20180302 - Santa Barbara, Morro Bay, Tour of Thomas Fire Damage

20180203 - Jullian, California

Initially, Paul and I had planned a weekend long distance ride.  It worked out that Sinyeon was going to come to the US from Seoul, so we changed plans to include Sinyeon and Paul's wife Caroline.

The trip was going to be a one day circuit through Jullian California.  We originally planned to have lunch on the outskirts of town, but those plans didn't work out.  When we arrived in Jullian, I backed my bike up to the curb and was right in front of a bakery with Apple dumplings in the window.  Sinyeon saw them first and wanted one.  Who didn't want one?

We decided to walk through town first and see some of the shops.  If it were just Paul and I, we wouldn't have done this, but we wanted the ladies to have a good time too.  There are many little shops in Jullian and all kinds of things to see.  During our walk, Sinyeon managed to convince us that apple pie was a perfectly good lunch, so we went back to the bakery and had lunch there.  The pie was delicious.

Trips to date:

20180107 - TombStone and Kitt Peak National Observatory

Another Paul and Bob adventure.  Trips are less frequent these days.  I have school and semester breaks are 6 weeks apart on average.  These are about the only times I have to ride distance rides anymore.  Tombstone was on the agenda for the weekend.  Along the way, we stopped in to Kittt Observatory and had some really nice Italian food in Nogales.

Tombstone is really a neat place.  We visited The Bird Cage, the house of ill repute that featured the longest ever poker game, prostitution, and drinking.  We also visited the Tombstone graveyard.  Lots of entertaining history there!

20171022 - Crater mountain / Petrified Forest

“NO BATTLE plan ever survives first contact with the enemy” - Helmuth von Moltke, head of the19th-century Prussian army.  I can think of many enemies to motorcycle riding, but the two biggest are time and weather.  In this case, both conspired against our plan to go to Capulin National Volcano in New Mexico.  Realistically, the weather would have been chilly but tolerable.  The time constraints would have caused us to do an iron butt ride on the way back and leave us no time on Sunday for trivial matters like laundry.

So, we changed the plan and decided for a tour of Crater Mountain in Arizona and a trip through the petrified forest.  We would travel well over a thousand miles on the trip, and I'd never been to either place.  With Plan B ready, we hit the pavement.

The meteor crater is a big patch of land that once was flat and is now a huge ... crater.  A meteor hit it, and my understanding is hurricane winds resulted on impact, along with debris traveling just as fast.  Nothing would have survived in the immediate vicinity.  People dug what was left of the meteor out of the ground and put it on display in the visitors center.  Curious humans would have it no other way.  The chunk of rock, about the size of a beach ball, weighs more than a motorcycle.

The petrified forest is a land mass where several logs became encrusted with minerals after they fell and were saturated in a flood.  The results are log segments that resemble jewels.  The park is huge, and the petrified logs are all over.  As with other national parks, there is plenty of hiking there, a recreation Paul and I have never taken part in.