How the West Was Won Let me start by relieving everyone by saying that the last three days of riding have now turned a corner with my body. What I mean is that I was much less sore today from the ride than I had been any of the last three days. I don’t know if that means it now takes three days of pain to get two days of pleasure, but today was, indeed,…
Creatures of Comfort This is the third day of a five day motorcycle ride we are taking through Arizona and New Mexico. I know what you are thinking, that it might be too hot in the American Southwest for that sort of thing. I would like to expand the term of art to “Mad dogs, Englishmen and Motorcyclists go out in the noonday sun.” I am sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Encanto in…
Fort Apache We are in Apache country on the border between Arizona and New Mexico. Yesterday we took a scenic side trip on Rt. 72 that actually took us right past the historic Fort Apache, but I neither knew that at the time nor did we stop. I suspect that at that time of the day we were all bone weary and perhaps not as interested as we might have been in the morning. Fort…
Back in the Back Today we started our motorcycle ride through Arizona and New Mexico. I really haven’t ridden much since our ride through NorthernSpain and Portugal last October. That has mostly been a weather-related issue, but there has also Ben some dust in the air around our club membership that I have previously described and have no desire to rehash. This ride was organized by one our Phoenix members, so, naturally, it started and…
Dialing Up the Awesome Several years ago, my friend, Maggie Larsen, sent me a card that I keep in front of me at my desk. On that particular shelf I have things that are meant to remind me about the kind of person I want to be. I have a miniature model motorcycle and scooter to remind me of my greatest passion and its origins way back when with a Lambretta 50cc scooter when I…
Strapping it On In October 1996, I rode my new yellow and black Honda Valkyrie, a monster of a motorcycle, up to Woodstock Vermont to go on a very chilly ride through the fall foliage of New England. I was meeting our good friends Frank and Barbara O’Connell at their place on the Ottauquechee River, called Robinson Farm. It was a notable farm because it has a massive barn that sits on the hillside and…
Reliving My Life I have for a long time prided myself in saying that I have no regrets. That is my way of saying that I feel I have lived a good life and that I have learned form every step I have taken, whether it turned out well for me or badly. I can point to a number of setbacks in my life, but none of them cause me to regret having gone down…
The Shrinking World For most of my life, the world has gotten bigger. My mother took her small Upstate New York perspective in 1946 and globalized herself by going to work for the Rockefeller Foundation in Venezuela. No trip to Italy for her, she went right out to the deep end of the pool in the mountains of the Orinoco. I inherited that global orientation by being born on the shores of Southern Florida and…
Coming and Going This weekend was all about Kim’s Encore vocal group show. She had performances on both Friday and Saturday nights and each one lasted for 2 hours+. I went to both shows, as is my habit with her performances. The first night we had friends Oswaldo & Gary, Sam & Chris, sister Kathy & Bennett as well as nephew Josh, Haj, JJ and Leila, who drove down from Pasadena. In addition to several…
Living with a BooBoo It’s been two days since I sliced off the top of my thumb with a really sharp Japanese sickle blade and my left thumb has mostly stopped throbbing, but is still very much bandaged up for protection while that nasty wound heals. The good news is that it was a very clean slice that took off a wedge chapped piece of the gardening glove I was wearing and a small piece…