16 hours…

16 hours…that’s the time difference between Los Angeles and Singapore.  It’s 5:00 a.m. Sunday morning over here and 1:00 p.m. Saturday afternoon back at the plant.   16 hours.  And it took a little over 19 hours to fly here.   So I’m wondering…does that mean it only took 3 hours to get from LA to Singapore? Or that I flew into the future? It’s all so confusing. I know things will clear up as I continue to savor that cup of instant coffee I just brewed in my Singapore hotel room…my very own version of a Singapore Sling. I’ve got a day to kick around before the serious secret mission stuff starts, and I may visit the actual bar where the Singapore Sling was invented. We’ll see.

It certainly has been an interesting 12 months.  Last year at this time I was getting ready to ride in Colombia, and I sure had a fantastic time on that ride with my buddies Juan and Carlos.   Colombia was one hell of a ride, and my RX3 (actually, my loaner bike from AKT Motos) performed magnificently as we rode through Colombia’s Andes Mountains and the coastal lowlands.

It’s amazing how much of the world is out there that I had never heard of, and then once I visit a place, I seem to hear about it on a regular basis.  Sam Manicom, in his excellent book Distant Suns, wrote about his ride through magnificent Colombia and he mentioned the city of Zipaquira (among many other places).  I want to return to Colombia with my wife someday just to explore that city.  Really.  Zipaquira.  It has a magnificent underground cathedral carved out of a salt deposit that I missed on the trip last December, and now I want to return just to see that.  And I had never heard of the cathedral or Zipaquira before my ride with Juan and Carlos.

And yet another Colombian location…Antioquia.   It was another place I never knew existed, but we rode right through it.   There was a special on the TV show 60 Minutes this past weekend about a disease prevalent in Antioquia, and I knew the region when they spoke about it on that show.  I even recognized the architecture and several of the street scenes in the show.  It was indeed amazing.

We had two great Baja rides last year.  One was our normal Spring Break Baja run down to the see the whales.   I think I am either getting used to these tours or I am getting better at organizing them, because that ride was genuinely fun and stress free for me.   We saw and did a lot.  You’ve no doubt seen this video before, but because it is one of my favorites, I’ll show it here just in case you haven’t seen it…

Our second Baja adventure last year was the run through southern California down to Tecate, San Felipe, and Ensenada on the TT250s.   That ride was a hoot and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.   We had a great bunch of guys and we ran a great route on a great new bike…here’s the video from that adventure…

So I’ve got three motorcycles in my garage right now, and the TT250 is the one I am riding the most.  Many of our friends who buy the TT250 own several motorcycles, and I’m hearing the same thing from them…their TT250s are the bike of choice.   There’s something about the TT that makes it special.   I know I love mine, and I’m glad I got the black one (it is the fastest color, you know).  The white ones are fast, too, and I think we are down to less than 10 of them now on our special deal to close out the 2016 models.   I’m guessing by the time I get back to the US they’ll all be gone.

Oh, I can’t forget about the secret mission in Turkey a few months ago when I met with  several Turkish RX3 riders (the “Young Turks,” I call them).   That was a hoot, too.   One of these days we are going to do an RX3 circumnavigation of the Black Sea.   That will be another stellar motorcycle adventure ride.   It’s what owning an RX3 is all about!

Of course, there was the grand-daddy of them all, the magnificent ride across China last summer.

The China ride was the grandest adventure of my life, and I’ve had more than a few grand adventures in the six and a half decades I’ve been on this planet.  I find myself thinking about the ride across China, the Colombia ride, our Baja rides, and more stuff related to my moto adventures these days when I am not on the motorcycle.  Daydreaming, I guess you’d calling it.

China was just incredible.  It was real Indiana Jones stuff.   The recently-discovered Eighth Wonder of the Ancient World (that would be Xi’an’s Terra Cotta soldiers).   The not-so-Asian-appearing folks from Liqian (where the lost Roman legions settled 2000 years ago).   The mystical town of Seda, high up on the Tibetan Plateau.   The lost Buddhist temples carved into the cliffs at Mo Gao.   Camels in the Gobi Desert.   The food in China…spectacular is not a strong enough adjective to describe it.   And lots more.   Those 6000 miles spread across 37 days covered some of the best riding of my life.

The best part of all of the above?   Hey, that one’s easy to answer:  It’s knowing that there’s a lot more coming.  More Baja rides.  Our ride across the US this summer.   Maybe even Africa this summer.   All of it on CSC motorcycles.   Hey, you!   Yeah, you!   Don’t you want to put yourself in this picture?