In 2006, after returning from Darfur, Sudan, I bought a motorcycle and hit the road to tour the country, and take a break from life for a while. Brian agreed to join me once I made it to LA, jumping at the opportunity to spend some adventuresome time together. While I was out there he took me to Cal City where he was aggressively completing his AFF training. For the thrill I joined the course and made the first jump... good times. Anyway, he took a motorcycle training course, and within a month or so of completing it he had bought a bike, and we were hitting Hwy 1 heading up the California coast. We mapped out camping spots along the way, and spent two weeks enjoying each others company, the thrill of the road, and the adventure of bad weather. As Orange County natives we were blown away at the beauty and grandeur of the countryside north of LA. During the couple of weeks I was with him before our trip we watched Ewan McGregors Long Way Round documentary to psyche ourselves for our much smaller scale trek. A running joke in the show was that one of the two guys (Ewan or his friend...cant remember which) kept falling over, even embarrassingly falling over a few minutes after starting their trip. Brian was that guy for our trip. This one was my fault, but literally a hundred yards from his apartment his bike died. We couldnt get it started to save our lives until after about an hour I remembered I had shut off the fuel line during some preparatory maintenance. Oops. But it seemed like at least once a day Brian found a way to drop his bike... thankfully not while riding. We stopped at a dirt overlook spot that had breathtaking views of the ocean and the mountains dropping off into the crashing waves. As we started to pull away Brian lost balance and fell over. We pull up to a camp site...Brian falls over. The best instance though came in a little oceanside town somewhere in Northern California. We were enjoying the picturesque nature of the downtown area, going maybe 35 mph, when without warning (literally...no bells or anything) a railroad crossing we were approaching flashed its lights and started dropping a cross bar. We both slammed on the breaks, coming to a stop just barely in time before getting hit by the dropping barricade. I put my feet down and turned to see Brian, who was so focused on stopping, promptly fall over having forgotten motorcycles only have two wheels and need help to stay upright. He was good natured enough to laugh about it, even though there were a plethora of amused drivers around us. Im going to miss reminiscing about that trip with him. It seemed like it came up a lot in our conversations. Im sure some of you all have heard the stories... like the swarm of bees... that was crazy...
Posted on: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 09:39:39 +0000
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