I did manage to grab a few decent shots, and most make pretty good digital postcards just right for taunting friends in the hope they might someday leave the numb safety of their mini vans long enough to come visit the Pacific Northwest and get some of this too.

Previa Pilots, you know who you are…

Why call it the Straight to Hell Tour? Why hang such an ominous-sounding label on a perfectly good endeavor like riding around the upper left-hand corner of this great country? Well, most of the credit for the name goes to a riding buddy of mine who happened to be sitting next to me in a local coffee hangout earlier this spring. I was happily emailing pics of the previous day’s ride to the aforementioned friends along with a detailed explanation of the great roads and spectacular scenery. After seeing the pics and reading the accompanying email text that described the insanely good riding that exists literally right at the end of my driveway, Steve looked me right in the eye and said “Bastian, if you keep taunting your friends with stuff like that, you’re going straight to hell”.

It gave me pause. Yeah, I reasoned, I guess it could happen that way. Of course anyone with even a basic working knowledge of my life and times would get a pretty good laugh at the idea of that email being the one thing that punches my on ticket the southbound brimstone shuttle. It’s like saying the only thing keeping Paris Hilton from being named to the Supreme Court is a general bias in the Senate against tall, morally flexible blondes.

For some reason I remembered that conversation when I started thinking about doing some real riding again, an exercise I found myself increasingly involved in as it had become painfully obvious that I needed to find a way to breath some life back into me. I needed, for lack of a better term, a general systems recharge, having just weathered what was probably the toughest year of my life. I was rattled and mentally running on empty all due to my first real health scare. In April of 2007 a broken left foot and the nasty infection (of the sort normally reserved for a 20/20 Special Report) that followed nearly cost me a wheel and worse. It landed me in the hospital for a couple of days, then kept me on crutches and away from all the stuff I retired early and moved to the outdoor sports mecca more commonly known as the Columbia River Gorge to pursue. No mountain biking, windsurfing, sailing, whitewater boating, fly fishing or motorcycling for the better part of a year.

Recovery was slow, frustrating, and painful, and at times far from certain. At one point it seemed likely that I might lose that wheel after all, even after months of fighting to keep it. My mind was as hammered as my body, and I finally got so crazy from doing nothing I bought an old Honda CB750 and a sidecar, bolted the two together, and fabricated a right-side hand shift to ferry me to my doctor’s office, the grocery store, and of course, bars.

That’s just how it goes sometimes I guess. Still, given the nature of what I consider quality time, this near-death experience seemed somehow surreal. I mean, I didn’t ride my Santa Cruz Bullet off a cliff. I didn’t hit Aunt Ethel’s Buick while wheeling around a blind corner on my XR650 supermoto. I didn’t wrap my whitewater canoe around a rock and get pinned in the wash. No climbing rope mishaps. No shark attack.

I stepped off my porch the wrong way and it almost killed me.

It’s enough to, well, give one pause.

Anyway, by the time this spring rolled around I was on the mend and operating at about 80%. I was also in dire need of what the denizens of pop culture speak used to refer to as an attitude adjustment.

There are plenty of ways to make this adjustment, I guess. Some people sit on the beach and do nothing. Others spend mountains of dollars in fluffy spas getting their bodies wrapped in the very stuff that washes up on those same beaches. Me? I’ve never been good at sitting still, and well, doing nothing does just exactly that for me.

Nothing.

A big ride seemed like a good way to get my long AWOL swagger back. Since I wasn’t quite 100% and I wasn’t really sure my leg could take long miles in the saddle, I decided a series of shorter loops would made more sense that striking out to make a lap of the continent. I also decided that the Kawasaki ZG1000 Concours that I’ve done over five seasons worth of high speed, big mile days on would stay parked in favor of the 650 V-Strom I’d been busy re-engineering since I picked it up slightly wrecked a few months earlier. The V-Strom, I reasoned, was over 200 pounds lighter and better suited to a rider with some physical limitations. It would also allow me to pretty much take any route I felt like without regard to road conditions or how fat or what color that squiggly line on the map was. I liked that idea a lot. No Interstate crap. Just ride interesting roads with no set destinations and an absolute effort to go out and meet my country, tourists and locals alike. Like a honeybee in a meadow, I hoped to inhale enough nectar along the way to do me some real good. As it turned out, that analogy wasn’t half bad, because in addition to riding some of the most spectacular roads in the country, I also managed to find some stellar places to sample the local nectar one pint at a time.

Yeah, you could say it worked out.

Cheers,

CWB