“What a perfect night! The stars are so bright!”

Fiona was right, the stars were bright. It was a perfect night, the night before my birthday, just me and my lovely fiancee out in the middle of Jawbone Canyon OHV park, surrounded by rolling hills. We sat in front of the fire and watched the stars a while, noticing one that was particularly bright.

Then we noticed that particularly bright star was moving in a peculiar fashion, almost as if it was slowly coming down a mountain. It dawned on us that this star was in fact coming down the mountain, because this star was in fact a miners helmet light attached to… someone walking down the mountain path directly toward our little Mobile Desert Assault Base Camp.

Within minutes this strange, mountain climbing dude was standing in the middle of our camp.

“Shit! What a long way down!” he started. “My dog ran away and my truck is stuck up at the top… you know that cabin up there? Yeah, well I got a flat and then I had to walk all this way down and…”

And? And then, with no further explanation, he turned and marched out of our camp towards the main road, never to be seen again.

As the miners light disappeared in the distance, we both looked at each other, wordlessly saying, “What the hell just happened here?” Didn’t get much sleep that night.

Spent my birthday doing my second favorite thing in the world:

Later that day, my good friend Keith, aka Unleaded from the Great Unsponsored Nova Scotia Expedition and his son stopped by to help me and Fiona celebrate my forty-second year on the planet.

We shared the story of the mysterious mountain man. Keith immediately wanted to ride to the summit to see if we could find the dog, the truck, the cabin or anything at all.

Here is a video of our Ride to the Summit:

No luck finding mountain man, but the junkyard at the summit was pretty impressive!

Without a doubt, my APC Rally off-road riding training is coming along nicely, and of course, this was the Best Birthday Ever!

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For my 42nd birthday, Fiona and I will be celebrating by riding some new desert trails. What better way to creep closer to the AARP?

I’m not even sure if my SPOT tracker still works, but I will have it on in case we need to call for help!

Track our progress here: http://bit.ly/j7IXer

If the track stops for a long, long time, it probably means we’re at the bottom of a mine shaft somewhere.

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It’s beeeen such a loooong time….

Yeah, that’s definitely one of my favorite Boston songs, and also should be the subtitle for this blog. Some people on the Adventure Rider forum started saying that my silence must indicate that I realized that the Australian Property Center Rally was more than I could handle, and I must have taken up crochet instead.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

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For some people, Black Friday means getting up at the crack of midnight to stand in a ridiculously long line to buy Christmas stuff. As I learned on Thanksgiving night, my soon-to-be-wife is one of these people.

I am not one of those people. My idea of shopping is Amazon.com. Besides, I couldn’t go out at midnight to Occupy Wal-Mart and risk oversleeping, I had an appointment on Black Friday to drop my dirt bike off at Agent Smith Racing for some much-needed TLC.

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The frenetic pace of work has slowed my on-bike training. Right now I am finishing up a string of shows in Liverpool. In the last month alone, I have flown over four quadrillion miles, with only fifteen quintillion more miles to go until the year ends.

All that travel doesn’t mean I have stopped training though. On November 1st, a few of my friends and I started a running contest called, creatively enough, ‘Just Because.’

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