With the stunning weather lately has come a severe onset of wanderlust. Or maybe it’s Spring Fever? More important than actually diagnosing an idiom, let’s settle on the biggest symptom: I would so rather be out traveling than being responsible. If you asked me where I’d head if all of a sudden I came into traveling money and an abundance of free time, I’d point to the selfie I chose today.

For years – I hesitate to say decades, but it’s probably decades – I’d had a daydream of where I wanted to spend my 40th birthday. For a lot of people, that sort of milestone birthday conjures ideas of Las Vegas debauchery, or dinner at the French Laundry. That didn’t appeal to me. Instead, what I really wanted to do was spend my 40th in Death Valley on a motorcycle. As I mentioned, I’d had this dream long before I had any idea I’d even have a motorcycle again. But the idea held fast in my imagination, and as the date of my 40th appeared on my annual calendar, the stars started aligning and by October I had an epic Death Valley trip planned.

Full disclosure, I wasn’t in Death Valley on my actual birthday. No, instead my friends Jennifer and David Eric took me to the Tonga Room in San Francisco. If you haven’t been there, please go. You owe it to yourself to sip a giant rum drink while the fake thunderstorm rages over the lagoon (it’s in the Fairmont in the middle of San Francisco, so the lagoon is part of the magic). Despite the massive fruity beverages, and the boutique rum salesman who, upon finding out it was my 40^th, generously provided copious samples, I woke the next morning on Halloween, my departure day, feeling great… which is more than I could say for the weather.

Bike loaded up, I sealed myself in my rain gear and headed south through a torrential downpour that didn’t abate until I hit King City. I checked the weather radar on my phone, and I had just outrun the leading edge of storm, but it was hot on my heels, and having stripped out of my rain gear at the gas station, I wanted to keep ahead all the way to my first night’s destination at my friends Mark and Cindy’s place in Arroyo Grande. I made it just in time – the storm hit the central coast a couple hours after I arrived and knocked out power so Halloween was just that much creepier… and soggier.

By morning, most of the storm had moved on, but the remaining showers meant I headed off in my rain suit again. I made a beeline for Death Valley and (after a necessary stop at Indian Wells Brewing to pick up a growler), I dropped down into Panamint Valley and immediately wanted to turn around and ride that amazing road again. But with daylight starting to wane, I still needed to cross the park and get to Nevada. On highway 190 as the road starts to climb back out towards Nevada I stopped to watch dust devils hypnotically swirling along the valley floor. I pressed on and left the park – that’s actually where the above picture is taken, after I’d ridden through the park. I didn’t take a selfie on the way in, but I got a great picture of my (still clean!) bike:

While I’m sharing pictures, just as I crossed into Nevada I got a great glimpse of the last remnant of the previous day’s storm. It was sitting over my destination, The Atomic Inn in Beatty:

I arrived without getting too soaked, wrote a little in my journal while I had some of Indian Well’s Amnesiac IPA (and was grateful the motel had a fridge!) and called it a night.

I’d given myself the entire next day to explore the park, and I gassed up in Beatty thinking the massive 320 mile range would be enough – I limped back to Beatty in the dark that day with just 20 miles of gas left. Death Valley is huge! And unbelievably alluring. I picked up the dirt Titus Canyon Road just outside the park and wound my way through and up to the ghost town of Leadfield. On the approach, I stopped, managed to find a stable place in the red earth for the kickstand and took a picture of my bike. I remember thinking as I took the picture that I couldn’t believe this same motorcycle that so ably carried me down the freeway in torrential rain could also be so ridiculously sure-footed on this dirt trail. No, it wasn’t particularly technical (though, for me at the time it was!), but nonetheless, the versatility just blew me away. That high gave way a few hours later when the deep pea gravel on the way to the Devil’s Racetrack swallowed the front wheel and pitched me off. I wasn’t going very fast and bike and rider suffered no damage but to my pride and a few scrapes on the engine guards. I could go on about crisscrossing the valley, but I’ll leave you with this moment: walking through the visitor’s center at Scotty’s Castle one of the rangers was watching me. I said hi, and she said, “This is your first time in Death Valley isn’t it?” I said it was and she said, “That’s too bad. I can tell it’s got you hooked already.”

Right now, writing from my desk in Guerneville, with my motorcycle tucked away in the carport (which more aptly resembles a collapsed mine shaft), I know exactly what she meant. Three and a half years later, I haven’t had the opportunity to get back to Death Valley, but I can feel the pull of the desert like a siren song. It was nearly 100 degrees in the park today – yes, of course I checked. I naturally prefer cool weather to hot, but yet the desert beckons…

What’s your siren song? Where’s the place that makes your heart speed up just thinking of it? And, crucially, when are you going back? Let me know in the comments below!

