Redmond to Kennewick

After saying my goodbyes, I left Josh and Wendy's place at about 10AM. Having Josh and Wendy here and also a place to stay for 2 weeks has been really helpful. I am very thankful that they allowed me to cramp their space for 2 weeks! It would have been so much more difficult doing all the organizing from a hotel, and it was great to catch up with them both and do some stuff together. They also provided me with some valuable insight into American customs and culture.

I loaded all the stuff on my bike, in the hope that none of it was too heavy and wasn't going to fall off! Each bit of luggage has a weight limit, but I had no scales to weigh them with so I just had to pack evenly and hope for the best. Thank god for the Ventura pack, there is no way all my stuff would fit into the panniers alone!

In Redmond, just about to head off to Kennewick

The plan was to go back to the bike dealer and get my 500 mile service out of the way. It. Was easy to ride to kennewick, because at the end of the trip my odometer would have exactly 520 miles on it.

After a long ride, I wearily dropped my bike at the service department and caught a taxi to my hotel. Thankfully the hotel was really nice! Somehow I got a double room, and had lots of space! I spent the rest of the night just chilling and getting my blog up-to-date. It was fantastic to get some time to relax, one of my goals of this trip was to keep it pretty easy going, I didn't want to rush through really fast like I did in Europe.

Seeing as I had no transportation, there was no restaurant in the hotel and my bike needed to kept overnight at the dealer, I just ordered Dominos for dinner. It was actually better than I was expecting!

Tomorrow I'm off to La Grande!

Final Day in Redmond

The Kawasaki OEM top box was not going to work for me for these reasons:

1. Had a paltry weight limit of 4 pounds
2. Speed limited to 80 MPH

Now these might be restrictions made by some over zealous safety person at Kawasaki, but I didn't really want to take the risk. So with a 25% restocking fee and $30 shipping, I sent the top box back to the distributor. What I really needed was a Ventura rack, I knew these could be used at speed and the way they attached to a bike would mean they could take more than 4 pounds. 

Ventura pack racks are hard to fit because you need to get special L-brackets made specifically for your bike model. Most of the time you'd go to a motorcycle apparel store and they'd have to order in the brackets, because it was stupid to keep all the different L-brackets in stock. This was time I didn't have, I wanted to get moving pretty soon.

This is where I got really lucky, it turns out the only Ventura distributor in the United States happened to be in Lynwood, about a 15 minute ride from Redmond. I rang up, they confirmed they had the correct fittings and then I rode over there. The extremely helpful staff there lent me his toolkit, and gave me a hand fitting the rack to my bike. In about 15 minutes we were done!

I even got a free emergency tire repair kit! I now have so much redundancy in that space, I bought one of the bog standard "spike handle with rubber logs" kits from the dealer in Kennewick, then Josh suggested I buy this "Slime" stuff, where you just spray it into your tire and it plugs the hole while inflating the tire, then I got this free kit from Ventura! This kit is way different to what I've seen before, it has these plastic keys that you turn into the puncture hole then snap off.

I managed to get all of my stuff to fit in the Ventura bag and the panniers. Just. As expected the SLR takes up a lot of room. I can save space by removing the lens from the body, but I'd like to be able to have quick access to it if I need it. Also the sleeping bag takes a fair bit of space, even though it's one of those super small goose down ones. I figure if I do end up buying a "Bivy" for camping, I'll just roll it up in that and it can go on the back of my bike. 

It's a pretty tough balancing act, on the one hand I need to pack light and small, on the other this is a solo trip for 5 months so I need to be prepared for anything. I've got a small polar fleece jumper that takes a fair bit of space, but I don't want to ship that back to Australia because what happens if it gets cold? There are lots of considerations like that. I'm guessing that as I progress through this trip, I'll find things that I just don't use and start to trim down the fat of my luggage.

Applebees

Today Josh and I spent a lot of time going around Redmond and picking up a few final things for my trip. This included things like a duffel bag (as I had decided that the Kawasaki Top Box was not going to work), tire repair kit etc.

