Blessing of the Motorcycle, Thanks Cormack

First Snow Storm, New Jersey

Well, only two days into my trip from Boston to Omaha and I found myself in New Jersey in the middle of a snow storm. Tuesday morning I woke up in Brooklyn at my friend Chris's house to the cold rain. I knew snow was to my west and moving northward so I didn't really worry about the weather. I've ridden through wet weather before and wasn't that worried. I began to wonder if I'd made a good decision to move while crossing on the bridges in New York. The wind gusts must have been at least 40 miles per hour. I though if I can just get south of this stuff the rest of the way should be pretty nice. About 10 mile into New Jersey it started spitting snow then it just started coming down hard and sticking to everything. I could barly see out of my helmet. I quickly exited the Jersey Turnpike and found myself in East Brunswick, a place I'm sure I would have never visited without a little help from mother nature. By the time I made it into East Brunswick eveything was a slushy mess. I've never ridden in snow, much less slush. I was worried the bike was going to come out from under me, but draggen my feet and keeping it in first gear worked. After holding up inside a stripwall for an hour and getting weather reports from my dad I decided there was nothing I could do except hunker down for the night. I found a hotel with a restaurant that was home to the "World's Largest Pickle Bar." and the worst chef salad. I guess I'm learning early on that plans are going to be thrown out the window about every other day. Now on to Washington, D.C.

Real Purpose

Marty is a grad student at Harvard working on his thesis in Environment Management. That will require some field work and data gathering on various carbon sequestration and credit projects along the way. His purpose will be to spend sufficient time investigating the realities of Latin American carbon projects to come to a valid conclusion for the thesis. My purpose is to break the mold again.

The last time I did something like this was twenty years ago. I closed my law practice in a small high plains Nebraska town near the Wyoming border and moved the family to Austria and Germany to earn an LL.M. in International Business and Taxation. So I have learned that radical change produces radical opportunity. I have been cramming Spanish again, learning the vocabulary of the new market of carbon, and will develop a practice generating the legal documentation and tax compliance systems for US and EU purchasers of the new environmental financial products.

My experience in China in the early 1990's has taught me that one cannot draft the documents and advise the client if one does not understand what is being sold. That is the purpose of the factory tour and meetings with management. The same will hold true for the new markets in environmental products, e.g. traded carbon credits . The hope is that exposure to these projects and contacts along the way to Argentina will jump start the practice opportunities.

Then there are my farms. We run four farms in Iowa, five if you count the time spent on the mother-in-law place. With almost 1000 acres, that is a lot of dirt to manage. I have never seen a piece of real estate I did not love, with the notable exception of some Arizona and Nevada desert. The opportunity to expand to South America is alluring. So I will use the trip to scope best practices and available ag ground from Guatemala to Patagonia.

But no matter. It will be a great trip at the end of the age of oil. What's the worst that can happen? I go to work for one of the big international ag banks?

Four Weeks to Go

Marty and I are becoming a tad anxious. With only four weeks to go the weather in the Northern Plains is starting to change. Last weekend the winds came straight out of the north - a sure sign of rough weather to come - and today the first warnings of snow in the Rockys appeared on the weather service.

The bikes are ready. At least we think so. I need to make one more surgical adjustment to the BMW luggage system to add a lateral support bar to the racks. I have learned from experience that if one lays the bike over the luggage will push the rack in just enough to put the case up against the exhaust pipe. So, tubular steel is the answer. When the surgery is complete I will post the pics.

But now I have finished building rack extensions and auxiliary fuel tank attachments. I have married a Canadian built rack extension called Kildala built by Rick Bizarro in British Columbia to an American ATV tank bracket and 1.5 gal tank made by Kolpin.

The whole system is a little expensive ($US180 total) but I hope it is worth it to have peace of mind and an extra 150+ km range on the bikes. I have more pictures for those F650GS owners who want to build their own system. Check ADVrider or F650.com for more detail.