Review: More than a year with the Amazon Kindle

First off, let me repeat my standard Amazon disclaimer. I'm an Amazon Affiliate. If you go to Amazon via some link of mine and buy anythingfrom them within 24 hours, some of your purchase price goes to me (about 6% on average). It doesn't cost you any more to buy the item but instead of all the money going to some big faceless corporation in Seattle, some of it goes to a bike riding guy in Issaquah, WA. And by the way, everybody I know who works at Amazon has a face as well and if Amazon is big and successful it seems to have something to do with them being pretty damn smart.

But, I digress. Expect a lot of digressions ahead. For your first digression, you can read the review of the Kindle I wrote back in March of 2010. Everything I wrote there still holds true and if you read that I won't feel the need to repeat the things I've covered there.

I'm still totally happy with my Kindle. It's a handy damn piece of technology that just plain works. Yep, newer ones are out now that do a bit more stuff or do the existing things better. And yeah, the price has dropped. Right now, if I busted or lost my Kindle, I'd replace it with aGraphite 6" Kindle 3G+Wi-Fi. If I wanted to save a few bucks, I might get the version that's a bit cheaper because it displays ads on the screen-saver. You can read hundreds of reviews of the various flavors of the Kindles on the net but everything I'm going to mention in this review relates to stuff that I've done with my older Kindle.

The first thing to understand about a Kindle is that it makes it super easy to carry a lot of virtual books with you. Going on vacation or a bike tour or headed to the coffee shop or the dentist's office? Bring a Kindle an you can have the latest 1000 page best seller, some essays from Emerson, a pulp stories from the 1950s, the book from a South African novelist that won't see print in the US for another 6 months...you get the idea. Of course Amazon's store makes it really easy to buy stuff for the Kindle but you can also load up on free books from sites likehttp://mnybks.net/ or http://m.gutenberg.org/.

The Kindle can make reading both more private (if you want) or more public (if you want). On the subway, reading your Kindle, nobody knows if you're reading Gibbon's Decline & Fall of the Roman Empireor the latest story of teen vampires from Stephanie Meyer. But, if you're one of those people (like me) who likes to share interesting lines you find in a book or jot down notes, the Kindle total has that aspect of reading down. Not only can you highlight text and jot notes, but you can share those notes and highlights via Twitter. Again, this is something you can do, but you don't have to do. But via Twitter I've learned of new writers, found new books and generally broadened my reading experience.

Here's an example. I'm a fan of William Gibson and I follow him on Twitter. He goes silent when he's working on a new book, but once the manuscript is in the hands of the publisher or he's out on a book tour he's out there tweeting away. So I knew when Zero History was coming out last fall and I pre-ordered it on my Kindle and it appeared magically there (because we're living in the freakin future, folks). And I completely enjoyed it and tweeted out some excerpts and maybe some folks followed those links and bought some more copies of Bill's book. Good for Bill. BTW, it's a damn good book.

At various times William Gibson raved about the novels of Lauren Beukes and while her paper novels at the time were not for sale in the US, I was able to get the Kindle versions for less than $5 each and I was blown away by her way with a story. BTW, Lauren recently won the Arthur C. Clarke award for Science Fiction for her novel Zoo City, so I guess I wasn't the only one blown away.

Of course I've found some duds in my Kindle reading but another neat thing with the Kindle is that you can download samples from most books to get a feel for them. Also, many authors are releasing their out-of-print backstock titles on the Kindle for free or at low prices to help drum up demand for their newer titles. And small, indie authors are publishing straight to the Kindle. Some of these books are very good and about 70% of the sale price goes to the author. I took a $3 chance on indie author Ray Doty and bought Out of the Black. For the price of a cup of fancy coffee I got a great thriller and Ray made a couple of bucks.

Reading on the Kindle is great. Battery life is terrific and I hear the battery life is about twice as good on the new ones. The new screen is supposed to be even crisper but the screen on my Kindle is a joy to read on even in full daylight. Another advantage of the Kindle is that you can pick a comfortable font size, so if you want all your books can be large print books. The Kindle doesn't have a backlight and while reading lights are available, I sometimes use a headlamp. More often for night reading, I actually usually use the Kindle software on my ARCHOS 32. There is also free Kindle software for iPhones, iPads, Droids, PCs and what have you. The neat thing is that the software keeps your place in whatever you're reading, no matter what device you are on. Whenever I switch between devices, Amazon keeps track of where I am. (And yes, that is kind of creepy!)

