If you’ve read my blog in the past, you’ll know that while I love taking solo trips, I also love sharing the fun with my best riding buddy, Dick. We have been friends for over 20 years now (that’s some crazy sh*t) and we’ve been on a lot of adventures together.

I wanted to share just a few rides, some from the past and one from just last weekend. You should know I take my life into my hands when taking photos of him. Which is why I’m grinning in this pic and he is…not. But hey, what are friends for?

On this particular ride, Dick came up to Mt. Shasta and I took him on a tour in my back yard. We started out at the mountain, of course.

From here, we headed off to the Lava Beds Nat’l monument. Over the last half million years or so, volcanic eruptions have created the landscape that is the Lava Beds. It’s filled with over 800 lava tube caves that you can explore. Here are just a few we saw.

Legend has it that Bigfoot and other mythical creatures like to hide in caves. While I didn’t spot Bigfoot, it definitely had a magical (and a little creepy) vibe.

While we were nosing around, we happened to see a couple. The woman was holding a giant stuffed banana. You heard me. Dick and I looked at each other and just kind of shrugged our shoulders.

But then I caught wind of the conversation. She kept telling her boyfriend that it was “his turn to hold the baby”!

I thought, surely she can’t mean the banana. That is when she handed him the giant banana and he had a tired expression on his face as he reluctantly took baby banana off her hands. In order to hold the banana baby, he had to put down his stuffed baby animal because apparently they both had “babies”. These were grown-ass adults by the way, not kids.

Whatever floats your boat, is what I like to say. Later on at our lunch stop it gave us plenty to discuss. Does the banana baby have a car seat? Are they just babysitting the banana or are they the parents? What does baby banana eat? Smaller bananas? And so on….

Yep, we’ve had some fun over the years. Once we took our dirt bikes to Moab, UT and rode the red rocks.

Another time we did the Topaz dual sport ride and saw some amazing scenery that you’d probably never get to in a car. We even rode in the secret back road to Bodie Ghost Town.

Here on another ride, I got myself stuck in the mud, and like all good friends, instead of helping me out, he made sure to take photos.

Yep, lots of fun times, too many rides to try and list over 20 plus years.

So, last weekend I went out to his neck of the woods, and we had an epic riding day in the Sierras. We rode my favorite road from Georgetown, rode beautiful back roads to Loon Lake, stopped for lunch at a rustic old cafe’, saw Uncle Tom’s Cabin and stopped at Big Hill Lookout.

Yeah, solo riding is fun, but sharing it with your best riding buddy is even better.

I hope you have a friend in your life that you can adventure with, laugh with and get in trouble with. Happy Trails!