As it was getting close to the end of my stay with Josh and Wendy, we all decided to have a final dinner at Applebees. Applebees is a restaurant chain that I hear a lot about on TV and movies, but don't really know what it is all about. Essentially it is a chain of family-friendly bars that serve food. We all ate at the bar tonight, and the food was pretty good! Especially the much hyped "Spin-dip", or "Spinach Dip".

I also had to 20oz glasses of some Irish beer (described as "if Guinness had a child with a brown ale"), which for some reason got me way drunker than I was expecting. I'm not even sure if the alcohol content was high, maybe I was just tired or something!

Guns and Cheesecake

The OEM Kawasaki Concours Top Box

Most of this day was spent trying to find a Black OEM Kawasaki Topbox to fit the Concours. I figured that I was going to need more space than what the factory panniers offered (just an assumption, I hadn't gotten the bike yet so I had no idea how everything was going to fit), so I thought a lockable top box was the best option. I later discovered this was not the case, I'll explain in a later post. It took me about 3 and a half hours ringing up various distributors to find a black top box with a top cover. Apparently the box itself is really common, but the black trim panel cannot be found anywhere.

Anyway I finally found a place in West Virginia that had some in stock. The lady I was speaking to was very enamored with my accent ("I could speak to you for hours"), but very helpful. $360, I hope it does the job (spoiler: it doesn't).

Me shooting at zombie bin laden.

With that underway, Josh and I decided to perform a sacred American ritual of shooting the crap out of Zombie Osama Bin Laden targets with a range of firearms. I shot guns in Thailand before, but this was something else. Basically we could shoot almost anything we wanted, and there were a lot of guns available. For $50 plus ammo, we could shoot almost any non-automatic rifle on the wall (out of about 15). To shoot an automatic you need to book ahead.

More shooting, stance is probably
all wrong, but not much guidance
was to be had!

I guess the craziest thing was that all you had to do was sign a form, then they give you a gun and ammo. They spend about 10 seconds explaining how to use the gun, where the safety is and how to cock it. All of this is pretty much forgotten once on the range, so you have to try and guess how it all works (kind of half the fun I thought, like a puzzle). It isn't rocket surgery, but you need to know where the safety is, how to load the magazine, then how to cock it, then the position to hold it in. Most of this I just remembered from all the action movies I've seen over the years.


First up Josh and I shot an AR-15. Now these guns have all been modified to use 9mm rounds and to be semi-automatic. So you're not really getting what it'd be like in "real life". Don't get me wrong, these guns would kill and are the real deal, but you're not shooting larger rifle rounds or using full auto mode. The magazines are kind of hard to load, I think you spend most of your time just putting the rounds in them. After a while you can sort of reach a rhythm when loading, making it a bit faster. 


Shooting the rifle isn't really an issue, I'm pretty sure I was holding it correct, so there wasn't much kick to it. The rifle did have one of those electronic "red dot" sights that they have in Call of Duty, which was pretty cool.

This is my Thompson.
There are many like it but this one is mine.

Next up we shot a Barretta 9mm pistol, then some other futuristic rifle that I forget the name of. I wanted to shoot a PS90 (a civilian-ised P90), but unfortunately they were out of ammo because of the Zombie Apocalypse "Preppers". Yeah apparently here that's a real thing, there are people in the US who are legitimately preparing for a zombie apocalypse, and the PS90 is a very popular weapon among them. The shooting range staff member was equally weirded out by this as I was. 


The final gun we shot was a World War II era Thompson SMG (AKA Tommy Gun), used by the American forces as their standard submachine gun. It is pretty iconic to me because it has been in a lot of movies and computer games I played (including Enemy Territory, which I played a lot of). The gun is a little different from the other rifles because it took a .45 round (way larger than the 9mm we were using the the other guns), was "open bolt" and essentially way simpler than the others we tried. By far this was my favorite gun, it had a bit of kick and was surprisingly accurate with the iron sights.