While the Kindle is, first and foremost, a book reader, there are some handy apps and services you can access via the "experimental" web browser. My 3G Kindle has free wireless connection to the internet and yes, it's really free. I've paid for my Kindle and I've paid for books I've bought, but I've never had to pay anything to access the net via my Kindle. And that's a really handy thing.

Here are a few useful Kindle sites:

http://www.kindletwit.com/ -- This site lets me browse and post to Twitter via my Kindle.

http://kindlefish.t15.org/kfishdx.html -- This site uses Google to translate between various languages.

http://maps.google.com/m/directions -- A simple link to the Google Directions.

There are also some handy applications and games available for the Kindle, costing anywhere from $1 to $3. I've found Notepad, Easy Calculator and Calendar Pro to be worthwhile and both Christine and I are hooked on the word game Panda Poet.

In the year-plus that I've had my Kindle, it's gone with me on various bike trips, tours to the backwoods and trips to Portland. When Christine and I went to Lopez Island last fall, our Kindles went with us. The Kindles have held up fine and are still going strong.

Keep 'em rolling,

Kent "Mountain Turtle" Peterson

Issaquah WA USA

Jackfruit by David E.X.N. Nghiem: A Review

Disclaimer: I was provided a review copy of Jackfruit by the author at no charge.

Why we do what we do is one of the core questions in the heart of each of us. In the case of David Nghiem, he finds himself drawn to Latin America with his bicycle on a journey that he chronicles in his bookJackfruit. An engineer by training, Nghiem has experiences and finds evidence that contradict the common views of history and technology. His attempts to find meaning in symbols, to visit ancient sites and to learn how the people of today live in this part of the world, form a narrative of highs and lows and some questions that remain unanswered. While this book may be too mystical for some, I have no doubt that it is a sincere representation of the author's experience.

Nghiem describes the terrain, the hardships, the artifacts and the people, but the bulk of the story is carried on in conversations. In Peru, for example:

"Why did you come here David?"

I looked at him. Ernesto now had a strange, searching, expression that I hadn't seen before on his face.

"You know, that's the same question my father asked me before I went. I told him - I told him that I didn't know. I just had to go."

Ernesto smiled. "It is always that way. The legend of Paititi is that only those who are selected may see the city. Otherwise, it appears and disappears at will, confusing those who are not worthy. It is for those who come here beyond their own will."

Beyond their own will? What the hell... I started to get a strange buzz up my back. It's the kind of feeling I would get whenever something major was up.

"David, do you think you are the "Escogido'?"

"Escogido?"

"The name the old Quechua woman called you was Acclhaska. Do you know what it means?"

"It means searcher, right?"

"No... it means 'Chosen One'."

At times Jackfruit certainly reads like an episode of the X-files, with unexplained lights and electrical storms whipping in from nowhere the instant a magical talisman is accidentally destroyed. But, to extend the X-files comparison, Nghiem is more a skeptical Scully than a willing Mulder who wants to believe.

While Nghiem goes to interesting places and has some interesting conversations, in too many places his writing is awkward. Nghiem has a knack for including too much detail in some places and not nearly enough in others. I know, for example, how many times he had to run to the bathroom one night, but I have no idea of the contents of his panniers. In trying to convey an idea of the size of the 200 ton stones of the temple ruins at Sacsayhuaman, Nghiem writes the following:

To present a relationship, the US aircraft carrier Nimitz weighs about 97,000 tons, the battleship New Jersey is 15,000 tons, a typical destroyer class ship is 5-7000 tons, and a 4 story nuclear reactor can be 670 tons.

Despite the mind-numbing level of detail in that sentence, I reached the end of it with no real idea of the size of those stones. Perhaps a good old-fashioned comparison such as "big as a house" would've been better in this instance.

While some paragraphs are smothered in detail, in other places the book reads as if vital bits of information have been left out. One night, after encountering "Dead, hacked opened, mutilated and gutted bodies of dogs, at least eight or nine of them laid on the road, and their guts were all over the place", Nghiem makes it to a hostel. That night "the woman's warning, and the memory of the dead dogs haunted me." While a few paragraphs earlier I'd gotten a flashback of Nghiem's parent's experiences in Vietnam, I vainly flipped back through pages looking for the woman's warning. I never found it.

