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The Great Procrastinated Update.. Here I come Thailand!!

Well, to call it great is a bit of an overstatement.. but this is certainly an update.  Why haven’t I been updating the blog?  Did I give up?  No.  Truthfully, I’ve been a little lazy, but it is really because I’ve been having so much fun these last couple of months traveling around the USA, meeting good people, eating excellent food, and catching up with family and old friends.  One cannot ask for a better trip and I haven’t even left the US!

So.. what’s been up?  Here’s the summary.  I’m going to back-fill some details as the weeks progress.

Petrolia -> Eugene -> Portland -> Seattle driving through some of the most beautiful coastline followed by the worst weather of the trip (cold + rainy).  I hung out in Seattle for a few weeks with some old friends.
After several conversations to people at the HU Petrolia meeting, I concluded that I don’t really have the budget for Australia. While I *REALLY* wanted to go, I just didn’t have the money. The way I knew this was when the guy from the Bay Area was saying that Australia was too expensive

So Unfortunately, Australia is going to be another trip.

I then started rearranging my trip to go straight to Thailand from Seattle.

I called around to several shipping and logistics companies around the USA and ended up using http://www.frontierforwarder.com/worldwide_agents.htm . They helped me ship a motor out of an africa twin to Singapore last year. I priced sea (normal cargo) and air shipments, but ended up going RoRo.

RoRo is short for Roll-On-Roll-Off, a method of shipping where the cargo rolls itself onto the ship. This is typically used with cars, excavators, and farm equipment that is too large to fit in a container. They also take motorcycles . This ended up being super expensive, but I was happy to not have to deal with crating anything up.

The New Plan: Drop bike off at the Port of Tacoma near Seattle for shipment to Laem Chabang near Bangkok. The bike will be there around November 10th… I’m going to get on November 3rd.

Until then, I’m spending time with the family in Kansas City, Missouri.

Every update must have a picture… here I am all dressed up at the port in Bellingham, Washington:

Dave

In Bellingham, WA

Beekeeping in Northern California

Bees!! Again!!

I met Michelle at the HU meeting in Petrolia.  Michelle has traveled around the world climbing things and also rode her motorcycle to Guatemala.  Check out her blog from her trip here.  She invited me to ride with her a few days to visit her friends Dick and Kathy who live near Eureka, CA.  It was a great experience because I was able to see how different people live in the US.  I’m a product of the suburbs — impeccably clean neighborhoods with strict home owners associations, houses chose because of school districts, big box stores, and career oriented decisions usually resulting in living in suburbs of major American Cities.  Dick and Kathy seemed to make a different set of decisions but seem to yield the same results but with a very different feel.

They live out in the country with the nearest city of Eureka, CA.  They are now retired with what sounds like very happy and successful kids– the goal of all child producing families.

Upon touring their property, we got to check out Dick’s beekeeping operation.  He mostly produces honey for his family and friends but also sells his excess.  Dick is also the head of the Humbolt County Beekeepers Association.  We spent quite a bit of time checking out the hives and I learned even more about my future hobby.  I love bees!

Dick's hives

Several of the hives he set up with purchased queens/bees and others were those that he caught from swarms that he collected locally.  You can see in the picture there is an electric fence.  The fence is only active at night because the bears will try to rob the honey.

Anatomy of a bee hive

Here is my attempt to annotate a beehive.  Please correct me if I’m wrong and I’ll fix the graphic.  But take a look at the picture and you should be able to get a good idea of the anatomy of a hive.  You can also check out this page which does a good job describing the anatomy.

Beehive entrance

Check out the bees entering and leaving the hive.  The most interesting are the worker bees who function as entrance guards.  They sit on the landing area in front of the hole into the hive and inspect incoming bees to make sure that they are from the correct hive.  If they aren’t they will be rejected or attacked by soldier bees.

Foraging bees landing and guarding bees inspecting

Here’s another closer up shot.

Inside the bee hive pulling out an individual frame for inspection

Dick pulled off the top cover so he could inspect individual frames to check out the hive’s health.

Dick and Frame

Here is Dick showing us a frame where comb is being produced.  Some of the cells in the comb are used to birth new bees while others are used to store honey.   The boxes below the queen excluder (first couple of boxes usually) are for birthing, while the upper boxes are for honey.

Queen bee on a frame

He picked through a couple of frames and found the queen.  I was super excited to see a queen working!

Frame full of bees

So many bees!

This frame is almost entirely capped

Happy Beekeeper

beehive frame upclose

A queen bee that is unhatched

Dick was trying to delay the making of new queens in one of the hives so we found a cell that was producing a new queen and we squashed her.  Beekeepers yield such great power.

