As February gets closer to its end, mother nature decided to throw us a curve ball. Instead of the typical rainy weeks of misery we tend to get around here this time of year, she gave us one beautiful week, and an absolutely gorgeous weekend.

Mid 50 temperatures, clear, cloudless skies, and beautiful snow capped mountains surrounding us. It really has been a wonderful time so far this year with our weather.

My weekend started early, due to putting in my 40 hours earlier in the week, and getting Friday off because of this.

Friday ended up being a great day.

I woke, surfed around a bit, got a package out in the mail that I’ve been meaning to get out all week, but was unable to make it to the post office in time.

Grabbed some breakfast, and then head out to Renton Fish and Game Club for some .22 target practice.

After shooting through a few hundred rounds of .22, and realizing that the scope that I have had on my 10/22 for the last 20 years was really not working well. It seemed every shot it rose up and to the left.  It at least made it challenging to compensate each shot to try and hit the target.

After we finished up at the gun range, we took off to Popeye’s for some fried chicken. It has been a long while since I’ve been to Popeye’s, and my roommate had never been, so it seemed like a great idea for lunch. And it was!

We finally pulled in home around 2pm, and the day was already great, but I decided to make it much better by going for a ride.

My roommate’s WR250X is in the shop having some warranty work done right now, so I let him ride Kara (My XT225) while I rode the KLR.

We took a typical route to Sultan, then made our way up Sultan Basin Rd to hit the forest service road and head up to Lake Spada.

We rode around a bit, then head back, making it home around 6pm.

Saturday was a packed day.

I woke up, got ready, head out to my buddy Jason’s place and loaded up his F4i in the back of my pickup to take to KFG to have his suspension rebuilt.

I got home around 11, then grabbed the KLR, and all of the new toys I received in the last week and threw them in the panniers and took off to Grant Johnson’s house.

This day would have been great, save a few minor inconveniences.

First off, the torsion spring on the Doohickey took us a good hour to try and get on. Eventually it took 3 people to get it on, and that kind of set the pace for the rest of the day.

So we pulled the clutch cover, cleaned the oil trap, and then I moved on to the Thermo-Bob installation.

Thermo-Bob installation went rather well. It wasn’t too bad, except I forgot to bring along the directions. Luckily Grant let me use his laptop so I could download them.

Installation finished up, it was no time to add coolant. Started to add coolant, and heard something draining against the floor.

At first, I thought I had forgot to put the drain plug back in, at the bottom of the water pump housing, but that wasn’t it. Nope.

We drained the fluid once more, and I decided that we would fill the bike up with fluid right before I headed home, so I could get the bike home.

Because of this decision, and the time wasted on it, I wasn’t able to get around to doing the sub-frame mod, nor was I able to get back into the carb to make adjustments from last weekends dealings.

We buttoned the bike back up, and I got ready in my gear.

Ready to go, Kevin and Grant topped off my Coolant as I sat on the bike, started it up, and rode away.

I kept an eye on the coolant temp the whole way home. It stayed steady, and I eventually made it home, parked the bike in the garage and put a catch pan under it. Still plenty of coolant left in the system.

Sunday I was planning on finally getting around to putting the TTR forks on the XT, but after Saturday’s series of events, I instead joined Grant and Kevin on a ride up around the Mountain Loop Highway on my XT.

What a very welcomed ride.  The day was gorgeous. No clouds in the sky, sun was bright, air was crisp, and the ride was fantastic.

The reason for the ride, was to explore some of the side roads for a camp spot for future camping excursions.  We managed to make it up a ways on one very overgrown road when one of the other guys who had joined us, had dropped his KLR a couple times, and now it wouldn’t start. After a couple hours of diagnostics, we got it bump started, and decided to keep to the main road.

We eventually found a few spots to camp later on that would work out for us, and continued on around the loop.

It was a much needed ride that really ended the weekend on a high note, especially after Saturday’s disappointing outcome.