Photos copyright April K. Tse.  No stealie.

OMG belly as large as my helmet.  Granted, it’s a Youth S helmet, but still.

Baby is not pleased with the Sharks’ current road trip stats.  C’mon, Sharks, step it up for the fetus, yo.

Well, I finished the outer part of blueberry’s stitching last night! I think it’ll be perfect in the nursery.  :) I’ll put her name in next (no, we’re not telling) but obviously the birth date will have to be done a bit later.

The little bikes are from cartoon clip art that I found online.  Three of the four hearts are from the book “A Rainbow of Stitches“; I made up the fourth pattern since the book only had three of that size.

That made me think of the other motorcycle-related stitching I’ve done.

This one was for Colleen, back in 2008.   Clearly I didn’t yet know how to use the hoops without making dirt marks, oops.  I did this piece from a photo of her KLR prior to buying the photo-to-pattern conversion software that I’m addicted to now.

This one is mostly satin stitch, done on the side of the MotoSport pannier bag for my cross-country trip on the F650GS in summer 2008.  I ran out of time and black thread to do the tires and have been telling myself for almost 4 years now that I’m going to finish that up any day now.

This next one was my first motorcycle-related stitching with the photo-to-pattern software.  The piece itself was for Steph’s birthday in 2010; the photo is from our trip to Alaska in 2004.  It’s one of my favorites for the great colors (as well as great memories).

Finally, I did this piece of the Ninjette last year.   I really like how the “real” colors are featured in the artificial/man-made part of the piece and the photograph is of the inverted/fake colors.  This piece currently lives in my cubicle at work.

It made me think of all the times I’ve ridden in rain (hundreds) and how I only have two photos of bikes with rainbows.  They’re elusive!

Mental note: when I get back to riding, take more photos of rainbows.

Somewhere north of Quesnel, British Columbia.  June 2004.

Outside of the Lion’s Den Hotel;  Helenvale, Queensland, Australia.  June 2007.

(Link to the Australia ride report)

The campground is close to our house and blueberry will be 3 months old at that point, so maybe I’ll be cool leaving her at home overnight with Peter.  Even if I choose not to go camping, April can still use the site, so either way, it’s a win!

So, in honor of my likely-futile attempts to plan a night to myself 6 months from now, today’s Way Back Machine takes us to one of my very very very favorite things in the whole wide world: motocamping!

I first started motocamping in the spring of 2008 in preparation for my cross-country trip.  It was really just an excuse to buy a whole crapton of new gear and pledge my eternal soul to REI.

My first overnight camping trip on the bike was at Big Basin Redwoods with Steph and Kim, a trip that we now fondly refer back to as “that time we went camping and it really sucked because it was insanely loud and freezing and I can’t believe we ever willingly camped again after that mess.”

Luckily, I learned some lessons on that trip and was never quite THAT miserable ever again.

By the time Steph and I camped at Del Valle a few weeks later, I was actually enjoying the motocamping experience.

I only wound up camping twice on my cross-country trip in 2008, but they were such incredibly memorable experiences that now I can’t imagine doing a long distance trip without camping at all.

A lot of my long distance touring is solo.  In general, I prefer that; I like spending too long taking photos and riding too slowly and stopping at really boring rural museums.  The  only problem for me is the hours after the ride is done.  If I pull into a motel at 6pm, I have an evening of sitting by myself and looking at the walls.   Sure, I walk to dinner or read a book or sometimes take a bath, but there’s really only so much excitement to be found in the neighborhoods that generally house Best Westerns.

Motocamping, though…now that’s something different.  First of all, it takes a while to set up all the crap.  Now, most of that is intentional — I certainly don’t need to be as big a princess as I am when I’m motocamping.  But it makes me happy to move around and sett up my tent and my cot and my little cooking area and make myself a little home for the evening.

Plus, there is always cool stuff to do at campsites.

At Balmorhea State Park in Texas, I spent a wonderful evening wandering the spring pool after setting up my tent in a windstorm with some friendly neighbors.

Even better, at Lake Fausse Point, Louisiana, I went for a very short hike after dinner and still managed to see birds, turtles, alligators, and armadillos.  Unless something has gone very wrong, you don’t generally get that at Best Westerns.

