Last fall when it got too cold I stopped riding my bike as we do in cold climates when you get winter, snow and ice.

Now I don't have a place to put my bike inside so I left it where it was and I covered it with several tarps,

but I never really did my normal storage procedure that I would do.

Then the snow came and we had a long winter here and freeze and thaw as it does in the wintertime

and that froze those tarps solidly into the ground.

Literally, I could not get the tarps up at all to check the bike like I normally would.

Normally I would check it over and even start it up once in a while and I'd just check for anything that starts to roster and anything like that.

It sat all winter like a frozen statue of a covered motorcycle. Then finally the snow melted and I could once again pull the tarps off and get the bike ready to ride.

When I started it up, I was shocked to see what came out of the exhaust and then equally shocked by what I found in my air filter.

You can hear more about this coming up on this episode.

It took a fair bit of work for me to sort this out.

I was lucky, it could have been a lot worse,

all this because I really didn't do my storage procedure properly, at least not as good as I should have.

Putting a motorcycle into storage is fairly common practice, I think most of us have run into it at some point or another.

Whether you're putting one bike away to ride another one if you're lucky enough to have multiple motorcycles,

maybe you don't ride in the wintertime, so you store your motorcycle.

That would be another storage situation.

Or maybe you're doing a trip like riding from Texas down to Usoia and you're doing it in chunks.

In other words, you have two weeks or three weeks or a month.

So you ride that distance, then you find a place to store at the motorcycle,

then you go back home, the next time you have time to ride or your next vacation,

you fly down, you ride the bike a little more, you store it and you go home.

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