Since my mom passed four years ago, we have a family tradition of getting ice cream on this day, her birthday. We all take selfies and text them to each other. It’s a wonderful tradition and my mom would love it.

I’ve been treating my word processor like a rattlesnake tonight, cautiously approaching to write, then hurriedly stepping back. I’ve sought distractions from all directions. I watched the end of the Boston/76ers game. I watched the new woodworking video from April Wilkerson. I watched an episode of Ghost Adventures (in hindsight, in my little house in the woods, that might not have been the best idea…). I watched an inning of the Giant’s game.

I know I’m going to cry writing this.

…Okay, let’s do this.

Happy birthday, mom! I miss you so much.

There’s a number of reasons I have trouble writing about my mom. First and foremost of which is I have a lot of regrets. I regret that I didn’t visit her more. I regret that I didn’t take her up on visiting for what would be her last Thanksgiving. I regret not calling more. None of us know how much time we have left, but I guess I never thought mom would be… gone.

Even when we didn’t talk I knew she was there. My mom was such an important figure in my life. She got me. If you’re reading this you have probably known me for a while, and so you know that I’m not normal – in the best sense, I would maintain! But my mom got that. Case in point: in high school, a friend’s dad gave me his old moped. I loved it because it was quirky and weird. It had a front rack I could bungee my Little Mermaid lunchbox to. I affixed a milk crate to the back and would ride the thing to school in my Birkenstocks. Where does my mom come in here? She sewed me a tiger-striped seat cover.

Another story: for my birthday one year my aunt Jean bought me this awesome 6-foot tall blow-up Godzilla. I love that thing, but it developed a leak and I relegated it to my closet. Fast forward a few years and my buddies and I went to see Jurassic Park on opening night. Naturally I got home late, and the lights by the side door were off. No big deal. I opened the door and Godzilla, all six feet of him lurched at me from the open door. I’m not ashamed to say I screamed like a little girl. My mom hit the lights as she laughed hysterically. “I’m so glad you finally came home,” she said. “Do you know how many times I had to pump that thing up?!” This was a trend: a few years later I returned from seeing Blair Witch Project to find stick figures like in the movie menacingly decorating my room.

Mom came to visit Anna and I when we were living in Utah. She did her research and decided we had to hit up the enormous local corn maze. The three of us ventured in and got hopelessly lost almost immediately. We never found the exit – we ended up going out the way we came in. “You can’t go out this way!” one of the employees said. “We just did!” Mom replied as we hurried to the car. That same trip she and I drove out to Bear Lake (on the way we might have – at her urging – ventured up a few 4×4 trails…) and had their incredible raspberry milkshakes.

My ice cream picture above came from here in town. They encourage you to sample the different unique flavors, and as soon as I tried the blueberry limoncello, the tart blueberry reminded me just a little of that raspberry milkshake for just a moment…

…These moments…

She was always supportive of my writing. Always. She read all my clips from my high school paper and insisted I bring her home City on a Hill Press from UCSC when I started writing there. And then after college… I pretty much stopped writing for a long time. No one likes to think that they might not have lived up to their parents’ expectations, but I’m genuinely saddened to think of everything she’ll never read. I thought of that when I started this blog and, in a lot of ways, it’s dedicated to her. She might not get the opportunity to read it, but that’s not the point. What’s important is that I am writing again, and that’s enough.

The fall before she passed, she and her sister, my aunt Jean, went on my mom’s dream Greek cruise. She compiled the pictures of the trip into a huge album. Here’s another regret: I only got a few minutes to flip through it with her that February day when I came up to be with my family as my mom went in for exploratory surgery. Before we took her to the hospital I asked if we could look at it later. She agreed, but then a few hours later we got the terrible news, and nineteen days later, she was gone…

I promised myself I wouldn’t write about that time today. But I have a reason for this one – a few months before that she sent me the journal she kept throughout the trip about the excursions and the locations they visited and some of the colorful characters they me along the way. I re-read the journal recently, and heard her voice in my head again, so clear. I was surprised I didn’t cry – but then why would I? It was clear she was having the time of her life!

These moments.

I know she’s still around. There are moments I feel her distinctly. I know she’s with me when I’m on the motorcycle. I feel her when I’m off adventuring. She was in a dream recently – we were having a big family party and she was making a feast of our favorites, but was concerned there wasn’t enough food. I offered to make my oven fajitas and she agreed. That’s a dish I made only after she passed. At the risk of reading too much into a dream, I think it suggested that not only is she still around, but she’s aware of the things I make – be they oven fajitas or, well, this blog.

Happy birthday, mom! You are loved, you are remembered, and you are missed. Thank you for everything! See you in my dreams!

