I was on vacation in Lake Tahoe this last weekend, snowboarding and hanging out with a bunch of old high school friends, and on the way back I happened to notice a group of folks who looked like riders: Alpinstars backpacks, Ducati hats, and various gear of the sort. We chatted a bit in the airport, I mentioned something about track days, and one of them suggested I look into the Northeast Sportbike Association. Turns out NESBA has a number of upcoming track days in the Seattle area, and better than that, has an intro program that's free!

I, of course, signed up for the first session I could make, which will be July 15th. Apparently what you get for your hard-earned $0 is a classroom/lecture session, and two 20-minute sessions on the track. The paying customers get all day, but the first two sessions ought to be a hint as to whether this is the sort of thing I'd be interested in doing, and it's generally possible to "upgrade" after those two sessions if it seems like fun. I'll wager it will be, but there's never anything wrong with free.

Reading more about this and chatting with others, I'm really looking forward to it very much. I think it'll be a great opportunity to push my skills a little bit, and to maybe get some advice from more experienced riders. I kinda wish I could get a chance to do this before the Massive West Coast May Ride, but my schedule is pretty tight before that point. If I do end up enjoying the track day and joining NESBA, there are a bunch of track times every year that I might want to take advantage of.

In other news, I've been planning and scheming for some time about a long ride this spring, and the majority of the planning has now been completed. I have arranged for just under three weeks off work to ride down the coast this May, visit friends, and check out some of the more interesting roads I can find. I've so far been planning mostly the southbound leg of the trip, which will involve catching the Sport-Touring.net West Coast Regional Meet in Fortuna, hanging out with an ex-girlfriend in Oregon, dropping by Santa Barbara to see my parents and friends, three or four days in San Diego with a long-lost elementary school buddy that I'm dying to see, and the exciting roads down the left edge of the country. There's a lot to see and a lot of very exciting roads, along which the route is still very much in flux, but I've picked up a lot of good suggestions from ST-n and other sites scattered across the web.

The trip back is something I've barely considered. I'm on the fence as to whether I should come back along the same (or at least a similar) path, or whether I should branch out a bit and return up through Nevada and Idaho. The desert's got some beautiful scenery (and some nice, long, straight roads to play with the top end a bit) but it'll be hotter than hell in late May, and I've always been a forests-and-oceans kind of guy. Honestly I may not even decide until I'm on the road, but we'll wait and see.

I may be able to get a riding cam setup by then, depending on finances, and I think it'd be extremely cool to put together a little video of the trip... In my head, I've already got a lot of the music picked out.