Ara, aka BeemerChef, and his dog Spirit, have a wonderful site called "The Oasis of my Soul", a motorcycle travel journal with heavy doses of photography and food thrown in. I've been enjoying it for some time now, so I'm adding his feed to the new site here.

My K12S came with a beautiful Hepco & Becker tail rack installed. After a little research into the brand, I found that they have some topcases designed to mount to the rack. I found precious little info or pics on the web specific to the K1200S, so I thought I'd post this.

The rack itself it is extremely sturdy, and mounts to the subframe, replacing the OEM grab handles. It's shaped so that IMHO it looks really good on the bike, not out of place at all. I can't comment on ease of installation, since the previous owner did it.

MRA makes a "spoilerscreen" windshield for the K1200S, but I couldn't find any good pics of it other than the one stock photo at twisted throttle. I went ahead and ordered one, and thought I'd post something for the next person looking for info on it.

Drupal comes with the excellent Garland theme, which is a fluid-width theme, and additionally a theme called Minnelli, which is fixed-width version of the same theme.

The Image

Fortunately, it's wonderfully easy to create a custom header image for Minnelli:

Click image for actual-size JPEG. Download the example in PSD format

Well it feels like it's time: My family blog and my personal 'hobby' blog are diverging. The content and readership of each is so orthogonal, that it just makes sense to split them up.

Lame title, I know. Sorry. But this has gotta be the best Christmas since that year when I was twelve and my extended family chipped in to help me buy the Schwinn High Sierra mountain bike I had been saving for and drooling over for months.

Why you ask? Because Santa brought me this:

What a blast! Handling is quite different from the RS. You definitely feel the extra wheelbase on the K bike. It's simply just a big motorcycle. But for my large frame it seems to fit me well, which was one of the things that drew me to it.

As many of my readers know, it's customary among the online biking community to for people to post trip reports of the places they've been.