Tomas and Lucie Vetrovsky

Lucas on Easter

tomasv — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 18:48:10 +0000

Lucas dancing to Xbox at Czech Easter gathering and doing egg hunt in our backyard

Fast Tube by Casper

Motorcycle offroad traning and Mt. Rainier trip

tomasv — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 18:23:16 +0000

On Sunday April 8th we met at 8:15 near HWy 18 in Hobart. The goal was to find and explore some new dirt routes before our 2PM motorcycle offroad training in Roy, WA. I have spent hours on Google Maps in street views trying to find which roads may not be blocked and lead us to some more rugged area. Unfortunately I have not expected signs like the first photo below – we agreed we are not going to push our luck if though on the map it seemed that road connected to a nice system of fire roads.
The next road was gated off because of the Tacoma watershed area – OK that one I understand. But all of the other DNR gates I don’t. Why can’t street legal motorcycles travel on dirt routes, when there is no active logging??!! The same goes for the Hancock managed land – there are so many roads that would be great to travel but all of them are off limits. So the only dirt road was 165 to Evan’s creek ORV area where we found Ford 150 stuck in snow/mud. Went back for help and left before the rescue was finished. Beautiful views form up there!
Next we went to Roy, WA for the Puget Sound Safety motorcycle offroad training. We started with their smaller Kawasaki KLX 250 bikes but quickly switched back to our big Vstrom 650 and my BMW R1200 GS for some of the exercises…

At the end we decided to try jumping the logs with big bikes – something we have not imagined would be possible even with the small once before the training – it worked! Just look at the videos below

great day, great ride!

Fast Tube by Casper

Fast Tube by Casper

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

BMW and Vstrom 650 off road in Nort Bend, WA

tomasv — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 02:08:06 +0000

Today was another great day for riding – while it was raining so hard at most Eastside, the North Bend area based on the radar was dry – we even got to see sun through the clouds at some moments. As you can notice a week later compared to the last moto trip the snow line was much higher so we were able to find out why the road was closed – wash out from a stream.

Since this was Karel’s first real time off the pavement he pushed his bike and while I wasn’t sure about the strength of the mud I decided to ride – it was fine and it held the heavy BMW R1200 GS just fine.

Or course it looks so easy in the video:

Fast Tube by Casper

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Motorcycle dirt road North Bend, WA

tomasv — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 06:05:31 +0000

While there was snow when I woke up this morning, by the time I got off the last conf call it was sunny so I could not resist and took the BMW R1200 GS out for a short, 70 mile trip with about 40 miles of dirt near North Bend, WA. Awesome afternoon, even got to play and practice on a side trail for a bit – came back home with a big grin

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]