Over the span of several months, the server we were on in the summer of 2007 was going bad for unknown reasons and was REALLY causing some major headaches for me. I had originally been planning to attend the first MexTrek trip with Richard "TrailBoss" down to Galeana, Mexico. I'd spent months getting my bike and everything else ready to go. However, as the date for the trip got closer, the server was just falling apart performance wise. The new server I'd ordered had come in and Chris "Wczimmerman" had it ready for me to grab from his home in Temple and take up to the data center in Dallas. I couldn't leave town for a trip to Mexico for over a week with the site falling apart. I had to cancel the trip, head to Temple then Dallas, drop off the server, and get back home instead. Fortunately, the new server worked great. This was the very same server that we recently moved off of in December of last year (2018).
In the eleven years that server was being used, the ONLY problem we ever had with it was a hard drive failure for one of the three data drives setup in a redundant raid system. It got hot swapped with a spare without even a hiccup on the site. There were a few network related issues over the years that caused some problems, but no other hardware issues. In computer years, I'd say I got my money's worth out of that server! I recently received confirmation from the data center that the server drives have been scrubbed and the entire machine sent out for recycling. Apparently, being so old, it was not worth them trying to use it for anything even though I told them they could have it free and clear.
I tried to make that same trip to Mexico three more times. I can't recall what happened the second time that prevented me from being able to go at the last minute. The third time, a deer got the best of me and my KLR 650 a week before the trip. I had ridden the bike to work to make sure everything was good to go because, once again, I had spent a lot of time and money getting it ready for the trip. I was in post surgery with screws in my left ankle the first day we were supposed to be in Mexico. My last attempt was a May trip instead of the normal October time frame for these trips. About a week before the trip, I was getting a REALLY bad feeling about going. Gang violence had been up in recent months. About the time I finally decided I wasn't going, the other guys I was going to go with called and said they weren't going because they too had been having a REALLY strong bad vibe about the trip. So we bailed and headed to Cloudcroft, NM., for a week of riding instead.
I would still LOVE to attend one of the Mextrek events, but life seems to have indefinitely pushed that off my horizon. Some day maybe...