We have our motorcycle trip planned for tomorrow through Monday, I realized this week that it had been a while since I'd changed the oil, 4,000 miles, in fact. I run Mobil 1 Synthetic, so that is not an inordinate amount of miles on this oil, but I prefer 3k between changes. So I am changing the oil tonight. I got the idea of shooting a reflection off the drain pan while I was on the floor watching the pan fill. I set up the camera on the tripod and gave it a whirl. It is kind of a cheap Filter (so to speak). There is still some oil dripping at a rate of once every 2 seconds or so, for this 5 second exposure, there were two drips. I planned this trip months ago, and we just came off two weeks of summer weather, as I type this, I am listening to the grand daddy of thunderstorms approaching. It is supposed to rain through into the morning and we are supposed to leave bright and early tomorrow. Once this clears up, we have the beginnings of Hurricane Bill to contend with. We're going though, there's no changing plans at this point. There is a 650 mile trip through 4 states on the plan. We have no firm plans though, no motels booked, we will play our stops by ear. I am introducing my 11 year old to getting out on the open road and riding. We've got the gear, we've got the time, oh yeah, I gotta go pack. Oh, and put some oil in the bike!

I didn't get a chance to do my riding this evening, I left too late and decided to head straight home. For the most part, I did go straight home, well OK, it was a little curvey. Straight home would have entailed me crossing the bridge that has become my subject here, I didn't go that route. It was probably for the best that I didn't get to do my ride as it was very hot out today, in fact, when I came out of the office at about 7:30ish, it felt like it was still in the 80's (which I think it was). I would have had a miserable ride had I left at 6pm like I'd intended. I loved the colors in the sky tonight. It is supposed to get cooler in the coming days, so I'm thinking some of these humid colors are gonna go bye-bye (which is a good thing). My 11-year-old & I have a 2 1/2 day Motorcycle Adventure coming up this weekend, the plan is to head north, and follow the border (Canada) all the way into New York. I'd take her into Canada, but she doesn't have a passport (I do) and we now have to have passports to cross the border so that Big Brother can keep tabs on us.

This is as far as you can legally travel on Saddleback Mountain Road. The sign is just to the side of me, I couldn't turn around safely at the sign so I pulled up a hair and took this shot (gotta have pics). This part of the road looks better than the previous climb up, it's better packed. The previous stretch is loose gravel and it wasn't fun going downhill on that rear Trailwing. If I keep this dirt thing up, I can see TKC-80's for me in the future. This was also an unplanned stop, by this time, the sun was setting fast and I'd given up on my final destination which was still a 1/2 hour away this point. I never did make it to my final destination, I did make it to a McDonald's at the Lee Traffic circle though. I would have loved to continue on up Saddleback, I have to check with the local Ham club, we have a repeater up on this mountain and if I am a member in good standing (callsign: n1xf), perhaps I can get permission to climb this here hill (err mountain).

Earlier we found a snakeskin on the rock island (it is a very tiny island) and put it on top of a boulder that is resting on top of the rock island (you can see it's shadow here). After taking a few shots of the fam, I caught Fox going berserk on the shady side of the boulder. At first I thought he was attacking an insect (he does this), then I thought he found the snake that belonged to the skin. After investigating, I realized it was the snakeskin that he was attacking, it had blown off the boulder and was lodged in this crevice and moving with the wind. He looks particularly fierce in this photo, when in fact, he is pretty docile.

Something about this particular shot that I like. Even though I have a bunch of shots in sequence and usually prefer to have the entire subject in frame, there is something about this shot that I like over the others.

We got to look out over this weeded area from our campsite. While I thought this area would be teaming with bass and pickerel, I had no luck in finding them. Edit: We found quite a few, they had trouble finding our lures.