Hit in the FAAAAACE

It was however probably not Josh's favorite rifle. Unfortunately for him, a stray shell casing came and landed under his glasses below his left eye, casing him to lose a bit a skin and be in a fair bit of pain afterwards. It could have happened to anyone, and thankfully it didn't actually end up in his eye.


So after that, we decided to head to the Cheesecake Factory (yeah, where Penny works in the Big Bang Theory) for dinner. As I understand it the Cheesecake Factory is a national chain of high(ish) class restaurants. As far as I know, we don't really do restaurant chains like this in Australia. The closest thing I can think of is Hogs Breath, but the food is not really comparable to the quality of the Cheesecake Factory. I kind of like the idea, it's similar to how you know that the food is always going to be good at Belluci's in Canberra.


The Cheesecake Factory food is really good, as is the service (which you would expect in the US) and the restaurant itself has really nice decor. One notable thing is that the menu is massive, there is so much to choose from it can be overwhelming. In the end I got the buffalo wings (really awesome, but apparently these might have skewed my expectations for buffalo wings in the future - they were the best Josh had ever had too), Pizza and of course cheesecake.


The cheesecake was amazing, I got one that mixed traditional and chocolate cheesecake into layers. I wish I got a photo of it. I was determined to finish it, but wow was it difficult - it was so rich!

Motorcycle Shopping

On Saturday Josh and I went around multiple dealerships and looked at candidates for my bike in the next few months. It was really down to the Kawasaki Concours 14, and the Yamaha FJR 1300. Unfortunately there were not as many bikes around the Seattle area in the Sports-Touring category, but there was enough that I could get something.

The first dealer had a FJR 1300, and although he seemed like a really nice guy and all, he wouldn't let me test ride it due to my international licence without putting the whole amount of money down first. And if after riding I said I didn't like it, they'd cancel the transaction. This may have been the dealer's policy, and I'm sure they weren't doing the dodgy, but it seemed like they would have been in too much of a position of power if in the end I didn't want the bike.

A Kawasaki Concours 14

So we moved on to the next dealer in Lynnwood, who had a brand new Concours 14. Luckily they actually did let me ride the bike. I only took it around the block, but it felt pretty good. It had strong power delivery and actually handled pretty lightly for a bike of that size. It has a lot of technology on it: Adjustable windsheids, ABS brakes, traction control, 'eco drive' thing etc. I'd didn't have the grunt of my Hayabusa, but I wasn't really expecting or needing that!

Then we looked at a second hand 2008 Concours 14. Which looked good but was a private seller who wouldn't allow test rides unless he had all the money (which is apparently common here in the US). Also there is a big difference between the 2008 and and the 2010+ models, in 2010 Kawasaki put a whole lot of fixes and features in (including traction control).

Finally Josh and I went the Ducatti dealership in the middle of Seattle, as they had a second hand Concours 14 and FJR. It was too late in the day by then to test ride, but both bikes at least looked pretty good. They Ducatti guys obviously suggested I buy a Multistrada, which was very nice, but probably way out of my price range. The Concours 14 was at least a newer version, a 2010 model.

The Harley Road King I test rode

On Monday Josh and I went to the local Harley Davidson dealership. Before coming over I was moving away from the idea of a Harley, mainly due to the back problems you get on cruisers, the lower top-end power on them and the cost of one. However, I thought it was a good idea to give one a ride. In my price range I only really had the choice of a Road King or a very old Electra Glide. The Harley dealership allowed me to take a black Road King out for a test ride, and it was a beautiful bike. Quite hard to ride I found, although it would be something I could get used to, the way the handlebars are positioned and how my feet sat forward took some getting used to. And I guess like all cruisers, this thing shakes when stopped at lights. Also the indicators are all weird, a button on each handle bar is pressed to turn on or off the respective indicators. Also the luggage capacity was pretty small, but in the end the bike looked really cool!

After much deliberation, I decided to put a deposit on a bike, a 2011 Kawasaki Concours 14. I wish I had more time to think about it and ride some more bikes, but I'm running out of time. The 2011 is basically the same as the 2012, but $3K cheaper. Only problem is that I have to go pick it up from a town 180 miles away called Kennewick. The other issue is that I'm going to have to get the first 600 mile service on it, as there is no Ks on this bike at all. But hopefully it was the right decision in the end, the bike should be pretty sweet and hopefully I get a good sale price on on it back in LA.

