Time: 4:05 pm
Location: brea, ca
Listening to: old Dave Matthews
Temperature: 72 degrees
Number of giant glowing orbs in the sky: 1. And that’s all we need.

Time: 1:46 pm
Location: the last road stop before the grapevine
I don’t have any really good numeical values to put here. We stopped because mike was starving and sick of my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. This was out table after he finished eating:

Time: 12:01 pm
Location: somewhere in the middle of California where cows outnumber people (no, not chino hills)
Listening to: malcom mcdowell’s TED talk
Hours we’ve spent actually driving so far: 15 hours
Hours til we arrive in orange county: 4 (hopefully) (mike says 3)
Miles we’ve driven so far: 1,000 (mikes trip odometer resets at 1000)

Time: 7:00 am
Location: leaving redding, ca
Listening to: hey lover by ll cool j w/ boyz II men (circa 1997)
Drinking: starbucks triple americano black, 1 stevia (I already miss Seattle coffee) (me); mango naked juice (mike)
How awesome is my dad for letting us use his wealth of hotel points and get a free, non-grody hotel room last night: immeasurable
Miles driven so far: 680
Miles to go: 500

Time: 1:42 pm
Location: a rest stop south of Eugene but north of Medford
Listening to: TED talks
Number of naps taken: 2
Number of electronic gadgets that have crapped out on us so far: 1 (our gps died- WTF?)
Number of electronic gadgets we’ve spontaneously bought on the road: 1 (a radar detector that we’re returning as soon as we get home. Suckaz.)

Time: 10:00 am
Location: mother’s bistro, Portland, OR
Number of calories consumed: I don’t want to know

We made it to Portland just as my absolute favorite breakfast place in the world was opening, so we were able to eat without a wait. (By the time we finished the wait was an hour and a half.). Why was it so important to get the timing just right? Because this is the home of the greatest biscuits in the world.
Next, a quick stop to stock up on water and contact solution, and we’re off.

The start of many motorbike adventures to come officially begins – July 8th at 6AM. Me and my fellow journey men (An and Jaime) will be setting off on an adventure from Southern California to Seattle Washington in search of the best roads on left coast. The ride will take us through some of the most beautiful landmarks this side of California, Oregon and Washington including, the the depths of the Redwood forest, the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, the sand dunes of Pismo Beach and the scenic coast line of Oregon. It’s amazing how little we’ve seen of our own backyard.

We’ll be riding wonderful roads such as this.

I’ll be trying my best to document the trip for everyone to enjoy and will try to actively post live updates here and on our tumblr journal when I can. (Mostly to let Aubrey know we are alive and well). In the mean time you can see our tenative route and virtually make the drive using Google Maps.

Follow along with on our Tumblr journal
Live photo updates available on our Flickr channel

I’d also like to thank Jaime for making this ride a reality by lending a hand and solving my bike situation.  Though I won’t be joining the Ducati family of riders per my originl plan, a 2006 Yamaha FZ6 will make do. Not quite as sexy, but it’ll get the job done. Onwards we go!

Live, Love, Ride – Michael

The guest train keeps on truckin’.  I LOVE friends and family coming up to visit us, but it does create one slight problem: when we have guests for 3 weeks straight, the definitely cuts down on my blogging time.  Thus this delayed recap.  But here I am, back and better than ever.

Anne came up last week for some grand explorations in the Pacific Northwest.  She spent Thursday and Friday exploring the city, unfortunately, mostly on her own during the day because I had to work.  Bah! to work.  However, we did get to get some good times in- Anne was able to explore some local yarn shops, meet my super awesome knitting group (or at least the girls who made it that night), meet me for lunch at The Other Coast (by the way, I am stupidly in love with their new extra small sandwhiches, which, for $5 are a total rip-off – a regular 6″ would only be $2 more for twice the sandwhich, but I don’t have the self control to save the other half, PLUS small food is cuter), wander around the Market Friday afternoon and then go to Black Bottle with Mike, where we had some good wine and THE BEST CHOCOLATE CAKE IN THE WHOLE FREAKING WORLD OMFG, which was even weirder because MIKE picked it out.  (Mike hates chocolate and cake but highly recommended this choice, and dear god was he right.)

Saturday morning(ish) we left for a weekend in Portland.  Portland is basically the knitting capitol of the universe, so we had to make sure to check it out.  We stayed at the Ace Hotel, which is basically a fancy hostel- I was a little wary of the shared bathroom idea but my fears were quickly alleviated.  Everything was so clean that I think my mom would be comfortable wandering around the showers barefoot.

During our trip, we visited some fabulous yarn stores, including Twisted, which was highly recommended by my friend Kate, and Knit/Purl, which houses the amazing Sandy of ShiBui Yarns.  We spent nearly two hours with Sandy catching up on the latest knitting gossip and news.  I am totally bummed that we forgot to take a picture with her- I basically want to be her when I grow up.

We also hung out with Anne’s friend Sherri, who acted as our tour guide and took us to some really cool restaurants and events.  We started out the night with cocktails, where I introduced Anne and Sherri to the liquid glory that is sparkling sake, and then checked out a Fashion Show featuring some really cool independent designers followed by Steven Adler’s long lost cousin’s band.  Ok, the lead singer was of no relation to Steven Adler, but he had that same 1987 style shaggy ‘do and he was way the freak too skinny with bulgy veins.  And he wore bedazzled jeans.  This was by far the whitest show I’ve been to in a LONG time (yeah, totally whiter than when we saw the Stars with Amy and Derek), and I realized that I had completely forgotten that white crowds don’t dance.  At all.  Ever.  I really don’t get it.

At least the lights made funny pictures.

The next day Sherri invited us to a special crab boil dinner at Kenny & Zuke’s.  Attending it meant that we wouldn’t get home til midnight and I had to be up early the next morning for work, but I am totally happy to sacrifice sleep for crab.

Yeah, you would give up sleep for that big bowl o’ goodness too.  Anne was particularly enthusiastic:

Much to my delight, the dinner proved to be pretty healthy, but only because of my mayo-phobia.  Thank god the crab was so fresh and sweet that it was good enough to eat on my own, because here were the accompaniments :

A giant tub of coleslaw swimming in mayo and a gallon of mayo-based dipping sauces.  UGH mayo.  And normally I don’t shy away from butter, but looking at that much of it kind of took some of the joy away.

Don’t worry- I didn’t go away hungry.  Between the pounds of crab, the yummy grilled asparagus, some fantastic clam chowder and the free-flowing wine, I was definitely a happy camper.  Well, specifically, I was a happy camper sucking down chowder and wearing a bib:

All in all, it was a good, but exhausting, weekend.  It was definitely good times to see Anne and embark on a mini roadtrip adventure.