Spot Me – Spring 2009 Ride About

I was planning a four week ride about this year but circumstances intervened.  I was planning it around the Motorcycle Tourer’s Forum (MTF) ride called the Moab Cloverleaf Tour & Rough Road Ride.  In my original plan I was going to be riding Brutus, my BMW R1200GS, and doing a considerable amount of off-road riding.  After my trip got shortened and my back problems resurfaced I decided to just go flower sniffing on Rufus, my BMW K1200LT.  As luck would have it I had just installed Wilbers Shocks on Rufus and this would be a good opportunity to give them a workout.  

Events conspired to force me to totally re-plan my routing.  The primary event was my youngest son’s graduation from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA.  So I am now going to be heading down I-5 to Grants Pass, OR and cutting over to the California coast.  I am going to ride a good deal of CA-1 all the way to Carpinteria.  I am then working my way East to some back road riding into the Big Bear area.  From there I will be heading to Palm Springs for a few days visit with my Dad and then we will go to Los Angeles for my sons Graduation. 

After that event I will boogey to Moab,UT to meet up with 50 to 60 MTF members for three days of flower sniffin’ around Moab.  I will then travel South to Monument Valley, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and possibly Antelope Valley.  I will then head home riding through Southern Utah, across Eastern and Northern Nevada and up Central Oregon.  Weather conditions may alter my Oregon route but only time will tell.

I purchased a SPOT Satellite Messenger along the tracking service option.  This will be a test post embedding a Spot Trip Manager map into my blog. This is a great tracking application developed and hosted by Jason Jonas. 

 

If everything is working correctly there should be regular updates of my position from May 1st though May 20th.  The trip will start and end in Renton, WA.  You may need to pan and zoom around the map to see or get better detail of my track.  There have been some recent reports that the application that feeds the Trip Manager tracking points, Yahoo Fire Eagle, has been corrupting the data.  Hopefully it is fixed by now.  If not then my track may not make much sense.

SPOT me if you can!