I love these chairs.

I'm on another trip. Starting from my mom and Art's place in Michigan, Art and I are going to head north, into the UP, then into Minnesota. Or so. Art is sporting his brand new 1200GS, which I'm really curious to ride on. I took my BMW F650GS Dakar. Not my 1150GS.

I mentioned some of this after my last trip - although so many things are great about the 1150GS, some things I don't like, but mainly I still haven't reworked the handlebars so the fit is just not right. I'm looking forward to seeing if it is some happy compromise between my 650 and 1150 - the power and brakes and generally improved engineering, but a little lighter, better cooling system, etc.

Leaving a girlfriend and dog and piles of work had me procrastinating. Maybe I'll leave after the rain passes. I delay packing. The notion of just staying home for a week or two and not working much sounds great. I could spend some time in the yard and garden, do some programming projects, make some shelves.

The ironic thing is, for considerable sections of these road trips, I'm in a mild existential crisis. Where am I going, exactly? A big circle? Even when things are pretty, it only takes a second to look, and then I have to ride for a few minutes before my view will change. And then it starts to rain, or gets freezing cold, or the wind is blowing me sideways, or all that at once, and I begin to really consider why I'm not in San Francisco or New York or just home in Chicago. Truth is most of these trips are composed of moments or even hours of beauty, and then long stretches of vaguely interesting scenery moving by like the background in an old cartoon.

There is a transition that happens quickly for me, though. When I get to the hotel or setup my tent, when I open the beer I hopefully included in my plan for the end of the day, when I take off my boots and socks and sit down, the whole thing is good, so good, and I don't even know why. And later, years later, in a life that seems to be composed of day after forgotten day, I can remember a lot of those beers, and a lot of those hotels and campsites. If you live a day and will eventually have no memory of it at all, does it have any value?