A short travelogue

Travelogue Day 1

I am planning on doing Sturgis next year which is a 1400 mile each way motorcycle trip, from home through Vegas, Utah, all of the way to South Dakota. Motorcycles from all over the country literally funnel through all of the highways across the country ending up in this little tiny town.

More on that next year.

I have some training for the rest of the week out in redlands california, only about 2 hours away from home. I'll be out for 3 days and I didn't want to fight the friday evening rush hour traffic back home so I figured what the heck this is the best time to try out a mini Sturigs run. I plan on camping out along the way to Sturgis so I packed up my sleeping bag, backpack, tent and all the other necessary equipment, precariously bungee corded it to the back of my motorcycle, and headed down the road. More accurately, I prepared myself for vehicular combat, riding down the 210 freeway is like dodging bullets while you're trying to ride a unicycle. The 210 is also known as "we don't know nothing about no stinking carpool lanes". Apparently the people who drive the 210 everyday just don't get the "2 or more people per vehicle" carpool lanes, as every time we've driven it the carpool lane is chock full of single riders. The carpool lane is supposed to be faster, but with all of these yahoo's in it it actually goes slower. Maybe these people do get it, as they've learned that there's no enforcement of the law, why obey it? But I digress. Where was I? Oh yes, I made it out to Redlands and checked into my Microtel, that's short for a microscopic hotel. I inquired with the receptionist about the neighborhood as I talked to her through the bulletproof glass. She assured me that it was safe enough just that "...there's a lot of people walking around." A quick call home and I was already fast asleep.
Day 2 and I got my first day of training done on software that is a lot like how google maps was developed. I won't bore you with the details just don't ask me about the kml format. It will be a long and tedious diatribe on how google is not accurate. Curvature of the Earth and geospatial elevations etc etc.
Walking around Redlands it was not hard to realize what the receptionist was talking about. There are a lot of homeless, its as if half the of people that came out here for raves just never left.