I have no reason to doubt Nghiem's veracity when recounting the local people's distaste for various vile practices of the World Bank and the U.S. government, but perhaps too many of the books 400 odd pages are spent in diatribes against imperialist corporations. What hostility there is towards gringos is never expressed towards Nghiem, however. He makes friends and works very hard to learn Spanish after an amusing and awkward experience with a young woman in Peru. At the beginning of the book, he knew only about 80 words of Spanish, but by the end, he is fluent.

The best parts of Jackfruit are the people. Nghiem is befriended by the man who designed Thor Heyerdahl's boat, the national bicycle champion of Honduras, Peace Corp workers and a remarkable boy with Down's Syndrome. The true friendships Nghiem forms shine through in the pages of Jackfruit.

Jackfruit is not a how-to manual that will tell you how to tour Latin America and there are far more questions asked than answered within it's pages. It is by no means a perfect book, Nghiem is still more an engineer than a writer and despite some strong scenes and moving passages, the book feels unfinished. But all our journeys ultimately only take us a bit further along the road and we are not here to be perfect, but to be human. At it's core, Jackfruit is a very human story.

You can read more reviews of Jackfruit on Amazon and you can read more about Jackfruit and David Nghiem's latest adventures at:

http://davesnewadventure.com/

Keep 'em rolling,

Kent "Mountain Turtle" Peterson

Issaquah WA USA

6 Books in a Backpack: Episodes 2, 3 & 4

Last month I wrote about my idea for 6 Books in a Backpack, a scheme I had that would give me reasons to ride, keep in touch with friends & get some ideas flowing in the form of book exchanges. I've now done a 4 of these exchanges and I have another one scheduled for next week in Portland.

The principle behind these exchanges is that from zero to 6 books can change hands, but you have to leave with the same number of books you came with. Barb Chamberlin describes this as The SISO Method for Life Management. In my first exchange with Joe, 6 books changed hands. In the second exchange with my friend Lexi, we traded 5 books. In my meeting with Barb, we swapped 3 books and when I met up with Ryan, 3 books changed hands.

In the past I've been vague about identifying a certain camping spotbecause I'd really be happier if a bunch of people didn't wind up camping there and similarly I've concluded that it's best not to detail every exchange in a "I got this book to A and got this book in exchange" fashion. A couple of the books I've gotten in trade I've already really enjoyed and I've thought "Oh, X will really like this, I'll put it in the pile of books I'm taking to my meeting with him." It would be a real shame to meet with X and have him say "Oh yeah, that was a great book, I bought it as soon as I read about it on your blog!"

I will, within these self-imposed concepts of vagueness, report on the great success of this project. While the first 3 meetings were with old friends, my latest was with a new friend, Ryan who was up visiting from Portland and got in touch because of my initial post on this subject. I turns out that Ryan and I have friends in common & we traded a couple of emails to assess our tastes in books.

In every exchange I've gotten books that were new to me, some by authors I've never read. The self-imposed deadlines of these meetings have me reading more, scanning my shelves and talking more books with more people. All good things. And I've ridden at least one hundred miles going to and from these meetings and had terrific, wide ranging conversations.

The exchanges themselves remind me of playing cards. We each pull out our six books, describe them and then we may or may not swap. Sometimes there's a "Oh yeah, that's good, I read it in college" or "Nah, I've got too many historical novels on my plate already" and that's fine. Sometimes we discuss books we didn't bring, other books by the authors we've brought to the table, or books that we find similar in theme or tone to the books at hand.

I'm reading more, riding more & having a lot of wide ranging conversations because of the 6 Books in a Backpack project, so I count it as a rousing success. If you're at all bookish, you might want to give it a try.

Keep 'em rolling,

Kent "Mountain Turtle" Peterson

Issaquah WA USA

6 Books in a Backpack: Episode 1

It was raining when I get up this morning and I might have chosen to be lazy and hang around at home if I hadn't previously set myself up for action. But I had so I load six books in a backpack and set off on my little red bike in the rain.

The source of this motion and the source of several more trips I have planned over the next few weeks are the result of a thought I had a few weeks ago, a thought that found expression in the following email.

-------------

From: Kent Peterson

To: bcc

Date: Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 6:51 PM

Subject: 6 Books in a Backpack

OK, this is going out blind CC to a mess of folks. Some of you I see often, some I haven't seen in years. I hope if you are getting this you at least go "Oh yeah, Kent, I remember that guy..."

