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BEING JOE DIRT

So being a snowmobile reporter and traveling the world in 1st class is a dream of yours? Do you honestly think I always get to hang out with cool people and see the places others just dream of? I bet you even think I'm getting laid every night and get free crap from companies that want me to write nice things about them.

Well, your gosh-dang right! My life rocks and I wouldn’t trade with YOU for all the two-stroke oil in the world. In fact, I wouldn’t trade you even if you offered Jenna Jameson and a Hemi covered in whipped cream with red cherries waiting for me at a NASCAR race, which would of course  be included together with Neverland, Bubbles the monkey, and season tickets to the Def Leopard reunion tour.



I know, who am I kidding? Yes, it’s a fun job and all that but seriously, do you have any idea how many days of riding you could get out of ALL the two-stroke oil in the world? Dang!

As I tried to highlight in a modest way, it is the traveling and the meetings with people that I love the most about my job, besides riding of course. Just being on the road sometimes can be an adventure by itself and lead to unexpected surprises.
A friend and I were on our way back to Idaho from a snowmobile show in Denver one rainy and snowy night in late October last year. We were both tired from a hard weekend at the snow show with late nights and early mornings. In the middle of nowhere in Wyoming a truck stop suddenly appears in the dark. I was like “Whuuut?!” Since we were both hungry we decided to stop and get something to eat. The restaurant was small and looked like it was the original joint with worn out furniture and a white plastic counter that had a slightly yellow baby poop color too it.

The flickering light from the fluorescent lamps reminded us of an old horror movie scene. Some truckers sat around the counter and glared at us without saying a word.  I think they were like thinkin, “what are those dang rock stars doing pollutin’ our restaurant?” We sat down and the Chinese couple that owned the place handed over the menus to us. The woman had a stained blouse and my friend ordered a sandwich with melted cheese and brown gravy, it sounded disgusting and looked even worse. She looked at me and I heard myself order hot fried noodles with chicken from the Chinese section of the menu. My expectations couldn’t have been lower and I could see myself spending the rest of the night in the bathroom. Boy, was I up for a surprise! The hot noodles were indeed hot, I think I must have been drank two pitchers of ice water on my own during the feast. I know I was hungry but still, that was the best meal I ever had at a truck stop. I stepped out of that restaurant one helluvan experience richer, dude!

I seem to have a thing for low expectations ever sine my parents left me at the Grand Canyon. Every time I don’t have them, things tend to go very wrong in order to kind of even things out. Goin’ to Canada and experiencing some of that world famous deep powder was a dream I had since I was a little boy. When I finally had a chance to go, my expectations were everything but low and I could hardly sleep at all during the 10-hour transatlantic flight. So it was still with a happy smile when my brother, our friend, and I, received the news when we landed in Vancouver, that our bags were lost somewhere in Germany. I mean shoot, we had our passports and money still, we would be fine until the day after when the bags arrived. Right?

We were booked on a small domestic flight to Kelowna, B.C. where some friends would meet us. We got a little lost while looking for the right gate and had to pass through several security checkpoints. The minute we landed, we also noticed the native’s way of ending every sentence with an “eh”. Stunned and fascinated we immediately decided to pick up the habit in order to blend in a little better. My brother saw his first chance at one of checkpoints when this big fat woman asked him to lean over the counter and explain what the object on her screen was before she opened his bag. To defend my brother’s sense of humour I must admit that the object looked exactly like an MkIIA1 grenade.
“It looks like a bomb,eh!” he said.
I guess their reaction was understandable, but it still took him 15 minutes to convince the six beefy policemen that showed up that he was just joking.  They were roughin’ him up pretty good so I asked them if that’s how they wanted to be when Jesus came and they left him alone.

When we arrived to the deep powder paradise we still thought that our bags would show up the next day, so we weren’t worried at all. The first couple of days went by while it was snowing like crazy and we got more and more frustrated about how we were doing nothing ‘cause we had no clothes! Eventually, we had to borrow riding gear from our friends in order to not waste the whole trip just sitting around. By now my famous expectations had dropped below any previous registered levels. It was raining in the valley when we fired up our rental sleds, I was already soaking wet in my borrowed clothes, the helmet was too big and the gloves too small.

None of us could believe our eyes when we finally left the valley below us and saw all the snow that had dumped down the last few days! The morning after, the sun was shining from a clear-blue sky and nothing in the world could put me in a bad mood. The weather stayed like that for the rest of the trip and heck yeah, I was happy when our bags showed up after a week but at the same time I couldn’t have cared less.

TEXT JOE DIRT

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