In fact, Lake Fausse Point is one of my trip highlights — one night of mosquito-bite infestation that stands out above so many other nights on a 6-week trip.  When I think about touring in general, it’s one of the memories that pops into my mind and tells me “this is why you travel”.  Just one night walking a .75-mile trail with armadillos and knowing my tent and my bike were there waiting for me.

Of course, there have been many other notable motocamping trips, from dual sport trips on the XT225 to Women on Wheels camping weekend in Yosemite, to nearby overnight jaunts with Peter or April or Steph.

My lunch break is nearly over, so rather than continuing to wax poetic, I’ll leave you with some more motocamping photos.

Groveland, CA, September 2008:

Taken on that same trip — yeah, technically not a camping picture, but still:

Altitude Sickness ride in the Eastern Sierras, September 2008:

Portola Redwoods, May 2009:

Half Moon Bay State Park, June 2011:

This trip is extra special because it was my first overnight ride, and first motocamping trip, after my back injury.

Portola Redwoods State Park, July 2011:

This is actually the one and only motocamping trip I’ve ever done with Peter.   Given that he was hit by a car on our way home, hopefully he’ll agree to do another one with me someday…

I look exhausted because I’ve been sick for two weeks.  This has lost all novelty and I greatly look forward to being able to take a deep breath, clear my throat, or sneeze without pain and bracing my ribcage.  Dare to dream, I always say.

The 10 second summary of the book is that it’s a watercolor-art journal, arranged month-by-month, by a woman who settled down along the Long Island Sound coast after spending her life to that point traveling the world.

It’s more than that, though.  It’s about cats, and teacups, and seeing everything around you (even if it’s your day to day life) through the magic filter of being somewhere new.

(more examples of the pages and art from the author’s website)

I will also admit to being terribly jealous of her embroidery.  Cross-stitching looks boring compared to “real” needlework.

Anyway, there were two parts of the book in particular that grabbed me:

Page 45 talks about “Tea Cup Travel”:  ”…I collect tea cups the way I used to collect days in foreign countries.  There’s a tea cup, made of amber-colored class, that’s just like a shard of the Sahara glinting on my shelf.  The pale blue one — that’s like a cup of Nottingham rain reflecting the face of a handsome stranger I was flirting with one afternoon 30 years ago.  Midnight blue Limoges is January in Paris, a rare snow fall in the city, cold kisses, and Jean-Claude.”

Anyone who’s motorcycle toured knows how that goes.   Sometimes I catch a glimpse of something the exact shade of rusty red as Cape York’s Development Road.   A whiff of Avenue of the Giants in the rain.  Glasswork that glitters just like the exhibit at the Stark Museum in Orange, Texas.

What a brilliant idea to collect those memories in teacups (well, in anything) instead of letting them float randomly by.

I try to intentionally find my travels in my home life now.  I have a favorite candle on my desk: Nordic Pine.  Instead of merely sniffling it idly, now I sniff with purpose: this is the smell of pine trees.  Of the Alcan, of Lassen, of the Sierra, of the forest in southern Oregon where Jenny and I got lost on our dirt bikes.

The other quote I loved, tangentially related, is on page 51:  ”Some days ‘staying put’ might feel the same as Going Nowhere.   Make a cup of tea and wait for that feeling to pass.”

Now there’s advice that I need about 97% of the time.  For nearly three years now, I’ve been staying put and feeling like I’m going nowhere.   As though without my trips and my travels, I’m just like everyone else; my days are useless and I’m not Contributing To Anything.

I need to remember to make a cup of tea and wait for the feeling to pass.  Preferably while sniffing my candle and noticing that neon reminds me of the Cadillac Ranch outside of Amarillo.

The book doesn’t have a depressing vibe to it; it’s not the tone of an elderly person reminiscing about the glory days that will never be again.  Reading it, I never thought, “this will help me cope with not riding.”

It’s more like, “this will help me use my past experiences on the road and the eye I gained through travel to see everything around me in a more interesting and magical way.”  Since reading the book, I pet my cats more.  I try to look around more.  I intentionally look for comfy places to just sit and read.

The very first page opens with January:

“Before I got my Winter Mind, only Summer mattered to me. Summer was the significant season, the time to:

Run away to Paris for the first time,
Follow the midnight sun to Loch Ness,
Dance in the moonlight in Buenos Aires,
Hitch hike across the Holy Land,
Swim in the Trevi after dark,
Trek up the Niger, hunker down for tea time with nomads in the Sahara,
Kneel in the shadows of the Sarsen Circle at Stonehenge,
Chase the spirit of ‘The Wanderer Queen’ all the way to Carthage.

