No, he used to take an Uber, but at the start of 2022 he exclusively runs alongside us as part of his New Year's resolution to exercise more. We'll see how long this lasts though. Personally I'm skeptical.

Since 2018. He has around 90,000 miles under his collar.

Yes.

Counter-FAQ: have you worn goggles?

Before anything else, if you haven't worn goggles before, you should pick up a hobby that involves goggles. Odds are it'll be exceedingly fun, and you'll understand this perspective.

If you have, you know that it's usually for something pretty specific, like skiing, skydiving, or diving. But while the hobby is fun, wearing goggles isn't. It's a necessary evil to protect those photon-gathering, nerveless but delicate eyeballs. Goggles are uncomfortable, but generally the thing happening when you have them on is so intense and so fun that you forget they're there, until you're done with whatever that thing was, at which point they become particularly conspicuous and you want them off.

Surak's reaction to goggles is the same.

We beat him with a sack of Sunkist oranges until he complied.

But really: repetition with slow progression and positive reenforcement. It's actually not different from training a dog to do whatever - in this case it just happens to be riding. The great people/dog at Ruffly have great advice on motorcycle training for dogs.

We built it. We aren't fabricators, but are happy to share details and will eventually be posting them here. A couple other companies produce carriers for larger dogs, such as Ruffly or The Pillion Pooch.

Before he had this carrier, he was. Previously the main concern was the old carrier breaking and him losing his balance, or in the set-up prior to that him falling off the side. Since those problems have been solved, the main concern now is him being able to separate from the bike if a crash or tip-over happens.

Not unless he's supposed to! He stays put and has never jumped off when we didn't want him to.

Unfortunately he doesn't qualify. For a moment we thought about petitioning for the creation of a Furry Butt Association, but quickly reevaluated that idea after worrying about it being misconstrued.

Scott since 2004, and Odessa and Surak have been riding since 2018.

We pray to the gods of finance and hope they smile upon us. We've spent the last several years doing absolutely nothing except saving. No weekend trips, no summer vacations or winter ski trips. We cooked most of the time and didn't buy (or subscribe to) all the crap that is pushed on everyone today. We're currently trying to crack the remote work egg.

Lodging winds up being one of the biggest expenses on trips, so we avoid paying for it whenever we can. I'm typing this at a campsite. At that, we seek dispersed camping. We've had the fortune of meeting many hospitable people along the way who have generously offered up everything from tent space to houses for us to stay at.

Usually in a bathtub, but sometimes in a walk-in shower. Kidding aside, finding a place to shower can be difficult, but your mom's place is always a good fall-back.

August 24, 2021

Washington, DC. For the record, we didn't fit in there, but the local riding community was a godsend.

Explore and see things. Discover where that road leads. Figure out if we can get from here to there this way. But see below for a more appropriate question/answer.

The best way to explain this is by reaching back into nostalgia (or Google) to the days of Choose Your Own Adventure books. We know what we want to do (travel the world), so we already have an ending. Since that takes a while, we look into the more near-term and decide what far-away destination we want to head towards. Once that's done, we look at possible routes and start building a few options, and doing that in turn helps us discover interesting things in between. We then start looking at routes to those interesting things in between, which are usually much closer, and can come up with more detailed options, again finding even more interesting things in between. Recurse a few times and you have smaller, more detailed, and more managable routes with the added bonus of having an idea of what's beyond.

The most important aspect to us is having options, so we plan multiple routes along the way. You never know when a road will be closed (or maybe really boring) and you need to go another way.

It's an industry secret that every static personal webpage needs a bloated CMS framework riddled with subscription fees and unnecessary vulnerabilities so that it can look virtually identical to every other webpage made in the last fifteen years. Perhaps one day we will have content in need of management, but to be honest, I hope not!

I would rather carry a chainsaw in a backpack (see below) while riding trails in Moab than use any CMS. This website is script-free and slopily written in HTML/CSS, because as much as I hate frontend work, I hate CMS's more.

Correct...mostly.

This is an idea we wish was feasible. We were told that we should carry a mini-chainsaw so that we could cut wood, make a fire, and cook food. Apparently there's a technique for cutting a V-shape into a chunk of wood and starting a fire there. Unfortunately even the smallest chainsaws are still too big to carry along with all the other stuff we carry. I looked. Plus carrying more batteries is prohibitive, as is maintaining what would be a third engine.

Practical issues aside (finding a motorcycle, the finances, etc.), this is an optimization problem, because you can't have everything.

So what do we optimize for? Performance? Durability? Servicability? Uniquity? How do these things effect each other?

For Scott's bike, we sought a platform to build on before anything else. We need an off-road capable bike that has the structure to support the weight of a rider, luggage, and dog with a rear weight bias. We enjoy technical and rougher routes. When you add a dash of speed to that, you can hear millions of parts cry out in terror as they vibrate in unison. Washboarding is like waterboarding for part assemblies.

Motorcycles generally scale. A smaller bike abides to smaller parameters - max weight, speed, etc. In our case, weight was the determining factor. Anything apart from a "big bike" would grossly exceed the load we were placing on it. So this narrows down the options to the biggest class of adventure bikes. Having spent years with the BMW 1200GSA and hitting some important limitations, we went with the only other option.

Odessa wanted a motorcycle that was lightweight but still weight-bearing enough to carry her stuff around. Eventually she found herself wanting something closer to a dirt bike and something that had good performance. She started off with the 790, but because of weight and poor reliability, she switched to the 690. Because the 690 was hit and totaled, she switched to the Tenere 700.

While this is probably the easiest way to make money, we spend a lot of time in a tent, and Surak disapproves of this type of content creation. He says we need to be separated by at least one room.