The move to the Columbia River Gorge is complete. Damn, talk about the never-ending highway. It took four trips to get all my crap moved from the San Francisco Bay Area, and each leg is about 760 miles - one way.

The moving process actually started on Memorial Day weekend when my bud Andy and I hauled my vintage 26' Airstream from it's storage space in Redwood City, CA to the Hatteras West Ranch in a hellish turn-and-burn trip that involved a front tire blowout on the truck at speed, electric trailer brakes that went from "off" to "fully tire-smoking locked" and nothing in between, and my co-pilot hacking up copious volumes of greenish-brown schpluck every few miles as the result of either a bad lung infection or total demonic possession. The antibiotics he was eating by the fistful suggested the former, but I'm betting Satan was involved somehow.

I'll spare you any further details on this weekend, as I'm trying to block every searing image from my memory, but just let me say you haven't lived until you've had a front tire go on CA Rt 5 with a 3600lb projectile attached to your bumper, or bombed down an Oregon mountain pass, in the rain, at 1AM, not daring to hit the brakes, because when you do the 3600lb projectile's wheels lock up in a big f@#king cloud of screaming tire smoke, this while your co-pilot is yelling at you, to... go faster. Seems he was worried about being run over from behind by one of the many 18 wheelers stacking up behind us on the 7% down grades.

There is an upside to that scenario. The miles seem to fly by when you're deep in thought, engineering a way to crash the truck just so and kill only the passenger while leaving the driver unscathed.

I made the next run on July 4th, when I took my usual Gorge windsurfing vacation. This year I took all my windsurfing gear with me and left it all at the ranch when the week was over, not really needing it in CA since I found myself doing very little windsurfing in the Bay Area. Seems windsurfing on the Bay is overrated, just like most everything else there.

Leaving the windsurfing gear and a couple of mountain bikes at the ranch made a minor dent in the pile, but it was a useful dent nonetheless, because, well, I've got a big pile of big stuff, most of which will not fit into the average moving box.

I planned to run the next leg of this marathon move on Labor Day weekend. The plan was to ride the big Kawasaki Concours ZG1000 up that Saturday, hang out on Sunday, and catch a shuttle to the Portland Airport on Labor Day for the short hop back to San Jose. Of all my bikes, the Concours was the one that I didn't want to haul on a trailer. Hell, its whole purpose in life is to tear up miles in relative comfort. The same could be said for me at one point in my life. In short, I just wanted to ride one leg and as it turned out, I ended up having a great time.

I took CA RT 1/101 (The Pacific Coast Highway) up the coast as far as Crecent City, then cut over to RT 5 via Rt 199, a.k.a. The Redwood Highway for the last 50 miles or so of CA and up through OR. I was planning on running up the coast all the way to the Columbia River mouth, then turning right and heading due east upriver, but I got tired of the slow pace on RT 101. Great scenery, but after a while you just want to go, and besides, Rt 199 is isanely scenic and a good moto road too.

The planned day-trip turned into an overnighter when I stopped in Cottage Grove, OR for some road food and ran into a group of sportbike riders with a mechanical problem on a very pink GSXR600. Now, I'm nothing if not helpful when I get an opportunity to show just how damn much I know about the inner workings of motorcycles. The bike's color told me it was probably owned & ridden by a woman & there are very few things in life as fine as a hottie on a hot bike. Anyway, as it turned out, the ignition switch had just crapped out, and since I had a pair of wire cutters in my tank bag a repair was made & I was a hero (not a role I get to play very often, so I like to run with it when I get the chance). After I knocked back the the third Sam Adams courtesy of my new friends I decided that well, I kind of liked Cottage Grove and, what the hell, I wasn't in a huge hurry... sooo.... I ordered another after walking across the street and grabbing a room for the evening.

Sunday morning greeted me with the thickest fog I'd ever seen (I know, I know, welcome to the NW). I hung around, watched the Weather Channel, read the free USA Today that magically appeared under my hotel room door, but by 8AM it showed no signs of clearing off. I figured I'd just hit it and see if got any better up the road. It didn't, and after 20 miles or so of flying totally blind I pulled into Eugene, OR to grab breakfast fit for a Mighty Duck and wait out the fog. In an hour or so I saw sun, and jumped back on Rt 5 and pinned the throttle until my radar detectors went nuts and I backed down in the name of civil obedience.

A couple hours out of Eugene I hit the Columbia River and I decided to keep heading north and see what Mt St Helens was up to. According to my hotel's CNN feed, it was supposed to be on the verge of a serious blowout, but to my disappointment nothing was going on. No carnage. No hot air blast reducing the surrounding 100 mile radius to smoking fly ash. Not even a little steam. I hung around for an hour and did everything I could to piss the mountain off, but eventually just gave up and rode to the ranch, dropped the saddlebags, electronics & tank bag, and headed into Hood River for the rest of the day.

