I pretty much spent the entirety of my California trip missing my bike. All that nice, warm sunshine - in November! - and the twisty little roads up in the hills above Santa Barbara were really calling to me. Especially when I thought of Zoë, shivering under her gray tarp in the cold and wet of a Northwest winter. Surprisingly I didn't see many bikers at all in SB; a couple Harley riders and one fellow on a Gixxer, but other than that it was big BMW X5s and Escalades, all the time. I guess the demographics of Santa Barbara are basically older, wealthy folks, not exactly the target audience of the sportbike market. Ah well. That means more road for me.

I'm starting to think about a longer trip; I've realized I'm sitting on a good chunk of vacation time at my work, and if I don't start using it, it'll start to disappear. Next May, the S-T.n folks on the Left Coast are planning a meet-up somewhere in Northern California, and I've been toying with the idea of cruising on down for that, and then just keeping going all the way down the coast. I've been offered places to stay as far south as San Diego, and I think that would be a hell of a trip. Probably worth at least two weeks on the road, getting there and back without spending the whole ride on the slab. If I can plan it right, the trip down should be with some of the other S-T.n'ers; Seattle to the meetup with the northwest folks, and then maybe I'll tag along with some Californians for the rest of the run south. The return would almost certainly be solo, though, and might be a lot more slab time... We'll see whether I can actually make it work. I'm not certain I've got the chops for a 1300-mile (one way!) ride just yet, but maybe in six months I'll be ready.

On the plus side, the ski resorts around Seattle are starting to open. Time to break out the snowboard...