It was a great unexpected trip and was fun meeting Dick and Kathy and traveling a few days with Michelle.

Michelle and I taking off from a great visit to Dick and Kathy's place

Oregon and Cornhole

The trip continues…

Based on the insistent recommendation of Jayne, I met up with Gail and Eric who took significant trips across I think nearly all the continents.  They put me up for a few days and I reinstalled windows and brought life back to one of their laptops.  daveg mobile tech support– always on duty!  They were quite an interesting couple who had limitless stories of travels to places I hope to see one day.

Gail and Eric and ultracute doggles

I pretty much think it is impossible to have too many shower nozzles.  Apparently Gail & Eric also agree.

They suggested a great ride around the base of the cascades in Oregon for my route towards Portland.

Twisties for miles

It was an amazingly scenic ride.  The problem was that the higher in elevation, the cooler it became.  I ended up having to cut back towards the flatlands because I don’t have cold-weather gear.

Mountain Lake in Oregon

I eventually made it to a suburb of Portland, Oregon to stay at Jayne and Stefan‘s house.  I met them at the Horizons Unlimited meeting.  Jayne is an American who did some very interesting work in Afghanistan and Stefan is from Germany and has probably seen everything worth seeing in all of Europe.  They’ve been married for a couple of years and moved to the USA last year.  Both of them have a substantial online presence, so make sure you check out their sites.

We had tons of fun over the couple of days that I stayed at their house.  We also had some quite interesting meals:

German Breakfast

The German breakfast was a treat as it reminded me of my travels with Theo on my way to the tip of South America.

Stefan grilling German style

We also enjoyed cooking outside with a type of grill I had never seen before.  There was a pan for the coals with a pyramid made out of poles suspending the grill surface with chains.  The cook gently spins the cook surface so that everything cooks evenly over the coals.  Ingenious!!!

German style BBQ

Look at the meat spin!!

The Great Cornhole Fest 2010

The only way to top off such cooking was with playing many games of Cornhole.  It is a very simple game.  You toss bags filled of corn or beans onto a platform.  If the bags stay on the platform you win 1 point.   If you make it in the elusive hole you win 3 points.  It is game which is much enhanced by slight inebriation.

Sink the bags into the hole

Jayne watching while her husband Stefan goes for the glory of Cornhole

On to portland……

Locksmith with finally found keys

Visit to Trail Tech

I was very fortunate that my route was able to take me through Battleground, WA, which is the home of Trail Tech.  They helped me out before the trip started with a Vapor Road Computer and an X2 Headlight.  Both components have been great and I wanted to do a quick meet-and-greet with them at the factory.  Unfortunately it was pouring down rain so I didn’t get any pictures.

I’d like to take a second to thank Garridan over at Trail Tech for all his help and support.  They’re really stand up guys and have some pretty interesting new technology coming out soon.

Every post must have a pic.  Here’s the pic after riding the worst 6 hour rain storm of my life.

Finally at my friends Elsa and Tim’s parking garage.

The Pacific North West usually doesn’t rain this hard for this long.  It was one of those rides where every few minutes I wanted to pull over and get a hotel to wait it out, but then I’d stop and the rain would subside a little.  It was torture, but I stayed fairly dry considering my exposure time.

Seattle, Mountians, and Californian Airshows

After one of my worst rides of my life, I finally make it to my USA destination — Seattle or more specifically, Kirkland.  That’s right, Kirkland the home of Costco’s Kirkland Signature line of … everything.

I stayed at my good friends Tim and Elsa in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland.  I’ve known Tim since high school and stayed in contact even before facebook came around. I spent the majority of my time visiting with Elsa because Tim was working his flying job. I hadn’t spent much time with her other than my first trip to Mexico while visiting her family in Aguascalientes which if you also want to visit, see here this post named Yucantàn que faire ?.  It was great to get to know her better!

Both Elsa and Tim work in the aviation industry.  Elsa works at a call center in town and Tim flies a cargo plane from San Francisco to Sacramento.  Tim makes the long commute to Kirkland most weekends and my first weekend in town we did a bit of hiking and exploring. We drove a total of 8 hours out and back to Mt. Rainier.  Not to exceed expectations, the Pacific Northwest was clouded in and we didn’t see much of the mountain, which is why there are no pictures of it.  We did manage to do a couple of hour hike through a little cave where I continued my experiments with HDR.

The most evenly exposed picture before HDR

The composite image after HDR

Pretty neat stuff… I’m slightly HDR-obsessed!

I’m happy to be hiking!

