A while back I purchased a FitPC and wrote briefly about my intention to take it with me on a moto ride from NYC to SF. While I'm still not certain I'll take it due to increasing concerns about having sufficient power I have been working with it here and there.

The task was simple, get up early on a Saturday, ride to some campsite upstate New York eat/sleep and return... of course that was the plan.

New York State has quite a good website that allows you to search for parks and facilities throughout the state. I did exactly this on Saturday morning to find a suitable camping location I could reasonably ride to - in the end I settled for a campsite at the Hudson River Islands State Park

I took the KLR out for its first real ride this weekend up to Pine Plains which taught me a thing or two along the way.

First of all, I need to sort out a power supply circuit for my accessories. My GPS ran out of battery power within the first 60 minutes, not at all surprising and I was fully expecting it but it really drove home for me how lost I am without it.

Buying a secondhand motorcycle with a foreign rider/drivers license in New York State turns out to be an exercise in red-tape management and lengthy bureaucracy. Of course this was all to be expected and since the weather has not been great it's not as if I've been missing lots of ride time.

The US recession is bringing out some epic specials at the moment on the like of Craigslist. Check out results for search terms for things like "moving", "must sell" or "out of business" - you'll get the idea.

The International Motorcycle Show hit New York last weekend. Saturday morning must have been the busiest moment of the whole show since the crowds were at times overwhelming and getting a clear shot of anything was a royal pain. These photos are by no means an exhaustive collection of the 1000's of bikes on display and there are surely some notable omissions but you get the idea...

Ducati

Part of the fun of the ride is the preparation of the ride. I briefly mentioned in my ride announcement post that I had ambitions to take a certain amount of technology/digital stuff with me to record photos and transmit live GPS position updates to enable friends to track my progress online (probably with the help of Google Maps). To add such complexity to the already involved task of riding a moto across the US might sound mad but I need a project to keep me busy until the ride.

Google recently enhanced Google Alerts such that it is possible to obtain RSS feeds of canned searches.

This is enormously useful but there is no API that enables one to programaticly list, add and remove items to their set of Google Alerts. So partly because it's too cold outside to do anything and partly because this seems like useful functionality I spend a few hours today writing a PHP class that implements an API to Google Alerts.

A route from New York to San Francisco on a trusty KLR 650 is starting to emerge, looks something like the map attached below. I'm very keen to hear from people about this route for suggestions and route adjustments.

I always knew I'd need a checklist but it's finally time I got around to putting one together, so far this is how it looks