Seattle Day 4 & 5

Josh's Cat "Tomei"

Generally I've been taking it pretty easy the last few days. I've had a crazy last few months with all the closing out of my project and packing up my house. Just taking a bit of time to get over it. It is really great being in Josh and Wendy's apartment, it is clean and modern and in a really nice area. All in all, the whole Seattle area seems like a really great place to live. It is clean and quiet, but pretty close to a big CBD if you need it.

And there is apparently a lot of tech jobs around here, which is nice to know.

Right now what I'm trying to figure out is:

1. What bike I'm going to get (pretty sure the Concours 14, but which one out of all the dealers and private sellers)
2. Insurance for my bike (Geico seems to be the best so far)
3. Where I'm going to get a new Canon 7D from and which lens(es), cameras over here are not as cheap as I was hoping
4. What earbuds I should get for the bike, I usually get the Sennheiser 300s, but I keep shredding the cable on them, perhaps a better option exists?
5. Getting a small netbook for transferring my photos to my external hard drive and possibly up to my google drive.

Josh, Wendy and I went for a walk around the dog park in Redmond last night, which was a beautiful area. And a shit-ton of dogs as you'd expect! Afterwards we went to the Malt & Vine. We now seem like regulars there now!

Josh and his super opaque stout

Seattle Day 2 & 3

On my second day in Seattle Josh and Wendy had gone to their jobs for the day. I decided to use the time to do some grocery shopping and play around with my blog.

So first up I wandered down to the local Safeway, which is not part of the same company as Safeway in Australia, but designed by the same person. Everyone has been warning me that I could get very fat in America, so I tried to find things that were healthy similar to what is back home. Maybe I'm dampening my american experience by not eating lots of Count Chocula, Pizza Rolls and Pop Tarts.

USA's version of Weetbix, same shit with rounded corners.

Anyway, managed to find Weatabix for breakfast, which I'm having with "granola" which is the American name for musuli. Also I bought some 11 grain bread, which in Australia you'd expect to be something with lots of visible grains in it (e.g. Tip Top 9 Grains), but here it turned out to be kind of a sweet wholemeal bread.

Every supermarket here seems to want you to join their club. The prices displayed at Safeway are really tiny compared to the "club prices", which are so prominent on the tickets that everything seems to be cheaper than it is. I didn't become a member, but I was told by Josh later on that this is sort of mandatory for grocery shopping and everyone does it. It also is really quick and easy so I'll do it next time.

I also bought some instant coffee and found out that Americans don't really do instant. There was a small selection of varieties, which basically included Nescafé, Folger's and these expensive Starbucks packets. I'm guessing that in the US that everyone uses have drip coffee - that selection was much larger that it would be in Australia. So I thought I'd try out an American brand, but for reference Folger's tastes like crap.

Josh and I later that night went down to the local bar called the "Malt & Vine". This bar is awesome because:

1. It lets you sample wines and craft beers from a menu that changes every day
2. Samples mostly only cost a dollar each
3. It has the most variety of craft beers I've ever seen
4. It is walking distance from josh and Wendy's place
5. It is right next to a kebab shop

Josh and I have been to the Malt and Vine 3 time in 3 nights.

A range of microbrew beer samplers at the Malt & Vine

For actual 'regular American' beer, I've tried a few. Mostly the flavor is very weak, but this seems to be what they are going for in the brewing process. I guess they want a beer to be as light as possible for it to be as refreshing as possible. Most of the Budweisers and Millers are bland, but nothing compared to the Michelob ULTRA (purposely all caps) which I had in the outback steakhouse. This beer almost tasted like water! I don't think this necessary a bad thing, this seems to be what they are trying to acheive, just not my taste.

Anyway, Americans obviously do make good beers, you just have to look at the craft beers (or microbrew beers as they call them here).

