Leaving San Francisco

First attempt to blog from the palm pilot. My fingers are cramping up on those teeny buttons so this will be a rough draft without editing. How does the spell check work on this thing???

Anyway. Going down I5 in a one way Uhaul right now. It's freezing outside and it's warm inside. It's the most boring stretch of road in Califonia, especially at night.

Our only highlight so far was some 6 or 8 feet high neon letters up on a hillside spelling "Jesus is the reason for the season". That's still making our day. Great entertainment value, thanks Jesus.

It's a good thing though that we decided to take a heated vehicle since my heated vest seems to bog down the charging system on the KLR. I would have been able to only use it in an intermittend manner - as in, switch the vest on until I get warm, then off to replenish the battery, until I'm freezing my butt off again, then back on.

I'll be practicing this soon enough when we get to Creel which is essentially the entry to the Copper Canyon and it's at 8000 feet. According to that really fuzzy almost kind of hand drawn weather report in the SF Chronicle it rained in that area a couple of days ago so there might be snow on the ground up high.

Going down I5 though I'm finally jelling into vacation mode. Usually I'm on the way to the races when I go down this route. This morning was pretty hectic with last minute adjustments since I rode the KLR for the first time on the freeway last night and realized I really needed bar end weights to cut down the vibrations. Fortunately I had a nice heavy set at work which should do the trick.

Didn't have a chance to test ride it yet though since I also had to wrap up open ends at the shop.

But hey, preparation schmeparation. Since all my preparations went south already in terms of the KTM getting booted off the trip I'm figuring this was un-planned as an adventure trip into the unknown anyway.

I'm just starting early...