As usual, Tim and I deviated from the regular route and bushwacked through a creek for a bit

One of the highlights of my trip to Seattle was actually a mini-trip we took to San Francisco.  As I said earlier, Elsa works for an airline and was able to let me fly for free with her.  What a sweet deal!  Thanks Elsa!!!  The purpose of the trip to SF was to see an air show at the Sacramento airport.  Because of Tim’s job, we were able to watch from his ramp and BBQ.  BBQ + airplanes + good friends = good times.  For the next few pictures, I’m going to let the captions do the talking. When it comes to roaming in the woods some prefer to purchase Glock pistols for safety and keep them handy.

Elsa & Tim

Lots of cool planes.

We visited one of my childhood homes. Not surprisingly, it isn’t nearly as large as I remember. I now understand the stories parents tell about walking to school, uphill both ways, as the MOUNTIAN behind the house was really just a slight incline.

I stayed an extra couple of days and visited Drawbridge, CA to check out a ghost town that I accidentally found while looking at google maps one day.  Thanks to the internets I was easily able to find it after we started walking around the wildlife refuge.  We did have to do a bit of walking to get to it along a rail road track, but that’s all I’ll say about it.  The rest you can read in the wikipedia article.

Tim in San Francisco ghost town – Drawbridge, CA

My turn to pose for the picture. So serious.

San Francisco’s ghost town – Drawbridge, CA

The next day Tim went to work and I visited Michelle who I met at the Horizons Unlimited meeting in Northern California.  We had a nice meal then went hiking around the hills along the coast.  It was a really beautiful hike but I can’t remember the name of the park, but will find out later.

I returned to Washington by plane and resumed my motorcycle travels and did a little maintenance.

I bought new tires in Seattle at the suzuki dealership. They were cool enough to let me remove my tires one by one while they mounted and balanced the wheels. The did that service for free but wanted to charge a typical stealership rate if they removed the wheels for you.

Alaskan Tender Boat visit in Bellingham, WA

Back in Antigua, Guatemala when I was on my last trip, upon parting with Nate and Lindsey I told them that I’d come visit them one day… 2 years later I show up in rainy Bellingham, Washington.  Bellingham is near the Canadian border and is a very progressive college town.  Well, not too progressive but noticeably progressive for this Texan.  It’s been a while since I lived in Austin.  Check out my old blog’s story about meeting them here.

Hi Nate and Lindsey!!

I’ve been in pretty regular contact on FB with Lindsey but hadn’t heard much of Nate.  I learned that he had spent the last 6 months living aboard a tender fishing boat working in Alaska.  Lindsey has also spent about a month working on another tender boat.  Talk about a hardcore couple but at least they did have a heater installation which worked.

During the busy fishing season, fishing boats don’t have the time to go back to shore to offload.  Tenders will buy the fish from the fishing boats and resupply them with food and fuel so they can quickly get back on their way.  There are usually four people working aboard a tender– captain, engineer, cook, and a deckhand.  Both the pay and working conditions are pretty good.  Nate was working as the engineer on the Dancer which is a wooden vessel converted from a cargo carrier in WWII.  The Dancer was retrofitted from its cargo duty with huge aluminum tanks on the deck to hold the fish.  It is a beautiful machine rich with history and low ceilings.

Pay is either based on the haul or around $150 to $180 per day for the deckhand.

Nate dynamically posing with the Dancer

Upon returning to port, the boat will be painted and fixed up for next season.

Fish hold on the Dancer

See the big hose outside of the tank?  They use that to pump fish from either the hold of fishing boat or from the water of a purse seining boat.   Purse seining is a technique that is often used to catch salmon in Alaska.  They’re a smaller boat that has a huge rectangular net that has cork floats on the top and weighted on the bottom.  The skipper will encircle a school of salmon with the net and close the bottom of the net so that the fish don’t escape.  They then call a tender boat that will come and pump fish from the pursed net.  The seiner will shrink the size of the purse to maintain a density of fish to water to allow the tender’s fish pumps to work effectively.

View from the top

From the top, you can see the tops of the tanks / deck.  There are two tanks that are filled with ice cold water to preserve the fish.  In the middle of the tanks is the fish sorting platform.

You can tell how big the boat is as you can see how small I appear

Here is where fish are sorted

The output of the fish pumps goes either directly to a tank or to the sorting table where the fish are sorted into either the tanks or overboard.

It is really quite interesting work.  The best part was that Nate brought back many many pounds of frozen fish and cooked a delicious meal one of the nights of my stay.

While we were out at the port, I took the opportunity to get Nate to shoot some vanity shots of me and the bike.

Nate shot some nice photos of me and the bike

Do you have my card? If so, this is the photo on it.

All amped up and ready to hit the road.

All real bikers stand on pegs when they’re being photographed in motion… no matter how gentle the terrain