Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Long Way Round

Lately I've become disenchanted with regular primetime television. It used to be that you would have season premiers in the fall and then you would have new shows all winter until the season wrapped up in the spring. Summer was a time of re-runs and we accepted this. Now it seems like they are producing fewer and fewer new episodes of shows to air durring the winter and we end up with a bunch of re-runs mid season. I like certain shows but it is hard to remain faithful to them when they go on hiatus for a month. Grey's Anatomy did just that and we don't get a new episode until April 30th. Now I know I will go running back to it when the new ones start but I'm on the look out for new shows in the mean time. My search for things that don't suck has lead me away from the regular television that I normally watch and I've found things like Top Gear and Survivorman.

I recenty found a mini-series called Long Way Round and I've been transfixed by it. I can't stop watching it. I was enjoying it so much that I downloaded the whole series just so I wouldn't have to wait for more. I'm seriously considering buying the DVD and I've already downloaded and watched it. The story is Ewen McGregor and Charley Boorman take two motorcycles and ride the "long way round" from London to New York. They go east through Europe, asia, Canada and finally into the US. There was actually three bikes, them plus a camera man and they had two 4x4 support vehicles following behind them to help at border crossings and with other difficulties. They did get to ride the sweetest dual sport bikes though, the BMW R1150GS Adventure. At one point the camera man had to ride a Russian made bike because they broke his and oddly enough it performed better than the BMW's in places. I think the RS1150GS's were a little too big and heavy for the trip. They may have done better with lighter bikes especially when the roads got bad. They said that Mongolia only has 80 miles of paved roads and now I would believe them. I was amazed at how friendly everyone was. Before they left they were warned about the mafia in Russia and all the bad things that could happen in Kazakhstan or Mongolia but everyone was helpful and friendly the whole way. The only bad thing to happen was one bag got stolen near the end of the trip. It is a really amazing story that makes you feel good about humanity. If you want to check it out it is on mininova.org or go buy it at amazon and send a bit of money their way for the next trip.

Well that's it for now. I'll leave you with some advice, try to get a hummer in West Virginia.

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