Then I came to live in this little Village on the Long Island Sound and I discovered my Winter Mind and with it I discovered the rest of the year.”

I may not be riding now and I may not be touring for a little while yet to come.  But I can use that time to discover the rest of the year.  And I’m almost looking forward to that.

In honor of feeling sick, today’s Way Back Machine takes us back to June of 2004 and eastern British Columbia .  It holds a special place in my heart as I was sick as a dog the entire time we rode through.

Here’s Steph outside of Prince George, at Canada’s World O’ Drugs or some such, buying Canadian nasal spray.   This stuff was pure gold.  I wound up keeping it for years after the expiration date because it was so much better than anything I could find here in California.

I was famous on our Alaska trip for never noticing any wildlife.  I could be three feet from a bear and not see it.   The one time I did see a moose was when I pulled over to blow my nose for the fourteen millionth time and it (the moose, I mean) just happened to be hanging out in a lake visible from the road.

You can’t see the moose in this picture, but here’s Steph turning around to see why I’d stopped.  I promise there’s a moose in that water.  And I also promise my nose was running like mad thanks to the Canadian nasal spray.

The part of being sick on that stretch that really sticks in my mind was just outside Chetwynd, when we pulled over to a rest area so that I could stop hallucinating.  Tony, Steph, and I all wound up falling asleep on these picnic tables; probably my favorite riding nap of all time.

On June 16, 2004, I blogged:  ”If this whole ‘software programming’ thing doesn’t work out, I’m going  to invent a nose bib for motorcyclists who get colds while touring, and
I’m going to make a million bazillion dollars.”  I think I still may have something there.

Later that night, I reported from our hotel room:

“Our colds are subsiding. We still make disgusting noises, especially in the mornings, but I don’t feel nearly so much like I died last week and just forgot to lie down. We all went to bed at 9:30pm last night, being the party animals that we are, and I think it did everyone a world of good. Now I’m just always dehydrated and have a scratchy throat. This town is pretty much LungInfectionsville, though, with all the mud and dust and diesel trucks going through. I’ve been holding my breath since we pulled in around 5:30pm. Fort Nelson’s city motto is ‘The Resourceful Fort Nelson!’, which you know is never a good thing for the environment or for the squishy pink bits inside of you.”

The cold subsided a bit and then came back to bite me in Whitehorse, YT, which was annoying because I’ve heard that Whitehorse is really a beautiful town.  My predominant memory of Whitehorse, through a cold medication haze, is eating at the hotel restaurant and overhearing a very dressed-up young woman carrying balloons being very matter-of-factly upset that she had planned some sort of reunion party and no one showed up.   My impression was that she wasn’t very popular but had been hoping someone would have attended her party.   I think she was wearing a bright blue dress.  It still makes me a little sad to think about.

Being sick while on the road sucks but arguably it’s all part of the adventure.   And, as they say, adventure is just misery recounted at leisure.

So, that’s nice, Carolyn; why is this on your blog?  As I’m incapable of sitting at the internet without monkey-clicking from one thing to the next,  I wound up on the Wikipedia page for phreatomagmatic explosions, which in turn talked about tuff rings, a type of mass that forms after such a magma-water explosion.  As it turns out, I’ve visited a few tuff rings on my motorcycles and, thus, today’s Way Back Machine takes us back to both Ubehebe Crater and to the Oregon Outback.

Death Valley is one of my very favorite places to ride.  It has a special place in my heart for being the first stop on my first week-long solo ride in April 2003.  I remember sitting outside the Furnace Creek Ranch that night with my little notebook and thinking yes, yes, this is what I’m supposed to be doing.

The green in the Artist Drive Formation is from tuff-derived mica.  So, not a tuff ring per se, but close enough for my precarious attempts at cohesion.

I went back to Death Valley with Peter in February 2005.  This time we went to Ubehebe Crater, our little tuff ring star of the show.

Yeah, my eyes are closed.  I’m awesome like that.

Here’s my full ride report on that trip, if’n you’re so inclined.

The other tuff ring in my motorcycling history is out in the Oregon Outback, another truly awesome place to ride, even if it does have quite a bit of those yellow desert flowers that I’m absolutely allergic to.  I think Peter’s theory is that I love riding in the desert so much because I’m usually so hopped up on cold medication that I think it’s interesting.

