Outdoor Travel Geek

  • portland

    Please excuse the crappiness of the photos in this post. They’re all cellphone shots, I didn’t use my SLR a whole lot in Portland… We arrived in Portland pretty late in the evening. We found a cheap motel in the outskirts of town. Our motel is next door to a Chinese dive bar (never knew…

  • crater lake

    I think part of the reason why I like road trips is because my family used to go on them when I was a kid. I have good memories of road trips in our family minivan. My dad would be driving, my mom would be riding shotgun and my bro and I would each have…

  • lava beds

    Tonight we’re staying at a campsite at Lava Beds National Monument. The drive from Burney Falls to Lava Beds was pretty ridiculous. The GPS kept wanting to take us on dirt roads, and for a long time I kept trying to force it to recalculate by continuing on paved roads. Finally I just gave up…

  • burney falls

    A long journey began today. Gid and I went to the Sacramento airport to pick up a rental car for a long road trip. We had reserved a compact car, but we ended up upgrading to a Prius V. My first impressions of the car are that it accelerates really slowly and the handling is…

  • bullards bar

    It’s been a while since the Subaru’s been loaded up with mountain bikes. I’ve mostly been road biking lately. It’s been a while since I’ve gone mountain biking, and when I do go, it’s mostly been alone. It’s good to have the car loaded with three bikes. Today Geo, Dave and I hit up a…

  • socal sojourn

    I’m not really a huge fan of socal. I think I’ve mentioned that before. I mean, there are some great things going for socal. There’s an abundance of awesome food down there, some stuff which is not really available up here. The beaches down there are great, not like the cold water beaches we have…

  • livestrong

    Most people who read this blog know that I like to bike. Each year I try to channel that love for biking into doing some good by doing a charity bike ride. This past Sunday I rode in the Davis Livestrong Challenge, which supports the Lance Armstrong Livestrong Foundation, a cancer advocacy group. The day…

  • kid’s day

    Today my work had it’s annual kid’s day. This was my first time seeing it, since I was out on vacation last year. I was expecting it to be super boring, just a bunch of bored kids sitting in their parent’s cubicle. Instead I found that my work has just about the most awesome kid’s…

  • cyclic revelation

    In the last couple of weeks I’ve had a chest x-ray, an EKG test, an echo-cardiogram, a holter monitor test and a cardiac stress test. Thankfully, all of them turned out with great results, so it seems that everything is okay. The cardiac stress test ironically relieved a lot of stress for me and made…

  • parkway revisited

    The American River Parkway is probably the place where I really discovered my love for road biking. I used to bike there pretty often in the summer, but in the last couple of years I hadn’t ridden out there much, preferring to ride west from Davis towards Winters instead. This year though, I’ve been riding…

  • cardiac quandry

    Today I had an appointment to get checked out with my doctor. Originally my appointment was scheduled for Monday, but it conflicted with the delivery time for my washing machine. And for some reason the delivery company was unable to reschedule, whereas it’s fairly easy to reschedule a doctor’s appointment with my HMO. One of…

  • bassi falls

    I probably should be taking it easy, since I literally fainted into a face plant yesterday, but I figured a hike would be okay. I had already agreed to go on this hike to Bassi Falls, and it was supposedly a pretty easy hike. And anyways, I feel most recharged when I’m outdoors. The hike…

  • face plant

    According to Urban Dictionary, a face plant is when you fall such that you land directly on your face. Up until today, I never would’ve thought that it was physically possible to face plant. I mean, if you were falling, you’d try to break your fall somehow, you’d stick out your hands or something, right? Well…

  • horsetail falls

    I didn’t realize that it was Memorial Day weekend until Friday, when coworkers started asking what I’m doing for the long weekend. I didn’t really have any plans, just the usual, try to get in some biking or hiking. On Saturday morning I went biking on the American River Parkway. It’s nice out there this…

  • strawberry fields 2012

    I’ve been looking forward to the Strawberry Fields Forever century for a long time– pretty much since last year, when I rode the metric century (65 mile) course. I had failed to finish last year, so I was looking forward to redeeming myself by finishing the full 100 mile course this year. The Santa Cruz…