Matterhorn ride at Disneyland. We basically did that, but on a bike. With no abominable snowman or whatever.

She’s awesome! She waved to fellow bikers, she leaned into turns, she made me laugh inside my silly looking helmet. F-ing amazing. I didn’t even crash! Come on!!

Next up – Chile. Or maybe Mexico. Or maybe Woodside.

Check her out! Sweet BMW jacket, huh? I am jealous. I may have to remedy that soon…

With Kevict’s new-to-him 1988 KLR 650 and my new R1150GS both screaming out to see some dirt, Kevict and I set out in the coastal mountians near my house in search of some unpaved pathways.

Seems that Gazo’s creek road turns dirty and leads to a secondary entrace to Butano state park. Nothing too challenging, just a good old dirt road, with a couple of sections that were “paved” way back when, but have over time been reduced to gravel and chunks.

Shiny new R1150GS and lack of dirt riding experience be damned – I was gonne give ‘er a try.

The bike was impressive. More impressive than I was, to be sure. That said, we made it 5.9 miles up and 5.9 miles down without incident, ABS-ing along the way, and bouncing around a bit because I forgot to lower the pressures in my Tourances to a more dirt-friendly level.

Kevict and the KLR went bounding up and down without issue, as expected from a veteran dirt guy and a “real” dirtbike, and I impressed the hell out of myself by puttering up and down without scaring the life out of myself even once. A little clutchwork, some balance, juducious braking and looking far ahead served me very well… Hm, sounds almost like track riding to me…

I don’t think I have ever had more fun going eight miles an hour. I am addicted. This GS is amazing. The KLR is amazing. Touring is awesome. I had no idea. I can’t wait to actually go somewhere! I wonder how much a good GPS costs? What about knobbies? Do I have a tent? How much vacation time have I accrued? how many clif bars fit into the side cases luggage?

Oh man. Trouble.