Seattle Day 1

After touching down in Seattle, Josh and Wendy gave me a lift back to their apartment in their giant, recently purchased charger. This thing is massive, but pales in comparison to some of the trucks driving around here. Americans really do seem to like big cars. It all makes sense however, because much of the driving here is on huge, wide highways. The trip back for the airport consisted of multiple 4-lane beltways.

After stopping by one of the many Mexican fast restaurants for a quick burrito, I headed to bed.

The next day josh took me around some local places in the Redmond area. I wanted to see a Wallmart, so we headed there first. Basically Wallmart is a giant Big W with groceries and guns. What surprised me a little is that the type of guns you can purchase at wallmart are beyond the hunting rifles. I'm no gun fancier, so I can't really tell guns on sight alone, but one of them looked like an AR-15. That's a pretty serious weapon. I'm hoping to go to a gun range sometime in the US, but will have to look at the different state regulations on firearms, some are more restrictive. Only at targets though!

Next up we went to Starbucks for a coffee. As far as I can tell there is not many cafes around here, this may only be a Northern Midwest thing? Starbucks is one of the only places I've seen where you can get espresso coffee. And they are everywhere, even inside the supermarkets. If anyone was wondering, the coffee tastes the same as it does back home (kinda crap but not terrible). They also don't know what a flat white is, so I had to ask for a low-foam cappuccino, which they were happy to make.

That's a 1.75L bottle

Another thing is that I'm not sure why anyone would use cash here, everywhere takes credit cards. And when you use cash, you get all this change back - mostly pennies - as obviously the don't round up to the nearest 5c like in Australia. Also, you always have to keep in mind that the prices do not include government taxes, which vary frome state to state. In Washington this is about 10% and is sales tax, but other states have different kinds of tax and some have multiple taxes they apply. To make things even more difficult some items are not taxed, and others have way larger taxes than everything else.

This is really apparent with hard liqueur, as the tax is something like 20%, which explains why it looks so cheap in the stores. The picture on the right is a price for a 1.75L bottle of Smirnoff. Alcohol here is still ludicrously cheap though.

For lunch I decided to cross out one of the restaurants you hear about a bit in American tv and movies ("I'm so hungry I could eat at Arby's"). Arby's sell roast beef sandwiches which look massively unhealthy in their adverts. I decided to get a classic medium sandwich, which is pretty big from a Aussie point of view. It basically a pure meat burger, where the meat is cut into very thin strips, kind of like in a kebab but much thinner. It has a bit of sauce which makes it a bit sweeter than I was expecting (that seems to be a common theme for American foods).

After lunch Josh and I went to the fancy pants Seattle mall. This mall has a lot kf money. Since redmond is the capital of Microsoft, I had to checkout the Microsoft store. Turns out it was like any other electronic computer store, except they were giving out free t-shirts for anyone willing to use the bing search engine to perform a task. For. Memory it was:

1. Open Internet explorer
2. Search for the seattle sounders (sports team)
3. Prove that big showed the ticket price and that I could purchase a ticket in one click
4. Receive Microsoft store t-shirt

What was funny was there was a large apple store only 2 doors down. Didn't however manage to look at the much hyped "Microsoft surface".

For dinner Josh, Wendy and I decided to head to the outback steakshouse, a supposedly Australian themed chain of restaurants. This was my first experience with the famous American table service, which is supposed to be exceptional due to the tipping system. The young waiter was in training so she screwed up some things, but all in all, it was good. I tipped 15%, which is apparently a "good service" amount (less than what I was originally told). Josh also explained to me that unlike in Australia where you want your winter to bring you your food and drink then basically piss off, american waiters are trained to constantly keep checking on you, asking you if the food is ok and refilling your drinks. He said it can get a little annoying for us Aussies, but you get used to it.

The food itself for the outback steakhouse was good, I had the classic American starter salad and a steak, unfourtunately not the "blooming onion" which I was informed was just a fancy way of serving onion rings. As you may have guessed, there is no real Aussie food on the menu, but I guess they couldn't have a menu full of pie floaters and lamingtons.