Dream day (Nathan)

If you asked a guy with a motorcycle to describe the perfect day, you'd end
up with a description of what we did for 12 hours yesterday.

We started at Big Sur, one of the most beautiful stretches of the
California coast line, and rode north to San Francisco. Crossed the Golden
Gate bridge, then entered the wild roads that head north from there.
Picture a DNA helix laid flat across a steep mountain range and you get a
sense for what the road looked like. Actually, keep that picture in mind,
because it happens to describe pretty much our entire day. From the Golden
Gate we headed east for a brief detour to Santa Rosa, where my bike needed
an emergency chain repair that took about 5 minutes, cost me a case of
Corona, and made it clear that if I would learn the first thing about
elementary motorcycle repair, I wouldn't have emergencies like this one.

Either way, from Santa Rosa it was north up a massive hill climb to highway
20, which heads back to the coast over 36 miles. I'm not sure if anyone has
counted, but it would not surprise me if there are 500 corners in that
stretch, many of them scary sharp. The ones posted 25 mph - 40 kph - were
the nice easy ones, if that means anything to anyone. Many of them were
total screamers, the kind you enter madly downshifting until the bike is
revving high and your speed is bleeding off. Often, it's not enough, but
you never realize it until it's too late. So you rag on the brakes for a
brief panicked moment, then lean hard, hoping your bike doesn't tip over
far enough that things start scraping. And, since most of the corners are
blind, you also hope that there's no one in your lane on the other side,
and that it's free of rocks or gravel - which, when you're turning hard -
are the equivalent of ice on the road. Then, assuming it's all gone well,
you hit the end of the curve with a quick snort of the throttle, smile, and
lean into the next one.

I kid you not: I'm pretty sure we repeated that scene a thousand times
today, if not more. It was an unbelievable day.

Then tonight, tents on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. It sounds
like a peaceful Iraq out there with the surf crashing in.

I had a thought today: how exactly am I going to adjust back to life in the
office?