I get that... a lot.

                "Oh wow, you take pictures of dirt bikes. That's so cool. But isn't it dangerous?"

                Long story short: Yes.

With the winter season in full effect most MX racers are stuck sitting at home playing MX vs ATV, watching Supercross and dreaming about getting back on the bike. Of course there are the lucky few that have the ability to go south and ride in the warm weather and get ready for the season, but for those of us who stay here to enjoy the winter months there is X-Town in Mirabel, Quebec. They give riders the opportunity to ride year round, as long as we don’t mind the cold.

On January 26^th Andy Smith, Taber Burns, Jeremy Wallace and myself set course for Mirabel Quebec to ride at X-Town for a few days. Although we have very little snow here on the east coast this year some cold weather has set in and hard frozen ground is a little bit too unforgiving to ride.

The drive up was awesome; we could not have asked for better weather for driving and since we were not planning on riding until Friday it gave us the ability to take our time and not worry about getting there. About an hour into the trip our trailer plug came disconnected from the truck, by the time we got stopped and pulled over there was about a ¼ of it ground off. But it was nothing a little electrical tape couldn’t fix, and we were back on the road fast enough.

We arrived at X-town around 7:30 in the evening to check things out before making our way to the hotel.  We were very thankful when the staff at X-town told us we could store our bikes in there garage for the weekend and leave our trailer in their pit compound. After the bikes were unloaded and the trailer was parked as close to the main doors as possible. We threw our gear bags in the truck and headed off to the hotel.

Friday morning the four of us decided we needed to get a good breakfast before a day of riding so we walked down to Cora’s and loaded up on coffee, bacon and eggs before we left. When we got there the track looked great! I could not wait to get out and ride. Unfortunately my RMZ250F wasn’t ready to make the trip so I want to put out a huge thanks to Jeremy for lending me a KX250F for the weekend.

All three days we rode the track was in amazing condition. After not being on a bike much last year due to my injuries it felt great to pound out some laps. The X-town track was great; with the wide variety of skill levels in our group of four, it was nice to see a track that was good for everyone. As a Pro rider the track is a basic layout however it is a blast to ride and makes it so all skill levels and all size bikes can go out and have fun on the track and help to grow the sport we all love so much. X-town is a great facility for anyone to go ride and the staff and accommodations are excellent. Huge thanks to everyone at X-town for putting together such a nice facility for the MX community to ride in the off season.

Monday morning we hit the road around 6:30AM to head for home, the drive was great besides almost running out of gas and coasting into a gas station. Hahaha. Apparently the truck doesn’t get as good of mileage when we are hammering down to get home. We didn’t end up getting back into Lawrencetown NS until about 10 due to some really harsh weather near the end of our trip but all in all it was a great weekend and I can almost guarantee that we will make the trip back to X-town next winter for some riding and try and make it there this summer to check out there outdoor facility.

Thank you; Estabrooks Bracing Solutions, CTi2, Ossur, Kermaxx Performance Accessories, Printwerx.ca, Pro Wheels Racing Components, IMX Magazine, MD Distributions, Forma MX Boots, Deft Family MX Gloves, Pro-Tech Suspension, Pro Cycle, FOX Mx Gear, Motovan.com, Motoconcepts riding accessories and goggles, PRMX.CA, Golden Tyre Canada, Annapolis Pizza, Dajan Excavating, CVO, and Moto Hose USA

                So, the winter blues are totally in full swing. Not that we've had much of a winter here in Southern Ontario. There's no snow. Everything is brown and dead. No ice to go ice riding. No snow to go snowmobiling. And the ground is frozen rock hard and the air just a little too chill to make riding, at my level at least, any fun. But the winter weather does have one benefit: I get a lot of time to think and come up with some goals for the upcoming riding season. I think I've come up with a pretty good one, but I'll let you be the judge of that.

So as most of you know by now there has been much talk about our Canadian Women's National Series for 2012. After much discussion it was decided that the Women's Nationals be taken out of the Sunday Pro Day events.