Anyhow, I'm always looking for excuses to get out, ride my bike someplace, chat with folks, think about things. I had this random thought today about how I have a lot of books that are good, on all kinds of subjects, that I probably won't read again. Maybe I should get rid of them, then I'd have a bit more room to get more stuff and...then I had the thought. Here goes.

I take 6 books. Not 6 junky books but 6 books that I like. That I'd recommend to a friend. Six books that I'd be happy to keep actually. I put 'em in a backpack and go off somewhere to meet up with a friend. Probably a coffee shop. Heck, let's have the friend pick the spot.

The friend and I show up at the meeting place. We each have a pack with 6 books. We show what we brought. We chat about books. We chat about old times. We have a nice beverage. Maybe we swap a book, or two, or six or none. No big deal. The rule is this, however: You can't bring home more books than you left home with. You can come home with the same books or different books but not more books.

Got it?

Good!

You're the friend. This can happen any time. Propose a time & place. Don't worry if it's too far or too inconvenient. If it doesn't work, I'll tell you. These days I'm working Fri, Sat, Sun & Monday but things change and schedules can flex. But if you've got some time on a Tue, Wed or Thursday, think about a meet-up.

BTW this can be one of my weird excuses for travel. Portland folks, I'm thinking of you.

Also, please steal this idea and clone it around to your friends. But anytime you feel like tossing 6 books in a backpack and going someplace, let me know.

I hope everyone is having a lovely time.

Kent "Mountain Turtle" Peterson

Issaquah WA USA

http://kentsbike.blogspot.com/

PS, if this is of zero interest to you please ignore it!

----------

As it turns out, I got quite a few responses. Tomorrow I'll meet up with my friend Lexi in Seattle, but today is episode one of 6 Books in a Backpack and I'm meeting up with my pal Joe at the Starbucks in Lakemont.

This particular Starbucks is most of the way up Cougar Mountain and I'm on a bike with little wheels and 3 gears. Even though the trip from my house in only maybe 6 miles, that last mile up the mountain makes me feel like I've gotten a workout. I'm damp enough that the warm coffee is very welcome.

Joe rolls up on his Brompton and confesses the same thought I'd had, "If we hadn't set this up in advance, I probably wouldn't have gone out." Part one of the plan is successful, it spurred us both into action. We talk of many things: of bikes, advocacy, randonneuring, jobs we've had in the past, college courses, riding at night & raingear. Eventually, we talk of books.

I'd grabbed six books with Joe in mind and he'd cheated a bit, he had seven plus he had a book I'd loaned him months ago that he was returning. Despite this slight breach of the rules, we wind up swapping nearly everything.

We give quick summaries of the books we've brought. My side of the conversation goes something like this:

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest -- "Steampunk alternate history. Zombies in Seattle. Poison Gas. Airships. Kick Ass Heroine."

Spook Country by William Gibson -- "Gibson's follow up to 'Pattern Recognition' (the borrowed book Joe was returning). Some of the same characters. Great fun."

The Lost City of Z by David Grann -- "Story of Percy Fawcett, last of the old school explorers who vanished into the Amazon Jungle in the 1920s. Since then dozens of people have died going into the jungle trying to find out what happened to him. This book was written by a not-at-all-outdoorsy New York writer who winds up obsessed with the mystery and ultimately goes to the Amazon himself. Since he got the book written, you know he survives but it's a hell of a page-turner."

A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols -- "Another true adventure. 1968, the first solo round-the-world sailing race. 9 guys start, one makes it back. Awesome stories."

Drop City by T. C. Boyle -- "Novel set in the early 70s. California hippies run into trouble with their commune and move the whole operation to wild Alaska when one of them inherits a chunk of land from his uncle. Great cross-cultural utopia vs reality stuff."

The Signal by Ron Carlson -- "Like a Hemingway novel without the macho crap. Guy goes camping with his ex-wife after totally screwing up their marriage. Great writing, hell of a story."

Remarkably, Joe hasn't read any of the books I've brought and he wants them all.

We go through his books. Aside from returning Gibson's Pattern Recognition, Joe has three books he doesn't need to describe, since I've already read them. But we both agree that they'd be good books to go into my future trade pile so I take Woody Allen's Getting Even, Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes, and Timothy Egan's The Good Rain.