Barring a very bad, terrible, no-good Tuesday, Wednesday will mark thirteen years at LEMO USA. I don’t generally write about my dayjob because, well, that’s my day job. But thirteen years at anything is a long time and it’s worth reflecting on.

Over the course of my time there I’ve had five different job titles in three different departments. I’ve worked on the second floor, then the first floor, then the second floor again. I’ve had three different phone extensions. I’ve been lucky enough to have been sent to Santa Barbara for database training (where I got a free upgrade to a Mustang convertible!), and Montreal for web dev training (where I first had poutine!). I’ve been to the company headquarters in Switzerland twice. Both visits were marked by long work days (and evenings, and some weekend days) strung together – it certainly wasn’t a tourist visit – but on an August evening in 2008 when my coworker David and I were sitting on the patio of a restaurant overlooking Lake Geneva I remarked how lucky we were our headquarters wasn’t some place like New Jersey. And during the times I was able to escape to the nearby city of Lausanne I absolutely fell in love with its lake-side cafes, narrow steep streets… I hope some day I will be able to get back there on my own just to enjoy the city.

Over the last few years I’ve stayed much closer to home, but that’s been fine. I had a lot in my life I needed to work through. And, really, that’s kind of the theme of my thirteen years at LEMO: it has been an unbelievably stable place to work and to grow. While I’ve been at LEMO I finished my MA degree at Utah State, earned my electronic technician certificate from Santa Rosa Junior College, worked through a divorce, as well as my mom’s death. Work has been a blessed constant, and I’m unbelievably grateful for the foundation on which I have been able to maneuver to deal with Life (capital “L” intended).

That touches on one of the things that makes going in to work fun: I still learn something new every single day. I like to think I have a deep knowledge of our catalog and technology, but there’s always something new to learn – a tweak of an existing design, a unique customer application (like the guy last week trying to spec a connector to use INSIDE A LIVING COW). My current position involves a lot of written communication through email and manning the Live Chat line, and while that doesn’t directly contribute to my writing aspirations, it helps. At the very least I often take a couple moments to think about how to most effectively craft a sentence. It’s likely no one notices, but much like my writing here, it’s for me to appreciate it and learn from, and better myself.

And the people I’ve met… Oh wow. My life is unquestionably better for the people I’ve had the privilege of working with over the years. One of my biggest flaws is I’m terrible at keeping in touch with people who aren’t immediately in my life, so anyone reading this who I’ve worked with but, you know, maybe haven’t reached out to? I’m sorry. You absolutely have impacted my life and I am a better person for it. Thank you.

So, what happens after Wednesday? Well, year 14 starts, of course. What will come is anyone’s guess. When I applied back in 2005 I never would have predicted the course of the following 13 years. Who knows what adventures will come! Who knows whether I’ll clean my desk (don’t hold your breath)! What will be will be. I can say two things for certain, though: come Wednesday I will learn something new, and I’ll arrive and leave with a smile on my face.

PS: True story: when I applied to the Craigslist ad I thought it was a fake job listing. I had two weeks left at the Telcom tech support job I was working and furiously applied to anything and everything that remotely fit my skill set. Working one Saturday (because working Saturdays was a thing at that job), I came across two posts, one from a company that sounded like “Whacko” (the actual name eludes me, but people have verified since then it is an actual company) and LEMO, which after the whacko-like name I parsed as “lame-o”. Leaving work that Saturday I felt pretty despondent that I’d sunk low enough to apply to two “obviously” fake companies, Whacko and Lame-O. Little did I know…

PPS: When LEMO offered me the job, another company also offered me a very different job. It was a combination tech writing and tech support job – arguably my dream job. The company had also recently been acquired by Amazon, so getting a foot in the door there, too… The only  caveat: the company was located in the Presidio in SF. Now, granted, I’m deeply in love with the Presidio, but commuting there on a daily basis? And there were other issues on the home front that made staying closer to Guerneville more attractive and was ultimately the reason I chose LEMO. There are those moments in your life, though, when you look back and say, “I wonder what would have happened if…” That’s one for me. I’m not saying I’d trade the last 13 years, but sometimes you just wonder…

