Exclusive Excursions is a local tour company located in my hometown of Park City, Utah. Yesterday I had the great pleasure of joining the tour leader, Jeff Manwaring, and five of his customers on a short 15-mile bike trip from downtown Park City to the town of Wanship in the north. The entire tour took place on the historic Union Pacific Rail Trail and lasted just a few hours. While the cyclists in the group rode their bikes, I followed along and took photos. These photos will be used in the full-blown review of the trip that I am writing for my website at www.bicycletouringpro.com. You can view my photos from the Exclusive Excursions Rail Trail Bike Tour over on my Flickr account.

This winter I am planning to leave my home in Park City, Utah and travel to South America. But in order for me to do that, I need to rent out my condo.

My beautiful 1-bedroom, 1-bath condo is located in the picturesque ski town of Park City, Utah. Park City is where the 2002 Olympics were held, where the Sundance Film Festival takes place each January, and is the home to three of America’s best ski resorts. The city also has more than 300 miles of hiking and biking trails, is the host to more than 300 annual concerts, and is a great place to live, work and play.

As much as I love Park City, I want to spend this coming winter in South America. But before I go, I need to find someone to rent my apartment.

The apartment is perfect for 1-2 people, is super inexpensive, and it has everything in it you will need for your stay.

If you or someone you know might be interested in renting my condo for 6-12 months starting on or around November 1st, 2010, please get in touch with me. I am flexible on the dates, so just let me know what would work best for you. For more information and additional photos of my Park City condo, please see this page.

PogoTricks.com is a new website I created over the past couple days. The aim of the site is to help people learn which pogo sticks to buy and how to do incredible pogo stick tricks. I’ve been learning a lot about SEO (search engine optimization) lately, so this site is really just an SEO experiment. I want to see how quickly I can get the website to rank on the first page of Google; how quickly I can increase the website’s traffic; and if at all possible, actually make a little money from this new niche website. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens…

Today I rode my motorcycle on the freeway for the very first time. I only went about 4 miles and got up to a little over 70 miles per hour, but my first trip on the Interstate was a success. When I first popped onto the on-ramp I was able to quickly get up to speed and merge into the slow lane. There were no cars behind me for at least a half-mile, which was nice. I quickly got up to speed, but even at seventy the cars behind me quickly caught up and passed. The speed isn’t the the thing that scares me the most about driving on the freeway – it’s the wind! I’m sure that if I keep practicing I’ll get used to it, but at the moment it is still a bit scary.

After taking the freeway into downtown Park City, I climbed up to Deer Valley and rode all the way to the top of Empire Pass. From there, I rode down a dirt road to the Midway Reservoir before turning around and returning home on the main drag that leads from downtown Park City to Kimball Junction. It was a good ride.

In the photo above, the athlete is in the middle of performing a double backflip.

The photo above shows the high-jump bar. The athletes jumped off the van in other competitions.

The guy above ended up breaking the world record for the least number of jumps in a minute – 40

I can do this. Get me a pogo stick and next year I’ll break a world record!

I spent the last day or so working to totally redesign the website here at DarrenAlff.com. The redesign not only looks better, but it will allow me to share larger, wider images and to post more frequently about less important items.

The biggest addition to the new website is a new section I am calling my “Journal” where I plan to share photos, stories, and events from my daily life. This new section will be about the smaller things I am doing in my life. They may not be big things, but neat little things I want to record.

I wanted to add this journal section to the website so I could use my site here as a sort of online diary. I often times write in a physical journal, but an online journal allows me to share photos and video as well, so I think it will be a neat way to record my life. If I can continually journal online, I think it will be neat to look back at this website after a couple years and see everything that I’ve accomplishment. My physical journals are not nearly as fun to look back on.

I just finished drawing this with some new black pens I recently bought. I drew it while looking at a Brixton advertisement. The girl ended up looking like a guy. Oops! I guess I need more practice.

I saw this girl (probably about 15-years-old) walking down the street with her parents on Park City, Utah’s Historic Main Street. She had a huge frown on her face and I imagined she was upset at her parents for some reason. I painted this with acrylic on a garden brick.

This is my first attempt at painting in several years. I painted the background gold and then painted the black on top of it. This is a painting of a girl I saw walking around Park City with her parents.