Fleet Week is always one of (if not THE) best Air Show on the West Coast. A large aerobatic box over the San Francisco Bay means a lot more latitude with the types of maneuvers that can be performed.
Here are some of the highlight pics from yesterdays performances.
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There have been a few visitors already this week, to the Mountain Home.
These two came by today for a short visit:
Even a little interesting reptile life…
Earlier another buck made an appearance:
Another decided that some of the plants on our hillside were not to it’s liking, and proceeded to rip them out of the ground.
During the US Round of World SuperBike (SBK) Ducati Owners Club, arranged a preview of the Talbot Motorcycle Museum for club members. It was a great, warm and sunny evening in Carmel Valley, amongst some amazing motorcycles!
Here are some photos from the event:
Where you can view these wonderful machines:
Snapped these three pics outside our home off Branciforte, at 10:45 AM.
After watching the movie “Wild”, about a hiker on the PCT, I recalled meeting a pair of hikers in WA, who were picking up a shipment of shoes at one of the PCT outposts.
It was August 2005, and I’m pretty sure it was my first trip to a new motorcycle rally event in the Columbia Gorge, called Sportbike Northwest 2005.
It was quite great time, spent with many friends from both the Pacific Northwest VFR and local ADV groups (I’d just purchased my 2nd Ducati powered machine, a Cagiva Gran Canyon). (Side note; in the PNW VFR group page, my yellow 2000 VFR800 is 5th bike from the left)
While looking up references for this post, I found that a few of the pictures that three of the photos I’ve taken at SBNW events are at the summary photos shown by Google.. sorta cool)
I know that I took MANY more photos from the event.. but these are the ones that I’d posted to my original blog (long dead), back in 2005.
Many things on that Rally were not photographed, for a variety of reasons… Here are a few of the places that were enjoyed on the various rides/tours during SBNW.
Stonehenge
Yeap.. there is a Stonehenge in WA. Created by a visionary man named Sam Hill. [ More Info ]
Maryhill Loops Road
A private road opened just a few times a year to special Motorsports events. Maryhill Loops is an amazing ribbon of tarmac. During SBNW, the road is run one-way only, much like a race track. A similarly paced group of riders ascend; then when all have reached the top, the road is reversed and you descend. This is repeated many times for the small, limited group of people that purchase special tickets for this part of the rally. IMHO, a MUST DO!
Vista House
Vista House and the amazing section of road to (and from it), provides amazing views of The Gorge. I few years later I was fortunate enough to spend the day here riding with Reg Pridmore, his wife and my friend Mike. It was a great day of riding with a riding legend and a couple of good friends. Check out that road!.
Route 30 Porsche Museum and Ice Cream
What a treat Route 30 is! Literally. :). As a 911 owner in the past, this was a great treat. It’s not very big, but the ice cream is a welcome respite from the often extream temps that time of year in The Gorge. I still have the Valentino Rossi jacket I bought there.
Yes.. this bridge is rather impressive (and also part of the PCT). Bridge of the Gods is a crossing point I used often to get from WA to OR during the rally. There is also a pretty good breakfast joint at the base of the bridge on the OR side. Give it try!
There are more things that I’ve forgotten, than remembered. Maybe I’ll update the blog if/when I do.
It sure was fun looking 11 years back at where I was, the things I did and the people I rode with. Times have changed, yet so many things remain the same. 😀
Over the last couple of days we’ve had some daytime visitors along the hillside above us.
We know there are a number of predator cats in the area. I don’t often see bobcats so it was a rare treat to get a glimpse of one outside my office window:
Coyotes are much more commonly sighted around here. I often catch them on the infrared wildlife camera. Seeing them during the daytime is a little less common but it does happen, as it did this morning:
A few days ago, I posted the first test video shot using 30 second exposures with a GoPro3 camera, located at our home in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
For my next test series I set the GoPro3 Camera, to fire the photos at 10 second intervals. The number of photos captured before the battery expired was almost 1100, netting a much longer and smoother looking video.
The wildlife camera experiment continues.
A few nights ago it captured a coyote walking right up to our front door.
The camera only fired a few times that night, and unfortunately none of the still were usable.
Wow.. what a great time we had! First off, big thanks to Isaac G. for setting up this kick-ass outing. As usual, it was a cast of crazy characters; and also keeping with tradition.. we bought the photos!
For this trip, we went with American Whitewater Expeditions. 
AWE is locate in Coloma, CA, deep in the Sierra foothills.
Starting at Zero-Dark-Thirty in Santa Cruz, we headed over to Fit for Speed, located in Club Autosport to meet up with the group of yahoos we’d be rafting (and swimming) with today.
