Photos, riding, and staying in touch

When I first learned to ride motorcycles in '84 I had no one to ride with. I went stag to a couple of camp outs, rode with my wife, Deb, to Aspencade in '85 and commuted to work. But it was mostly a solo thing.

Then in '86 I discovered rec.motorcycles on usenet. I had been reading other groups on usenet for years but never realized there was a r.m community full of geeky riders just waiting for me to find them. By '89 I was friends with many of riders I had never met. By '90 I had met and started riding with the NEDoD crew in and around the northeastern USA.

These folks and the world wide r.m community became a kind of extended family. I visit them when I travel. I try to stay in touch with varying degrees of success.

This blog is just an extension of my experiences riding motorcycles. Its about enjoying the company of my online and local friends who ride. Its about sharing photos and memories. Most of all its about my third decade of riding.

I've tried writing about riding elsewhere with limited results. Maybe this blog will be something I'll stick with and work to perfect. I have no real idea at this point. It's just possible though.

Over the last few days I've been digging into my negative vault which stretches back at least into the mid-70's. Actually it's just a big 12 gallon plastic covered tote I picked up for $5 at Home Depot a few years ago. But it beats the cardboard box I once used. There are about 30 lbs of negatives and a few prints stuffed into the "vault".

My goal is to sort the negatives chronologically and then to identify and scan each packet. In the process of digging through layer 1 I discovered some unlabelled packets of negatives which turned out to be early to mid-90's family and motorcycling photos. I started feeding them into my Acer ScanWit 2720S film scanner and sorting the resulting images with Picasa2.

A few images included people I remember but can't put names to. So the idea of sharing the images and asking for help identifying the subjects occurred to me. That was the motivation for starting this particular blog.