Well, it is basically an Honor Page. It is to honor an achievement maybe not too extraordinary in an absolute sense, but quite unusual in my personal point of view. It is to honor my trusty BMW K75s motorcycle "Das Mopped", which just surpassed the 100,000 miles mark on Friday, August 13, 1999 (coincidentally, it also was an "Ozone Action Day" in El Paso). It took us exactly eleven years and seven months or 4,229 days to get there. By the way, the current mileage as of August 2, 2002, is 118,362.

One hundred thousand... Did you ever think about writing this number in Roman numerals? It would be a number consisting of 100 M's, one after the other. Quite inconvenient, don't you think? This lack of the "zero" and therefore the ability to write large numbers was one of the reasons why the Roman numeral system was eventually replaced by the Arabic system. But I am getting a bit off topic here.

One hundred thousand miles... This equals 161,000 kilometers, or 4 times around the equator, or 42% of the median distance between earth and moon (not that I ever planned to go there). So it is quite an impressive number after all. For all you number-crunchers and tech-freaks out there I have put together a section called Numbers containing a detailed record of the bike's maintenance, repairs, and replacement parts.

Almost 12 years... That is about one third of my lifetime to date. We did a lot of things together, "Das Mopped" and I. To make things easier to follow, I set up separate pages for the main topics: How It Began, Touring USA, Germany And The LEFT LANE, European Touring, and USA Again. The European touring section is closely related to the Left Lane section, in fact, it almost should be one page. I decided to rather make two instead, basically to avoid creating a very large page.

Speaking of download time: This website contains lots of images. Since not all of you have access to high speed networks, I decided to mainly work with thumbnailed pictures. This way you can decide for yourself which images seem to be worth taking a closer look at. Even though it might be inconvenient, because you have to hit the BACK-button each time to return to the referring page, I still think it is the best solution. So, if a picture catches your attention, just click on it and view "the real thing."

So let us now start to take a peek at my life with "Das Mopped."