In my dotage, I seem to have developed some sort of spring allergies.This morning it lead to the dreaded full face helmet sneeze. A most unpleasant experience.
  I'm on day three with a loaner scooter as my baby gets a pre-flight check. There must be a desperate shortage in rubber belts as the one for my transmission seems to be surprisingly difficult to obtain. Or maybe they are a hand crafted specialty and there is a Juan Valdez type figure wandering the mountains scraping rubber from trees. Vulcanized over an open hearth as his sons smelt ore for the steel core. Then he straps his donkey to a cart loaded down with piles of black and stinky v-belts to the local farmers market where an Englishman in a starched white shirt and cravat buys up the local stock and loads it onto a rusty freighter headed to US ports.
  Well, however it gets here, that is one of the last steps towards being ready for the trip. I'm also testing the workflow of adding pictures along the way. In that spirit, here's one of the pictures that I took last Sunday before we left Door County. This is the boat launch on North Bay. A spot from which A and I did some open water kayaking a few years back as part of a sea kayak symposium. I enjoyed it immensely, but A had some problems with the wind. Her loaner kayak was not equipped with a skeg to help keep her on track.