With the stunning weather lately has come a severe onset of wanderlust. Or maybe it’s Spring Fever? More important than actually diagnosing an idiom, let’s settle on the biggest symptom: I would so rather be out traveling than being responsible. If you asked me where I’d head if all of a sudden I came into traveling money and an abundance of free time, I’d point to the selfie I chose today.

For years – I hesitate to say decades, but it’s probably decades – I’d had a daydream of where I wanted to spend my 40th birthday. For a lot of people, that sort of milestone birthday conjures ideas of Las Vegas debauchery, or dinner at the French Laundry. That didn’t appeal to me. Instead, what I really wanted to do was spend my 40th in Death Valley on a motorcycle. As I mentioned, I’d had this dream long before I had any idea I’d even have a motorcycle again. But the idea held fast in my imagination, and as the date of my 40th appeared on my annual calendar, the stars started aligning and by October I had an epic Death Valley trip planned.

Full disclosure, I wasn’t in Death Valley on my actual birthday. No, instead my friends Jennifer and David Eric took me to the Tonga Room in San Francisco. If you haven’t been there, please go. You owe it to yourself to sip a giant rum drink while the fake thunderstorm rages over the lagoon (it’s in the Fairmont in the middle of San Francisco, so the lagoon is part of the magic). Despite the massive fruity beverages, and the boutique rum salesman who, upon finding out it was my 40^th, generously provided copious samples, I woke the next morning on Halloween, my departure day, feeling great… which is more than I could say for the weather.

Bike loaded up, I sealed myself in my rain gear and headed south through a torrential downpour that didn’t abate until I hit King City. I checked the weather radar on my phone, and I had just outrun the leading edge of storm, but it was hot on my heels, and having stripped out of my rain gear at the gas station, I wanted to keep ahead all the way to my first night’s destination at my friends Mark and Cindy’s place in Arroyo Grande. I made it just in time – the storm hit the central coast a couple hours after I arrived and knocked out power so Halloween was just that much creepier… and soggier.

By morning, most of the storm had moved on, but the remaining showers meant I headed off in my rain suit again. I made a beeline for Death Valley and (after a necessary stop at Indian Wells Brewing to pick up a growler), I dropped down into Panamint Valley and immediately wanted to turn around and ride that amazing road again. But with daylight starting to wane, I still needed to cross the park and get to Nevada. On highway 190 as the road starts to climb back out towards Nevada I stopped to watch dust devils hypnotically swirling along the valley floor. I pressed on and left the park – that’s actually where the above picture is taken, after I’d ridden through the park. I didn’t take a selfie on the way in, but I got a great picture of my (still clean!) bike:

While I’m sharing pictures, just as I crossed into Nevada I got a great glimpse of the last remnant of the previous day’s storm. It was sitting over my destination, The Atomic Inn in Beatty:

I arrived without getting too soaked, wrote a little in my journal while I had some of Indian Well’s Amnesiac IPA (and was grateful the motel had a fridge!) and called it a night.

I’d given myself the entire next day to explore the park, and I gassed up in Beatty thinking the massive 320 mile range would be enough – I limped back to Beatty in the dark that day with just 20 miles of gas left. Death Valley is huge! And unbelievably alluring. I picked up the dirt Titus Canyon Road just outside the park and wound my way through and up to the ghost town of Leadfield. On the approach, I stopped, managed to find a stable place in the red earth for the kickstand and took a picture of my bike. I remember thinking as I took the picture that I couldn’t believe this same motorcycle that so ably carried me down the freeway in torrential rain could also be so ridiculously sure-footed on this dirt trail. No, it wasn’t particularly technical (though, for me at the time it was!), but nonetheless, the versatility just blew me away. That high gave way a few hours later when the deep pea gravel on the way to the Devil’s Racetrack swallowed the front wheel and pitched me off. I wasn’t going very fast and bike and rider suffered no damage but to my pride and a few scrapes on the engine guards. I could go on about crisscrossing the valley, but I’ll leave you with this moment: walking through the visitor’s center at Scotty’s Castle one of the rangers was watching me. I said hi, and she said, “This is your first time in Death Valley isn’t it?” I said it was and she said, “That’s too bad. I can tell it’s got you hooked already.”

Right now, writing from my desk in Guerneville, with my motorcycle tucked away in the carport (which more aptly resembles a collapsed mine shaft), I know exactly what she meant. Three and a half years later, I haven’t had the opportunity to get back to Death Valley, but I can feel the pull of the desert like a siren song. It was nearly 100 degrees in the park today – yes, of course I checked. I naturally prefer cool weather to hot, but yet the desert beckons…

What’s your siren song? Where’s the place that makes your heart speed up just thinking of it? And, crucially, when are you going back? Let me know in the comments below!