After fueling up on carbs and caffeine we made the 3+ hour journey out past Sacramento. Everything was going smooth, until we tried to stop for lunch. Someone had the brilliant idea of meeting at Inn-N-Out burger in Rancho Cordova to re-assemble our convey. This part of the plan worked great!
Kevin and Beth 
were traveling with us. It didn’t take for them to start looking up all the awesome ways to order burgers. We had A PLAN!
Once we arrived on location however, things started to go sideways. Someone suggested we go somewhere that had salads. Using the trusty (right…) interwebs, a Mediterranean place about 1/2 miles away was located with GREAT Yelp reviews and we were on our way. We had about 20 min. to eat or we’d be late for our trip, which advised us to have a HEARTY lunch as we’d be on the river for about 5 hours (paddling at least 1/2 that time I might add). I won’t go into all the details but I’ll say that Amore in Rancho Cordova is CRAP! Took us 45 min. to get what food we could (I had to cancel my order) and what we received was over-priced pig slop. Deb and I split a hideous omelet was we raced into the mountains, already very late for a very mandatory on-time trip orientation. Isaac was able to smooth things over with AWE and despite arriving very late, we managed to make it onto the river!
I think a great time was had by all. Our boat didn’t require a safe-word… nuff said about that.
So here my words end, and I offer up the photos purchased from the entertaining, and I think you’ll agree great photographer that captured the fun. Thanks to Kevin at KBar photo for taking the great pics shown here.
This will HAVE to be done again!!
With the required repairs to make it run complete, now the work on mods to get it from a former runner of illegal immigrants, to functional (if not nice) micro toy-hauler can begin.
After doing some research at the San Jose International Car Show, I’m now more convinced the flooring found in the van is a factory original. As such, I’ve decided to re-use it.
Next to the flooring are two rolls of recycled industrial No-VOC carpets (6’x9′) that are enough to carpet the floor of the van, probably all the way to the firewall if I decided to go that far with it.
Having used the existing stereo briefly, I quickly found it’s navigation horribly complicated and it’s general performance underwhelming. Plus, it has a CD player in it.. might as well have an 8-track too. So that was removed, and a new (and very INexpensive Kenwood head with built-in Blutooth, and both Apple and Android music interface capabilities.
Having found the unit jammed in there fairly tightly, I ended up going a little medieval on the dash:
Having pulled all these parts off ended up making it MUCH simpler to route the Blutooth microphone (required for drivers making phone calls here in Nanny-State Kalifornica). I also noticed that the framework under the dash was painted a bright yellow, not at all like the read the rest of the van is painted.
Instructions for mounting the microphone were not at all clear, in fact there was only a single small diagram showing it mounted on top of the steering column. Huh? Screw that I said.. and ripped the left side A pillar cover off and mounted the microphone up at the top of the window, pointing at the driver. I hope that was not a big mistake. I’m sure I’ll test this soon and find out!
Running wires down the A-pillar and through the dash was easy enough, but getting from the lower section of the dash up to the top was not exactly obvious. Using a tool not at all designed for the job, often makes things simpler. 🙂 Here I used it to fish the microphone wire up and over the pedal box and long another wire loom, eventually appearing under the HVAC environmental controls.
One there, the wrong tool was once again used to fish the wire up to the top section of the dash (removing the cover around the dash vents makes like a lot easier). Viola… easy as cake.
Not being a fan of rattles, and especially in the dash area, the wire loom was tightly bundled, and once inserted into the dash, the head unit’s rear section was zip-tied to the dash structure as seen. Probably should have used grey or black wraps but…. I’m going to call this a design test.. yeah, that’s the ticket.. This radio is much tighter in the dash that the other install, and that’s OK by me.
This is nearly complete. There are patches of left over adhesive I need to remove, but the nasty and ugly decals (save a couple that I just might leave) are GONE!! Thank you Magic Eraser!!
With some help from the family, we removed A LOT of USPS shipping tape stuck to the ceiling of the truck. Purpose? WHO KNOWS!??! but it was all over the place and Debby just couldn’t stand it.
So while she was busy peeling the tape, A.J. and I unscrewed all of the interior panels and removed them from the van. Once able to inspect the the bodywork from the inside, I’m even more convinced that a diamond in the rough is what I have here. No signs of rust or any type of body work / repairs. If it wasn’t so loud, I’d be tempted to just leave the interior just like this!
One of the features of the head unit, is iPhone (and Android) integration. This I wanted to test out. Thankfully it just worked. One press of the button to change input to USB, about 60 seconds to sync with the phone and store it’s ID, and bang.. music starts playing.
Here I have WAZE up and running on the screen while the music app drops the bass.
That was enough for one day… many more days of work on this to come.