Two Wheel Adventure: Day 3-5

SO much to talk about!!!  I’m blogging from Mr. Toots Coffeehouse in Capitola, CA.  I had a great time at Mike and Kim’s place in Agoura, CA.  We mostly kicked back and relaxed.   Went to the beach on Sunday, it was windy at first but when the wind let down it was a perfect day.  Sunday evening I went out for dinner and beer at BJ’s brewery in Westlake, CA with Rick, my old roommate and landlord.

Rolled out Monday morning planning to camp at New Brighton State Beach, Capitola, CA.  Encountered rain about 40 miles south of Big Sur, CA so I ended up cabin camping in Big Sur.  Big Sur isn’t really a town in the common sense – it’s just a two mile stretch of hotels, food, and a post office.  Never heard of Big Sur?  Check out the Big Sur Bar – these things ROCK!!!

It took all night and several hours the next morning to dry out all my riding gear.  The bike is still totally covered with dirt and sand.  Hopefully I can get it cleaned up tomorrow at the campground.

I uploaded photographs and included comments on most – check it out! http://picasaweb.google.com/mason76/TwoWheelAdventureNov2006 

Two Wheel Adventure: Day 1-2

I rolled out of Phoenix at 12:30pm today. Hit some heavy slowing on I-10 west before even making it out of the city limits but it opened up after a few miles and it was smooth sailing. I stopped for gas just before crossing into the California boarder – got 40.5mpg, not bad for averaging 80 MPH. Next gas stop was Banning, CA – 42.2mpg – wow, this bike does better on gas than I thought!

I arrived at my friends Mike and Kim’s house in Thousand Oaks, CA around 8pm PST. It really sucks to be riding for 5-6 hours and than deal with 2 hours of LA rush hour traffic!

I’ll be staying here for a couple of days and pushing on down the road Monday morning. We are going to Venice Beach today to hang out. My friend Jacob might come up from San Diego tomorrow to join me on the Malibu canyon roads. The canyon here is the best riding I’ve found anywhere in the country.

I hope to put in about 300 miles Monday which should put me somewhere near Santa Cruz, CA.

You can now view my progress using Google Earth. I’ve configured the dataset for 600 points for now. Data points that show up as CELL mean that the phone was unable to get a clear view of GPS satellites and thus used the nearest Cell tower coordinates. In theory if you zoom to a cell location you should be able to see a tower or perhaps the shadow from the tower.

Special thanks to Mike for debugging the PHP and SQL for this to work!

http://photoln.com/kml.php

For those without Google Earth, the Google maps link is here (last 30 datapoints displayed)

http://photoln.com/bar.php 

Leaving vacation behind for an adventure

There is a difference between a vacation and an adventure. One is a life changing experience. Today I’m taking time off from vacation to embark on my two wheel adventure through Arizona and California. The planned route is Phoenix to Los Angeles, CA and follow highway 1 – Pacific Coast Highway to the Oregon border.

Special thanks to Tom for building a custom stem mount for my radar detector!

Remote indicator for radar detector is helmet mounted.

And finally, you can track my progress via real time GPS tracking. If indicated speed exceeds the speed limit it’s probably due to technical problems 🙂

LINK TO GPS MAP – You may need to use the zoom setting on left side of map. Last 30 data points are displayed on the map, points are updated every 3-5 minutes if all systems are go.