Since he's brought one extra book, I pass on the volume by P. G. Wodehouse. I enjoy Wodehouse's stuff immensely, but I read his works as Project Gutenberg files on my Kindle or MiniDroid.

Joe totally sells me on John McPhee's The Founding Fish. Joe confesses, "I'd never even heard of the shad until I read this book and McPhee makes them fascinating." I've read other books by McPhee, so I know what Joe means. I'm looking forward to digging into this one.

I admit I'm a bit nervous in taking on Ken Follett's massive World Without End. Joe tells me it's set in the 14th century and it's the sequel to another huge Follet novel set in the 12th century. "But you don't need to read 'em in order and it's really, really good. It totally moves along and you'll learn a lot." It's books of this size and scope that made me basically give up watching TV. I found that when I gave up watching every damn episode of Law & Order, I suddenly had the time to read thousand page novels. That seems like a better use of my time.

Joe's final selection is Nice Work by David Lodge. "Laugh out loud funny," he assures me. "Really, I was reading it on a plane and laughing. People kept looking at me. It was embarrassing."

So Joe has six different books and I have six different books. We load the books into our packs and head out to the bikes. It's stopped raining.

I've never been to Joe's place and he doesn't live far away, so I go over to check out his bikes. Joe is a guy with a proper set of priorities. His cars stay outside. His garage looks like this:

That brings episode one of 6 Books in a Backpack to a close. I have more trips like this planned and I hope the idea spreads. If you're anywhere near my part of the world and want to swap some books, drop me a note (kentsbike at gmail dot com). If you want to do something like this with your pals, please do so.

Keep 'em rolling & keep reading,

Kent "Mountain Turtle" Peterson

Issaquah WA USA

Review: Amazon Kindle

First off, I'm going to start off with my standard disclaimer: I make money off of Amazon. Not a lot, but it's what keeps this blog going and it's where the bulk of my adventure budget comes from. When readers like you click on any Amazon link here and buy anything fromAmazon in the next 24 hours, a percentage of your purchase dollars go to me. It doesn't cost you anything more but Amazon pays me for the referral. So if you buy stuff that way, thanks.

If you are thinking, "hey, he's just talking about X because he wants me to buy it!" (and in this case X is a Kindle), well, yes, I certainly do have an incentive to sell you stuff. But I bet you don't come here to be sold stuff. I bet you come here to find something that might be interesting, useful or of some relevance to bike riders. The Kindle scores well on all three counts.

I've written briefly about my first big bike tour back in 1982, when I was fresh out of college. I rode solo from Minnesota to California. For company at night in camp, I read paperback books I picked up along the way. Books are heavy, so I'd only carry one. When I'd finish the book I had, I'd give it away and buy something else. Of course the trick was picking the right book, one that would match my mood. And while it would have been nice to carry a whole library with me, there was no practical way to do it at the time.

Now there is. Now we have things like iPhones, Androids, Nooks and Kindles. The Internet has a wealth of stuff ready to be grabbed and read. I'll let other people rave about how cool their iPhone is and tell me how I should have waited for an iPad. That's OK. I understand gadget enthusiasm. It is the enthusiasm that has inspired me to write this post.

The Kindle is an electronic book reader. It's not the first ebook reader and it certainly won't be the last, but it is the one that made me hit the "Buy Now" button last week. It's not a move I made lightly, it's a pricey little gadget after all, and it is something I'd dismissed long ago as being to limited, restricted and intentionally crippled to be of use to me. I not only dismissed the Kindle, I pretty much echoed Cory Doctorow's negative impressions of the device that he posted on Boing Boing back in 2007.

Some people think the three words "I love you" are the hardest to say, but I find saying "I was wrong" is much harder. I spent a couple of years bashing the device without revisiting my assumptions or checking out the revised Kindle. When I finally did re-examine the world of ebooks, gadgets, and the status of creative content in our evolving digital age, I found that I had to utter those three words. I was wrong about theKindle.

I've long been a believer in things like Open Source and the Creative Commons but I'm also a believer in checking out at least some of the more reasoned opposing views, so I bought a copy of Jaron Lanier's book You Are Not a Gadget. Jaron makes some interesting points in favor of the value of closed systems and the need for methods to compensate those who create the art and products that enrich our lives. We can't all give everything away or support ourselves with advertising. Of course, it is a bit ironic that a paper book called You Are Not a Gadget may turn out to be one of the last paper books I buy and that it served at least as a partial inspiration for me to buy yet another gadget!

