I was right:  I didn’t get my bike.  I was completely let down.  That was the fifth or sixth time that I’ve been to the shop.  I lost count.

I feel I’ve done enough complaining for the month.  I believe it may be time to move on to something slightly more productive.  I want to make a list of prioritized destinations for both the very short term as well as the long term.  The Rieju is going to be my local exploring tool.  I figure this will be good: I can spend the next four months exploring the province of Cadiz and further out in Andalucia if I have time.  I’ll start nearby and work my way out, so that by the time I can pick up my BMW, I’ll actually need its legs to go a bit further.  So between now and May:

1. El Puerto de Santa Maria: my new home.  I’m going to learn this city in and out.  Whenever I go someplace new, I usually spend a considerable amount of time exploring.  The SMX will be great for this type of travel.
2. Cadiz.  What a great city.  It’s considered to be one of the oldest in the Europe.  Great beaches, interesting nightlife, lots of things to look around at.  Plus, it’s a tourist city (usually not a plus in my book), but tourist cities are usually great to practice the language in.
3. Sevilla.  Been there once.  Loved it.  It’s a bit of a haul on a 125cc, but I’ve taken much, much longer trips on a 250cc, so why not?  Same deal as with El Puerto here.  Except the difference is Sevilla is considerably larger, and I’ll have the wheels to do more exploring.
4. Granada.  Don’t know crap about this place except Alhambra is there, and it’s cold.  I think this will probably be the outer limits of where I want to push the Rieju.  It’s got a 1.96 gallon tank.  That’ll probably get me about 100 miles/tank or so, provided I carry additional fuel (so that I can take it down to empty).  We’ll see what kind of fuel economy the little bike gets me.  It’s a Yamaha engine, so it should be pretty decent.  As soon as I pick it up, I’ll blog a bit on its performance (or lack thereof).
5. Everywhere in between.  Sure, Sevilla and Granada may be what people think of when they think Andalucia, but the real treasures are going to be what I find on the rural coastlines, the farmlands, the pueblos.  Places that are worth checking out, but too remote for the casual traveler.

I think it’s the 13th of May that I’ll officially be able to pick up the BMW.  I’ll get it out of storage, transport it to the BMW dealership in El Puerto, and get it maintained (hopefully there won’t be any major issues with it other than I already know): new rear sprocket and chain, new front tire, 24K service, new rear brake, new relay for the aux lights.  That should take about a week.  Immediately following service, I’ll take it on a weekend camping trip for a shakedown ride.  Where?  Don’t know yet.  Somewhere cool.  Maybe Morocco.  So where do I want to go once I get some real wheels?

1. Croatia.  The Dalmatian Coast is to me now what Prague was to me 4 years ago: a destination that I always tried to get to, but it never worked out.  So as soon as I know that my bike is ready for a trip, I’ll be off to Tangier to hop a ferry to Genoa.  46 hours later, I’ll be in mainland Italy heading North-East.  I don’t know how long I’ll stay nor what I’ll do yet, but I do know this: I’ll be free to do whatever I want and go where I choose.
2. The African route.  I’d really like to take a trip to Tunis.  From there I could ferry to Greece, or somewhere further East in the Med.  Most people hear these North African countries and immediately think danger.  Sure, they’re dangerous.  But so are a lot of other places.  Additionally, you can’t think just think of these countries as African or European.  There’s more to it than that.  The common thread with all of these countries is they sit on the Meditteranean.  So you have Meditteranean Africa and you have Africa Africa.  Same way that Meditteranean France is comnpletely different than inland France.  You look around and see that Ligurians, Calabrians, or Cote d’Azur-ians are a lot closer to Tunisians than they are to Parisians, Romans, or Florentines (minus the language of course). 

And I think I’ll stop there.  My plans change quicker than a something in a something, and when I do get my bike, I’m just as likely to make a b-line for Norway or England as I am to sticking with any kind of plan that I’ve made for myself.

Today is the day… that I’ll be disappointed yet again.  Apparently it takes about 10 days to gas and oil up a Rieju.  Man!  Maintenance must be costly.  I got a call from Fermin this morning.  He insisted on speaking English to me… which is annoying; I speak more Spanish than he does English.  All he would say was I have to sign more papers.  Holy crap.  This bike better come with a good fixed-rate mortgage with the amount of crap I’m signing.  Seriously, I was in and out of Brattin when I got the BMW.  Anyways, he wouldn’t tell me if I could take it home, so I’m setting myself up for dispair, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed anyways.  I’m bringing my jacket just in case.  We’ll see.

I conceived the whole MotoHippie adventure deal sometime in 2002 with Paul while I was trekking around Europe.  Since 2003, I’ve ridden about 40000 miles (15K on a 250cc Honda Hornet, pronounced Hor-nay, around Japan) trying to pop my rider cherry.  I still consider myself a novice, but I know that if you bring the right tools to the table, then the rest is just attitude; I can live on the road indefinitely.  I haven’t even owned a car since the Saturn I had in college (I know, Yimmy, I bought that Mercedes 240D beater off of you a couple years ago, but I drove it a whopping 300 miles before it decided that it had had enough).  

Uncomfortable.

I’ve been driving around these tiny, tiny streets in a massive Volvo GLT 815 for the past six weeks.  Don’t get me wrong: I’m completely grateful that someone has been kind enough to lend me a car for free for so long… but all I want to do is ride a bike.  I got here on October 6th, and I have been trying non-stop (in some way or another) to be in possession of a bike.  My own would be nice… but I’m a realist.  I know when I’m beat.  I’ll buy a 125.  I’ll ride a bike half the size of the bike I learned on… but seriously!  I’ve been buying this tiny little bike for almost three weeks now!  It’s just silly!  Buying a BMW from Brattin took me a total of about three days.  Brand new.  Seriously.  I’m going to get killed in that Volvo.  I can see it already.  May my obituary read: He died valiantly, trying to buy a motorcycle.

