Andrea planted tomatos again this year. They have a pretty good place behind our house where they get sun pretty much the whole day. Very yummy.

As planned for this weekend - we did some more road trips so that I could get used to riding "Baby Sue" and would feel step by step a little less like a very newbie. The Bay Area has so many awesome routes that it is not hard for Guido to find something nice, but rather hard to decide which one of the really good trips to do.

Long planned and it finally happened: Diana, my sister, with her friend Tim came for a visit to sunny California. They had planned the trip for quite a while and where here from late March to early April - basically during the German easter holiday break as Tim is a teacher and therefore somewhat limited to the official holidays.

We had nice time and I hope the two enjoyed the time here in the US and will come again when they have a chance.

Another hunt in the neighborhood got us another 36 Grapefruit ... people are throwing them away here.

As Andrea is in Seattle at the moment, I did a day trip to the coast on the F800GS. It really brought many smiles to my face - the ride was fantastic, the weather pretty good most of the time - it was only slight chilly at the end.

So, where did I go?

It's grapefruit time in California. Since christmas we drink freshly squeezed juice about twice a week and haven't bought a single fruit ...

Right now we don't have enough oranges to make a good mix, so we might add orange juice as the grapefruit are sour and a slightly bitter. But the resulting juice is great.

When we came home last week Tuesday after climbing the whole area where we live in was dark. Completely dark. No power. This is something I remember from being a kid and in the 70s and early 80s we had some power outages back in Germany. After a big thunderstorm and a flash hitting somewhere close so that the fuses blew out and you had to switch them back on. It was rarely a wide spread thing.

Now in 2010, about 30 years later, in a country that claims it is a modern technical society this happened.

Andrea just picked them from our Mandarin tree.

As the weather was almost perfect today - 15 degrees Celsius and sunny, I decided that it was time to try out the new Aeroflow XL windshield together with the Aeroguards which have arrived last week. I had them sitting in the office as I forgot them a couple times there as I wasn't riding anyways in the last couple days, but on Friday I brought them home and installed them yesterday.

It really gets colder at the moment and we have a real fall feeling. It's late in the year for this, but as we are in California, I'm not really surprised. November was a wonderful month, sometimes cold (okay, a bit cooler), but mostly sunny.

December gets way more rain now, about every second day at the moment. Still I was riding my bicycle to work today.

One of the really nice things of fall are the crazy colors at some times. See the attached picture (click it for a large version).