Steve Jobs also ironically helped me push the Buy Now button for theKindle. Everyone knows Steve is the driving force behind the Mac, the iPod and the iPhone. And soon we'll have the iPad. But Apple really likes to lock things down, to control what can and can't go on their devices. That's their right and they make wonderful products that people love, but I like that there are companies competing and that we as consumers get to vote with our dollars. I'm glad that Google Android devices are out there competing with the iPhone and that the iPad is going to be competing with the Kindle. Competition will improve these devices over time.

Which brings me back to the Kindle. When I looked at the iPad what I said to myself was what I really wanted was a light device with great battery life, that would let me read books and web pages. It would be great if it could connect wirelessly to the web (not just at wifi hotspots, but via 3G) but I didn't want to be paying a bunch every month for web access I might not use that often.


I found out that while the Nook may get a web browser at some point, the Kindle has one right now. It's not great and it's labeled "Experimental" but it's built-in and it works. It connects to the web wirelessly, for free, via what Amazon calls Whispernet. Once I found that out, plus the fact that I wasn't just limited to getting books from Amazon, I ordered my Kindle.

The Kindle is really thin. The protective case I ordered is much bulkier than the device itself, but even with the case the Kindle is smaller and lighter than a slim hardback book. And the readability of the screen is amazing. The screen looks like a page, not a screen and the Kindledraws damn near zero power from it's internal battery except when you "turn" a page. You can pick from various font sizes and rotate the screen to display your books in either portrait or landscape mode. Dedicated buttons let you page back and forth and a tiny joypad and keyboard let you take notes, place bookmarks, navigate menus and things like that. If you want, the Kindle can read to you in your choice of a male or female robotic voice.

Amazon claims that the Kindle can go for a week without a charge and longer than that if you shut off the Whispernet. The charger is very compact, an AC plug that connects to a USB cable.

The cable lets you connect the Kindle to a computer for file transfers. The Kindle side of the cable is a micro-USB, so the charger works with my Peek. The modular cable also works great with my Solar Charger, so my entire email/web-browsing/book reading kit can run off the sun.

An eReader needs eBooks and obviously Amazon is betting that folks will fill their Kindles with eBooks from Amazon. The first eBook I bought was one that I passed on in hardcover because it was just too big. Really. Stephen King's latest novel, Under the Dome, weighs about three pounds. I just couldn't see myself hauling that around on my bike. The Kindle edition adds no weight to my pack and Amazon sells it for half of what they sell the hardcover for. So a heavyweight author like Stephen King just made one more sale because his book is digital.

My second Kindle purchase supports a woman who I'm sure is not making a stephenkingload of money. Amy Stewart's The Last Bookstore in America is a wonderful grass-roots novel with wonderful characters and a great plot revolving around the changes wrought by gizmos and etexts. See her website athttp://www.lastbookstoreinamerica.com/ for more details.

While Amazon makes it incredibly easy to buy books with just a click on your Kindle or computer, they also have over 20,000 public domain classics for free.

I've long been getting free eBooks from Manybooks.net and I was happy to find out that their 26,000 titles can all be easily searched and downloaded at the Kindle-friendly mobile version of their site at:http://mnybks.net/

And if you want even more Kindle books, this great tip from A Kindle World Blog tells you how to directly load eBooks from Project Gutenberg to your Kindle.

I've been amazed at how quickly I've taken to the Kindle. I've become as annoying as those iPhone zealots. I bet Sherman Alexie wants to punch me. But I can carry a library on my bike. I can read a bunch of books at the same time and the Kindle keeps track of my place in each one. I can search for that cool quote I half remember. I can scribble e-notes and not feel guilty.

My wife, for one, is glad I've become a Kindle convert. "I've wanted one for a while," she confessed, "but I figured you'd give me crap about it". I told her I was sorry. I told her I was wrong. We're waiting for one more check to clear and then ordering her Kindle this Friday.

BTW, long suffering blog-fans, I've just wrapped up my old job, just started my new job and am amping up the Tour Divide Training. And I had to get a couple of articles out for some old-fashioned paper publications. And I've been reading about a dozen books on my Kindle. Which all is a lame way of explaining the lack of blog posts here. But fear not, trail adventures are in the works as are some more blog post where I wont try to sell you a damn thing except for the idea that you should be out on your bike having fun!

Keep 'em rolling,

Kent