Conclusions
It was a pretty good weekend. After two of my kid's weddings this year I needed a bike-break! Because I had been to Death Valley earlier this year, this weekend trip to Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Rainier will probably be my only "big" rides this year. it was pretty cool to see the volcano again and I'd never been to Mt. Rainier before. Vicki and I will have to go over there sometime to see it in more detail.
Having a motorcycle has opened up areas of the country and continent to me that I would never have ventured before. Because I look for interesting places to ride, I find interesting places to visit with or without the bike. There's a lot of talk about adventure motorcycling. For those with a strict view, it means getting offroad into risky situations, having to improvise to figure out how to get through something - things like that. I am certainly all in favor of that and I want to do it too - that is, once I have an appropriate bike. But if you look at the definition of "adventure" you get three ways of looking at it.
adventure:
1. An exciting or very unusual experience.
2. Participation in exciting undertakings or enterprises.
3. A bold, usually risky undertaking; hazardous action of uncertain outcome.
Those definitions cover a lot of different ways of riding a motorcycle. What's exciting or unusual for me may be hum-drum boring to you. Or vice versa. For me it's a bit of all three of those things. Going where I haven't been before, riding where there is more risk, living life in an exciting way (as defined by me). Those of us that ride decide what level it takes to make life exciting and none of us have any right to tell another that what they did wasn't an "adventure". Like beauty, it's in the eye of the beholder.
So get out there. Have an adventure!
Tom Clark
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Intellitect, living in Spokane, Washington. I also do a little development work on the side. And I love riding motorcycles all over the country with my friends.