Anyway, I first visited Fort Rock in September 2006 during an impromptu Labor Day weekend ride on the Z750S.  (Full ride report here)

The region has about 40 tuff rings, but Fort Rock is the largest at about 4,460 feet in diameter and about 200 feet high.  It’s also much older than Ubehebe Crater: current estimates put it at 50,000-100,000 years old.

I find it incredibly creepy, to be honest.  Perhaps I was abducted by aliens in a past life or something, but I’m always skin-crawlingly uncomfortable around huge rock formations that just rise up out of the earth like that.

I was back at Fort Rock about a year later with my friend Jenny, when I rode the XT225 up to Seattle.

So that’s my little trip via the Way Back Machine to tuff rings.

There are certainly a lot of other volcanoes that I’ve visited — cinder cones, generally — but that can be the topic for another day.  I’ve still got a few months of content to try to dream up before I’m riding again…

Last night was our monthly Sport-Touring.net dinner.  The restaurant was near my house, so I dragged my sickly coughing butt out (you’re welcome, fellow diners) and indulged in some hot and sour soup and good motorcycle chitchat.

At the dinner, I sat next to Ed (goldylocks303 on STN).  It occurred to me after dinner that of all the people I’ve met on STN and still ride/socialize with, I’ve known Ed the longest.  And thus we take the Way Back Machine waaaayyyyy back to June 27, 2002……

I’d just had my one and only (knock on wood) accident on the SV650S when dingleberry rear-ended me at a stop sign on my way home from work.  I was totally fine but the bike was still missing the foot of the brake pedal, so I did the ride to San Simeon with a bolt JB-Welded in to the brake pedal arm.  Worked fine.

I rode alone down to San Simeon, a tiny little oceanside community roughly halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.  I took Highway 1 all the way down, natch, because that’s what you do.

I stopped at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park for a photo at McWay Falls:

A ride down Highway 1 without a photo of the Big Creek Bridge is no ride at all.  I think I’ve photographed this bridge about 20 different times.  I don’t think this was the first time, but it was definitely one of my earlier pics.

I arrived at the San Simeon Lodge and met my first STNers.  Little did I know that I would still be hanging out with some of them a decade later! Maybe I would have been nicer or taken more photos.

From L-R, that’s Ken (still ksann on STN), Steven (no longer on STN), Carl (no longer on STN), Ed (still goldylocks303), Jordan (still Rogue), Dave (still Shizoku), Ted and Terry (no longer on STN).

Ha ha, look at Ed’s long hair!

On Day 2, I rode with Ted and Terry to Hearst Castle.

We puttered around a bit afterwards.

Then wound up back at the Lodge for dinner, drinks, and the high quality entertainment at the bar that I’ve come to expect over the years.  It’s the kind of tiny, dark, local bar that plays live music covering Springsteen and has Firestone Pale Ale on tap — in other words, my kind of place.

On Day 3, we met a friendly policeman in the Lodge’s parking lot.   He was a motorcyclist as well and let us take some good-natured photos.

The SVS rolled over 10,000 miles on my ride home from San Simeon.  I’d had it for about 16 months at that point (and had some pretty bad wrist tendonitis for part of that time which kept me from riding as much as I wanted to).  Not bad!

So, that was my first overnight Sport-Touring.net trip, almost a decade ago.  Dang.

So I created a Facebook page specifically for this blog; the intent there is that anyone can “like” the Bluepoof.com Facebook page and get my oh-so-terribly-interesting blog updates without my having to add that person to my personal page.

I think this link should work:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bluepoofcom/216541128440163

Or, of course, you can search for “bluepoof” right on Facebook.

For the four of you whom I know “in real life” as well as through the magic of the interwebs, what’s your opinion on having blog entry status updates on my personal page as well as on the Bluepoof.com page?  If I have “Carolyn has a new blog entry!” status updates go to both my personal and the blog pages — like you’ll see when I post this, hopefully — will that be redundant and horribly irritating?

I’ll probably try a few things (both intentionally and unintentionally as I often have little wars with Wordbooker, the plugin which publishes my blog posts to Facebook) and you’ll just have to let me know if you start getting annoyed.

OK, hitting “publish” on this now to see if it posts where I expect it to.   Oh internet, you are so full of adventure!