There's nothing I like better than a good road trip, and I made a few observations on this particular 896 mile high-speed weekend. They go something like this:

1. I'm old and beat up, but I can still lay down some miles with the best of them. The Concours helps more than a little a bit. I don't know that I'd be walking around today if I had been on my old Honda 750 all weekend.

2. An MP3 player and a good set of ear buds are worth their weight in gold to help pass the miles. I brought my 20GB unit and had about 400 CD's worth of music available. Nice to jam to some Incubus when playing dodge-truck at 85mph.

3. A good radar detector is a wonderful thing. One with an external speaker jack is incredibly useful. On the Concours I have two, aimed front & back. I chopped up an old pair of cheap headphones and mounted one the the speakers in my helmet. With the "beep" volume turned up, I could hear it over the music. Saved my ass but good on Sat evening when I was smoking into Cayonville, OR at about 85 with Widespread Panic cranked up.

4. I hate sharing the road with 18 wheelers, and for the record, I just f@#king hate them in general. Kings of the Highway my ass.

5. Some Harley guys actually ride their bikes, and those guys make fun of the "lifestyle" posers, too. Just like the rest of us. I learned this at breakfast on Sunday from four Harley guys on Electra Glides who were waiting out the fog with me. Real riders with plenty of miles between them and not one piece of leather fringe on any of their jackets, or their grips for that matter.

6. A cold beer at the end of the day beats hot coffee at the beginning, but just by a gnat's ass.

7. A GPS is cool even when you know where you're going. If you plug in your route, you can answer your own "are we there yet.. are we there yet.. are we there yet.." questions just by punching a button. Of course, you may not have Adult ADD like me....

8. Trashy, bored, drunken women occasionally press naked body parts against the side window of their Dodge K cars just because you're on two wheels and they're, well, trashy, bored and drunk. I can't explain this phenomenon, and won't attempt to here. A Wonder of Nature, I guess.

9. Life is Good on two wheels. See numbers 1,6,&8 if you have any doubts....

Anyway, back to the move. The Concours safely delivered, I still had four motos, my '69 BMW, two trucks and six bicycles to go. Oh yeah, I had some furniture, too. I always forget about that stuff for some reason...

I took off again the day before Thanksgiving in my Ford Ranger, hauling three bicycles, my moto spares, one of my Honda XR650's and my '70 Honda 750 on a motorcycle trailer. The whole package got left at the ranch while I hopped on yet another one-way flight from PDX to San Jose. Sunday I was back in CA for one more week at the office and had another run on set for December 5th. This time it was up and back, at least for my 9mpg '76 GMC 3/4 ton pickup and me. I bought this thing for the express purpose of hauling the Airtream to OR, after pricing a U-Haul for the task and deciding it was cheaper to just buy something with a trailer hitch and hope it had 800 miles left in it.

As it turned out, she had had a few more in her, and as former Inmate #446373 says, "and that's a good thing".

Another acquisition made with the move in mind was a 6'x12' Pace American cargo trailer. I've wanted an enclosed trailer to haul bikes around for so long I can't remember, and this was the perfect excuse to get one instead of renting something from U-Haul. Ask any guy who owns motorcycles, an enclosed trailer is a highly coveted item, right up there with Snap On deep socket sets and Mia Sorvino. OK, Mia Sorvino beats anything Pace makes by a long shot, at least in my book, but you get the idea. It managed to swallow all my household stuff and tool boxes, and got dropped in the driveway while I wheeled around and drove the big GMC back for one more load. I talked to the truck all the way home "come on baby, one more trip". Somehow we made it back to Mountain View. A week later, with the house cleaned way beyond my usual standards and the keys turned over to the landlord, the GMC headed north again for the final time, hauling the Hawk GT and the other XR650 in the bed, two mountain bikes on the roof, and my '69 BMW 2002 on a U-Haul car dolly.

Lessons learned? Yeah, I guess there's a couple to be had:

1. I have too much stuff to move again anytime soon. It's not a problem, just an observation.

2. XM Satellite Radio is worth the $9.95 a month in a big, fat, huge way. It is, to use a worn-out phrase, just awesome.

3. Old pickup trucks just rule. I bought my old GMC for a grand last spring for the sole purpose of hauling my Airstream trailer to the Gorge. All I wanted out of it was one 760 mile trip, and I figured I was money ahead. That one-way trip turned into a round-trip when Andy bought a KZ900 in WA state and we decided to haul the KZ back to CA. Another round-trip and a one-way run later, she still runs like a watch. She doesn't stop too well (except at gas stations), but that's another story altogether. I promised her on the last leg of the move that if she just got me to the Gorge, she could assume the coveted role of semi-retired Home Depot Runner - just like her owner.

Cheers all,

CWB