Last year, I spent the spring and summer largely on motorcycle tour, which is why I did not publish more. Words do not do it justice. I was one with the wind, and the bike almost never failed me. And then I was so busted up I spent most of Q4 with my feet in the air icing my 30 year old boomer joints.

It was wonderful, and I regret not liveblogging it at the time, but the sheer sensation of it all would likely have left me jittery and rambling.

My first tour was to go see an old hometown team. I lived for a few years in Storrs, Connecticut, right when the UConn women's basketball team was going on their first historic undefeated run, when Geno Auriemma came in and started treating it like a real sport instead of a tea party. Well, the lady huskies are still hilariously dominant, and old Geno is still coaching, so they made the playoffs again last year, and eventually won the title. Their sweet sixteen round was played in Spokane, a place I had been before on a motorcycle, and had a newer, nicer bike I wanted to try out - a BMW R1250RS. The game was on a Saturday, so I had time to get myself over there on Friday. I took the ferry east to Seattle, worked from downtown on my laptop, and ducked out early to beat the traffic. I did not, unfortunately, beat the rain. If you have never ridden a motorcycle up and over a mountain pass in the Pacific Northwest in a rainstorm, in March, I do not recommend the experience. It was a big heaping bucket of Type Two Fun. Thankfully the rain cleared at the top of the pass as I expected, and the ride down into Ellensburg was much drier, and traffic was light. The next stop was Ellensburg, at the foot of the pass, and if I didn't set a personal best speed record falling down the mountain, I was at least exercising the upper half of the tachometer. I still arrived chilled to the bone. There is a wonderful diner at a truck stop in Ellensburg that serves good food and hot coffee by the pot. I had a meal and drained an entire pot, almost but not quite like Teal'c from that infamous SG-1 coffee chugging scene.

After Ellensburg comes the real reason I bought the BMW - the Palouse Country. The Palouse is the wild, windy, mostly empty place between the Cascades to the west and the Rockies to the east, covering most of Washington state by area. It's a dry land, yet shaped by water. The Columbia River gorge runs through it, and the Channeled Scablands were carved out in a near Biblical flood event when an ice dam on Glacial Lake Missoula broke about 12,000 years ago. The glaciers left behind an incredibly rich soil, so with irrigation, the Palouse is fine farm country. It is also one of the windiest places in the continental United States. The north-south crosswinds on I-90 are giant laminar flows when driving at highway speeds, pressing your vehicle sideways like the gentle but insistent hand of an invisible giant. The R1250RS is a shaft drive boxer engine with luggage on the sides but not behind the passenger seat, which means it wears its weight very low to the ground, and has good crosswind resistance. This is important in the Palouse. A year before when riding a lighter, sportier bike to the Republican state convention, I'd had to drop a gear and ride heeled over a good 15 degrees with my engine screaming at 7000rpm to fight the wind. The bike and the weather cooperated, and I had a much easier ride to Spokane this time. Climbing from Ellensburg up into the Columbia gorge, crossing the bridge at Vantage, and climbing back up to the flat plains above the eastern bank of the river was spirited riding in those conditions, but then it was easy mode all the way to Spokane. I stopped in downtown for dinner easily enough, and made it to my hotel. The lady huskies won their game as expected on Saturday, and on Sunday I got back on the bike headed west.

I made a stop on the way back to visit a friend and his lovely family, which I do not regret, but it made me later than I thought getting back over the mountains west to east. There was not as much rain this time, but I was still above 45 degrees north latitude and it was still March, so it got dark early.

LED headlights create a special kind of hell for riding at night. Your eyes are constantly flash-blinded from the oncoming glare, and you can't see very far in front of you. In addition to this, Snoqualmie Pass is infamously poorly paved. The lane markings were so faint I had to slow down to about 45mph to follow them properly through corners while keeping a steady line, which made me all kinds of popular with the cars and trucks passing me on both sides.

Then as we descended down into the foothills of the Seattle Eastside suburbs I was able to see more clearly, and it was smooth sailing metaphorically to the ferry terminal, from where it was literal smooth sailing the rest of the way home.

In Part 2, I continue my story as a seafaring motorcyclist.