A weekend away, a weekend to play...

On long, single-day trips, I prefer to be in motion and a viable distance from the start-point when the sun comes up. There's just this really feel to being on the road, making good progress, as the sky goes through those amazing blues-into-reds of dawn. As it gets brighter, and most people are just starting their day, I've already got a good percentage of my trip over with. It makes longer distances easier to bear, and the side benefit is I can escape the congested bay-area traffic before it starts. I was just south of Oakland when the GPS beeped and said "Sunrise -- switching to day mode" and changed color. Twenty minutes later, while on the Richmond bridge, the first rays of the sun made it over the hills and hit the waters of the bay.

( No, it's not another 20-page trip report. Just a visit to the parents. )

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This coming weekend I'll be camping out at Laguna Seca raceway with reality_fox, Dusty, and a bunch of crazies I met at the BRAG ride I took earlier this spring. This will require camping gear capable of being mounted on the motorcycle and surviving the semi-rough ground conditions of the motorcycle-camping area known as "Fox Hill". Good camping equipment is a system... tent, bag, sleeping pad, etc... which can be packed together as a unit and expanded to meet many other potential needs. I used to have a mishmash of these things, but they were all poorly thought out and most are either missing, damaged, or destroyed. I need to rebuild. If done right, a properly assembled system will fit well on the bike and enable me to do more adventure-style motorcycling where I can load up the GS and just head out to the wild places.

My infrastructure side is buzzing, just thinking about it. I'm off to REI after work to start looking at tents. My already recently-depleted bank-account is quietly screaming, knowing what's to come. Aieee...