That’s a 2018 Dodge Challenger R/T Scat Pack. But that’s not me in the car. More on that in a minute, but let’s just enjoy this car for a moment, ‘kay? Ah, I feel better.
I was thinking about this little blog o’ mine and realized that there are two deep and abiding loves of mine that aren’t really reflected in these posts. The first is music, but I’ve got plans for that soon enough.
The other passion of mine missing is my love of cars. It isn’t just one aspect of cars, either. I love to drive, sure, but I love knowing what’s going on under the hood – I have a deep admiration for a well executed inline four, but I’d prefer the balance and low center of gravity offered by a boxer four. Straight sixes occupy a particular corner of my heart, be it the evolution of BMW 3-series motors, the nigh-unbreakable Toyota Supra engine, or the brand new Mercedes inline 6 I wrote about in the Five Things This Week a few weeks back. I’m not even going to touch on such amazing engines as banshee-wailing V-6 in the new Ford GT or the unbelievable complexity behind the leonine growling W-16 engines in the Bugatti Veyron and Chiron. The design of cars fascinates me, be it the gorgeous lines of a Jaguar E-type or the boxy new Jeep Wrangler JL. I even appreciate the more esoteric aspects of cars. I could likely bore you to tears discussing the moves Alan Mulally made in the years before the Great Recession that kept Ford as the only one of the Big Three US Automakers that didn’t fall into bankruptcy – and how those same moves cost him his job ten years later.
I can’t quite put my finger on when exactly I fell in love with cars. It wasn’t, as you might expect, my teenage years. I mean, of course I had a poster of some Italian exotic sports car on the wall — that’s required by law for teenage boys, I think. But I cringe at the memory of 14-year-old Jordy asking the neighbor with the stunning Fathom Blue 1968 Chevy Camaro SS why he didn’t just buy a new car.
Right?
But for someone who loves cars as much as I do, you sure wouldn’t know it by the cars I’ve owned. I was looking for an old picture in my first car – my family’s 1980 Volkswagen Rabbit Convertible. I loved that car. I will find a picture and I will share it and at least a couple fun stories at that point. But while that car remains special to me, I recognize it wasn’t that great a car. From the underpowered, undercooled, 1970’s holdover 1.6 liter inline four to its propensity to devour clutches on a regular basis… But if I could have that car again, you know I would – logic be damned!
After I sold the Rabbit to fund my freshman year at UCSC, I rode motorcycles as my primary transportation for nearly a decade. That’s a whole ‘nother post in itself, but after I broke my leg in a motorcycle accident (see! A WHOLE story in itself!) I had to go back to four wheels.
First, it was Marva, the maroon death-trap of a 1988 Toyota Cressida. To its credit, that car taught me how to conserve and utilize momentum when I would drive it at a break-neck speed over highway 17. When I drove home in a new 2002 Toyota Corolla, Marva never ran again. Literally, she wouldn’t start and was actually towed away. I’m not going to shed any tears for that beast, though.
Azurita, the blue Corolla served as the workhorse of my 30’s and my marriage. Anna and I drove that thing back and forth to grad school in Utah numerous times. When I last saw Az, she was just shy of 300,000 nearly worry-free miles. Trustworthy? Dependable? Hell yeah. Boring? Absolutely. But, you know…
The only flirtation with sportiness was when Anna and I bought her 1996 Honda Civic Si. I call that her car because it absolutely was, but I did drive it on occasion and bombing through the twisties around here a few times was enough for me to give her keys back. Oh, the car was a blast! Too much so: heel-toeing around the bends of Westside road was an intoxicating experience made all the headier knowing I was going to step back into my Corolla. Cue the sad trombone.
Anna sold the Si to go to China, and I’ve been driving my mom’s 2007 Pontiac Vibe since she passed. While it’s not going to set anyone’s pulse racing, it has been an amazing car and seen me through some fantastic times. Every time I take the Vibe on a new adventure, I imagine my mom is along for the ride – be it taking the long way home through Bodega Bay, or searching for Manzanita in the Presidio, traipsing through the Napa Valley, or visiting friends down San Luis Obispo way. The Vibe has been a boon companion and a trustworthy vehicle.
But what does quicken my pulse? That Challenger above, certainly. I fell hard for that car when it came out and I’ve drooled over it annually at the San Francisco car show since. Don’t believe me?

Me in 2008.

Me in 2009.

Me in 2010.
Ooh, love that “Plum Crazy” color!

You get the idea.
So, imagine my glee when this last November when Fern and I realized Dodge was offering test drives! Granted, it was only around a few blocks of SOMA, so it really only barely scratched the deep and abiding itch for that car. Buuuuuuut……

Yeah, that’s me in that same car at the top of this post. And that smile? That’s happiness.