We had a fairly bad snow storm today that unfortunately started around 9:30. You know what that means, everyones at work while the roads get from bad to worse and the commute home turns into a full contact sport. I grew up at high altitude and love driving in the snow, but here in Santa Fe I only like driving in the snow if the roads turned into a hockey rink overnight. That way government offices and schools are canceled or on a delay and everyone who cant drive in the snow stays home.

Take the Tuesday before last, the roads were about 2 inches of snowpack back ontop of ice yet not a single accident or a single set of tracks off into the ditch. The entire downtown and plaza area felt abandoned, it would have been awesome for pictures. Last Thursday, however, the snow started about 8:30AM and by 9 they were treacherous. There was no delays so everyone was out on the roads, crashes everywhere, and the flatbed dually pickup that passed me going 60 ended up flipping 3 times 15 miles down the road on a curve so slight that its almost not there.

Today marks the third bad storm in three weeks where the day started off perfectly clear and overcast and by 10AM the roads were horrible leaving 1000’s of drivers who otherwise would have stayed home no choice but to brave the conditions to get home. So heres a few winter driving tips for my fellow New Mexicans and flat landers who dont know how to drive in the snow for when they are forced to that I’ve learned over the years.

continue reading "Winter driving tips"

Have you ever gone out for a ride only to see dozens of bikes going the other way and you realize you’ve missed some rally that you didn’t know was happening or forgot about? Yeah me too, all the time. Looking around on the Net I’ve come to realize that there is no one place for all the local rallies and events. You can find calenders here and there with a small handful of different things listed on each one, but no one place to get an idea of what all is happening everywhere across the state.

Over the last month or so I’ve been bookmarking all of the local event pages I can find and decided all of my time and effort may be of use to others too.

So new for 2010, I’ve put up a calender for New Mexico Motorcycle Events at the top of the page. If I get the time I may also go through and add in various car shows and other gear head type events. This is still a work in progress and hugely time intensive to scour the net in December and January to find links, times and dates of events for the rest of the year, many web pages have not been updated yet. So if you know of any that I may have missed or not put up yet let me know the info and I’ll get added or updated.

Well 2009 and the ‘aught decade are about to come to a close so like everyone else I was doing a bit of reflection and realized its been one very busy year in motorcycling for me. No wonder I’m so far behind on keeping up with this blog

A new addition to the family, Dad gets a V Star too.

continue reading "Year in Review"

Coming back over the river and through the woods from Grandma’s house we stopped by the Plaza on our way home and I took the opportunity to practice some more night photography. Hope you like it.

continue reading "Christmas Eve on the Plaza"

I mentioned earlier that Vaughn and Encino were pretty cool towns to photograph. I snapped a few photos out the window of the car on my way through to visit my bud Lalo who’s recovering from a bad motorcycle wreck. Again in a hurry I didn’t get to stop for long, maybe in the future when I’m not in a rush I can look around off the main streets for some other cool shots.

continue reading "Vaughn, NM"