OK, I know blogs are supposed to be more “real time”, but I haven’t really had any real time in the past month or so; hence the hiatus. While I actually have shot a few things during this time (a couple of way cool rods with Scott Whitaker in Cincinnati and a pair of sweet Ford conv. with Rich Schmidt in Ocala, FL), most of this past month has been spent lining up the production schedule for the rest of the year. I’ve largely been stuck in my office which isn’t really one of my favorite places.

The good news tho is that I have it all nailed down and will now spend the better part of the next six months on the road. You can see the dates and locations of the events we’ll be shooting here. There’s still one unscheduled wild card slot because I’m trying to figure out how to get down to Canberra, Australia in January for the Street Machine Summer Nationals. How cool would that be?!? Wish me luck on that one.

I’ve got an equal number of killer feature shoots lined up that will take us to California, South Dakota, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Alabama in the US, and Alberta and BC up in Canada just to name a few. Needless to say, I will be racking up the frequent flier miles.

But the thing that has really been domination my attention for the past few weeks doesn’t involve four wheels. It’s the upcoming shoot of the sixth episode of my motorcycle touring series, Trippin’ on Two Wheels.

Those of you who are familiar with the show know that it involves me, my teenage (actually, now 20) son Sam, and my good friend and motorcycle photojournalist, Neale Bayly, on multi-day rides in some pretty awesome parts of the world. To date we’ve shot in Scotland, Sicily, Spain, Quebec, Italy, and Switzerland. However on Tuesday, May 16, we’ll ride out on first one of these to be shot in the US.

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This weekend we made a surgical strike on Yuma, AZ to attend and shoot Midnight at the Oasis. This is an outstanding show with over 1,000 cars in attendance and we came away with the footage for a great episode, but this whole trip seemed to exist in its own strange time dimension.

We flew out of Evansville, IN on Friday morning at 6:00 am (CST) for Atlanta, which is in the Eastern Time zone where we languished for a couple hours before boarding a plane to San Diego, CA. Four and a half short hours later, we touched down in the Pacific Time zone in sunny California.

After gathering our gear, we made our way over to the rental car facility, located my name on the board, and went to the appointed parking space to see what they had assigned me this time. It was a brand new Nissan Altima; not exactly a ’56 Lincoln, but I figured it would get the job done.

Ben (the show’s producer) and I threw our stuff in the trunk, jumped in, and attempted to fire it up. This is where things got a little confusing. Nissan’s latest “innovation” is that they don’t use a key. They just have a fob and you sort of wave that in the general direction of the dash to let it know you’re there and then step on the brake pedal, hit a start button and theoretically, Vroom!

However when I hit the start button, the dash lights came on but nothing else happened. I hit the start button again and the dash lights went off. I repeated this sequence five more times, each time with the same result. Ben suggested that maybe it was running and it was just really quite. I dismissed that as patently absurd, but after I hit the start button the next time, I put the car in drive and to my amazement, it moved forward. It was at this point that it hit both of us that this Nissan was a hybrid. Duh. We sheepishly and stealthfully made our way to the exit of the rental car facility, hopped on I-8, and embarked on our three-hour drive over to Yuma.

I had never been in this neck of the woods before, and it really has some strange and diverse geology. Not far out of San Diego, you climb up over a range of mountains that appear to be comprised of huge piles of boulders unlike anything I’ve seen. The pass is at about 4,200 feet and then you drop back down to sea level on the other side. Farther along, you come into an area that looks like the Sahara Desert. Apparently this is where Patton trained his tank commanders for warfare in North Africa. Now days tho the tanks are replaced by battalions of ATV’s and Sandrails bombing around on these seemingly endless dunes. The dunes eventually give way to more typical sage brush and sand, and then things finally turn agricultural as you start to near Yuma. All the while, you catch periodic glimpses of the fence on the Mexican border which is no more than several hundred yards away.

Well, that was sort of the travelogue part of the trip, and we were feeling pretty good as we rolled in to our hotel in Yuma about 3:00 pm; or at least that’s what we thought.

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