Track Pete

If you’ve been following the shorter updates on Facebook or Twitter , you’ll know that I left Washington DC on Thursday morning riding on a brand new red Genuine Rattler 110 scooter.  The first day of travel was about as epic as things will get on this journey, taking me over 500 miles to Boston via Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York City.  I spent most of the day on small local streets trying to ensure my motor got the best break-in possible and as a result I was on the road for over 19 hours.  I decided to spend a couple days in Boston to catch some final R&R before heading onwards on the next big push, hopefully a bit more sanely managed. While I was in Boston, I stopped by Scooters Go Green , a great local dealer here.  The owners were fantastic and hooked me up with free service and some extra fluids for the road and we had a great time talking.  I highly recommend them to anyone doing some scooter shopping in the Boston area, they had a really qual...

After a lot of careful deliberation, I’ve settled on my audio/visual loadout for the Arctic Scooter Adventure.  The complete package weighs approximately 5.5lbs, the bulk of which consists of the new camera and the trusty old tripod.  My goal on this trip is to create increasingly immersive short videos with higher quality production.  As a result, there are a number of new items and upgrades in the loadout this time around…  Read on for a full review of all the equipment I’ll be taking with! Canon Rebel T2i Digital SLR I finally upgraded to a “real” camera – while I’ve been quite happy with the quality of the photos I take with my compact cameras, they didn’t always have the raw visceral impact that can be delivered with superior control over depth of field. Add the ability to take some of the highest quality video out there and ultimately I expect the T2i to have a massive impact on the quality of the experience I share with you guys.  The only downside ...

Last week I stopped by Genuine Scooters of Arlington to pick up my “dream” scooter – a Genuine Rattler 110 .  After paying just over $3000 out the door I was as committed to heading to the Arctic Circle as I could be.  I spent many hours a day last week putting miles on it around the city in hopes of breaking it in before I left for my trip and had tons of fun with it.  A scooter in DC is amazingly handy, even though I do live in some fear of getting a parking ticket for all the illegal parking I do… Then it went pear shaped – on Saturday, my best friend’s sister Carla was in town to visit and we rode the scooter down towards a big park in Virginia to meet up with Larry and the family.  After a wonderful hour ride down the George Washington Parkway the scooter suddenly gave up the ghost!  It locked up and died at 45MPH and refused to run properly afterwards.  I could get it to start but it would not rev up and push the scooter forward very fast, even und...

I created this blog to chronicle my first major solo adventure in late 2008, when I rode my motorcycle over 4,200 miles in just over three weeks from the east coast to the west coast of the USA.  That was the longest amount of contiguous time off I had taken from a job in nearly eight years and it solidified a slowly building realization that I wanted something different out of life – I wanted adventure! In the year and a half since then, I’ve completed major overland trips on two more continents along with another 10,000+ miles around the USA and I’ve gained a strange need for the challenge of open sky around me.  While I was driving an auto-rickshaw across India I started to think about what I wanted to do next, and it’s been bouncing around in my skull ever since.  I want to drive across Africa, I want to cross Australia, but most urgently I want to visit the Arctic Circle! Originally I thought about just flying up to Alaska and spending a month or two puttering ar...

Last week I spent four days down at the courthouse in Washington DC participating in the important civic exercise of jury duty.  After each side had presented their case and made their final arguments, our jury retired to the jury room in order to deliberate and find on the defendant’s guilt.  The relevant facts of the case can be reviewed in my longest blog post ever, available here . The presentation part of the case ended Wednesday afternoon at approximately 3PM, leaving us only an hour and a half to deliberate on this day.  As everyone filed into the jury room I could see a certain tension in the air, certainly felt quite strongly by me.  I took a quick break to use the restroom and returned to find everyone discussing the process of choosing a “jury foreman” – in what seemed a somewhat predictable routine there was an expectation that an older dignified looking gentleman (Ken) act in this role because he looked the part, however he wasn’t interested in doing s...

Prepare yourself for by far the longest blog post ever – if you’re at all curious about real life jury duty or enjoy all those cop & lawyer shows then give it a go - this recount of the trial and details given for evidence will blow your mind, make you think twice about the effectiveness of our police officers and the impartiality of our juries… Shortly before leaving on my trip in January, I was summoned for DC Grand Jury Duty .  I was able to have it rescheduled to begin on June 7 and made it back to the US only a few days before it was due to start.  After thinking about it I really felt that I would not be comfortable spending 27 days of 8:30AM to 5PM in an “office” for $30 a day, especially with the changes to the economy going on right now – I’d rather enjoy that time. Upon arriving at the courtroom for Grand Jury Duty, I quickly noted that there were over 40 people in the room, considerably more than the number required for the Grand Jury.  Once we were che...

My flight from Delhi to JFK was diverted to Newark due to visibility issues, now two hours later I have to shuttle over to JFK and attempt to get another flight home. Ah, airline drama. At least I am home sorta! My phone's internet is faster than anything in Asia and I had a sausage mcgriddle so I can't be too grumpy. 

After many months in Asia, I will finally be heading home tonight.  I made a number of friends (Tak, Mike, Ray) at various places, but nowhere did I get as close to people as here in Nepal.  It was especially odd saying goodbye to Mickey and Guy, but it will be really tough saying goodbye to Katrin – it’s incredible how a friendship can form in only a few weeks when you spend a lot of time walking mountains and exploring together. The last couple days in Kathmandu she has been my “German tour guide” as I relied on her and her German guidebook to figure out where to take us around the city.  Kathmandu is a pretty huge place and two days only allows you to barely scratch the surface, but those days have been pretty intense.  We’ve been staying in Boudhanath near the biggest stupa in Nepal which is supposed to contain the wordly remains of the original Buddha and is a really cool mix of Nepali, Tibetan, and tourism. Monday started with a rare venture to a res...