I’ve been over here, for what, a month?  A month and six days.  The day that I arrived I inquired into the status of my bike, and right from the get-go it’s been a conspiracy to keep me off a motorcycle.  Ok, so there’s no way to get a license to ride my Beemer until March?  So I can’t even get it out of the creepy shipping lot to make sure it’s not inside a crate laying on its side?  Holy moly.  Part of me is still in denial, by the way… the other part, reluctant acceptance.  Fine.  I’ll bite.  I’ll suck it up and get a 125cc.  I’m a man.  I’ll deal.  I thought the US was bad with all its rules and regulations… but over there, some semblance of logic is injected into the situation.  If I ride the bus between now and March, I’ll suddenly have the prerequisite experience to ride a full sized bike.  Criminy!

To get the Rieju SMX 125 Supermoto that I’m buying, I’ll have had to have gone to the dealership a total of four times.  What the heck!  I needed a bike two weeks ago!  Seriously.  It’s just getting silly at this point.  I keep waiting for Ashton Kutcher to pop out of my closet, but then I remember that I’m not a celebutante. 

I got conned into a day’s worth of training.  I got an email from one of the more senior guys in my organization that I have to show up at 0900 for a short training session.  Swell.  No big deal.  It’s my first real day of work by myself, but it’s ok.  I won’t have any problems.  Sure, I have a ton of stuff to do, but I’ll be done before lunch.  Wrong!  I sat down at the conference table, and a nice gentleman puched a two inch binder in front of me… bursting at the seams… “with what?”  you may ask.  With PowerPoint slides.  I’m not sure if I’ve blogged about PowerPoint before… but nonetheless, let me give a short description of my feelings on that special little program.  If you want to cap the amount of communication that happens in an organization (particularly a large and/or dynamically operating one), then introduce PPT as the standard briefing and meeting presentation tool.  Put PPT in front of me, and I become a zombie.  I may as well not be there.  If they are really long briefs, then forget about it: I become an irate zombie.  There’s something about that bulletized format, that sterile break-everything-down-so-each-section-fits-on-a-slide mentality, that useless logo that your company has to put on there, that makes the meat of whatever you’re presenting to into mush…  Greyish-whitish mush that doesn’t constitute anything but an obstacle between now and the end of the meeting.  Not to mention that using PowerPoint means that you no longer need to remember what you’re talking or briefing about.  There’s nothing better than listening to a fool mutter and whisper about his brief to an audience of hundreds while you try to signal the guy by the door to get you another Monster.  I’m going to stop with all the PowerPoint hating now, but I’ll stop with this: if you want to really learn how to convey your point visually, then you need to find a guy named Edward Tufte.

I locked my garage key in my car.  In the garage. 

I don’t claim to be intelligent.  Sure, I may have a huge ego… I may think that I’m pretty clevel.  And sure, I may very subtly attempt to manipulate people into thinking I’m a brain… but the important thing is that I don’t explicitly claim it.  In fact, I go the other way entirely… I’m a self-deprecator guy. So what’s the point of this little tirade?  Well, it means that I can act and call myself an idiot without losing any face.  It’s nice… because deep down, underneath my fake ego that’s hidden under my fake clown-suit… I’m a big moron. 

So I locked my keys in my car.  I saw a guy walk out of a little person door inside of the garage door, and I thought to myself, “self, you don’t need to keep your key on you because you can walk out through the little man-door.”  Idiot.  You still need to get back into the garage.  I didn’t call my landlord… I didn’t call the garage guy.  Instead, I waited outside the garage… in a dark alley… under a dim streetlamp… for an hour.  People were walking by thinking that I was about to rob them.  I was trying to look as inconspicious as possible… which means I strait looked like a villain lurking in the alley (this was well past sunset btw).  I was listening to Notes in Spanish with my head buried in the transcript for the podcast which ultimately made me look fishy as hell.  Sigh.  I hate being that guy.  So finally, after about an hour and a quarter a family-packed Skoda drove up to the gate.  As soon as the car disappeared into the door, I put down the transcript and followed them in.  Pure terror on this poor lady’s face.  I tried to be as peaceful looking as possible which means I was smiling.  For those that don’t know me, I don’t smile all that much.  I laugh a lot, and I’m more or less happy, but I need a reason to make the smiley face.  So in retrospect, I think the smile was in poor taste because I probably looked like one of those crazy clown-guys.

Anyways, about the MotoHippie stuff… it’s coming along very slowly.  The biggest stumbling block is not having a damn bike.  I may have one as early as next weekend, but I’m thinking it’s going to be a little bit longer.  The next delay is the fact that I can’t swallow my pride and just use a pre-existing blogging system to create my site.  I mean, I don’t even like using myspace (basically because it’s more or less the opposite of creativity) because you’re so constrained to other people’s themes and the requirements of the site, but how can I deny that more than half of the referrals to MH come from myspace?  Sorry, got tengential for a moment there… I’m going to have to suck it up and install something on MH.  I’m leaning towards wordpress, but I don’t know.  If you have any suggestions, let me know.  I’m looking for both flexibility and power.  I don’t want to be locked into any certain design, but I still want all the functionality of having permalinks and anonymous commenting while maintaining the ability to put crap wherever the hell I want to.  Uhhg.  I should just hire someone who actually knows how this stuff all works.