Last year in Thailand I has the pleasure and honour to watch and follow the guys and ladies racing on the BMW GS trophy race in Thailand.
I was on my Honda CRF250l and with a lot of knowledge of the tracks, we were riding on.
During ALL of the stages, i was finding very difficult to keep up with the BMW even on a CRF250?

Big Bike in THE RIGHT HANDS can ride offroad but to be fair these people competing in the GS Trophy was the best of the best from all over the world.

Pics not showing up ... I heard photo bucket has gone belly up?
You may want to change Photo hosting site. I use SmugMug. Never fails.

True, an expert rider can push a big bike to crazy places. I've done it in the past but no longer consider it much fun ... also beats the shit out of a very expensive motorcycle. I've seen NEW, $25K motorcycles reduced to trash in 3 or 4 days of "Adventure" riding.

Question of right tool for the job. Does anyone think if Ewan & Charlie knowing what they know now, would take R1150GS's across Mongolia again ? ... or would they go on a small, lighter weight bike? I think the later is pretty certain.
(especially when you've got a full crew carrying all your crap! )

So, photobucket has kicked the bucket - or it has as far as "3rd party hosting" is concerned. That means no more putting a picture there and linking to it here or anywhere else - unless you're happy to send them somewhere around $400.

I hope it doesn't mean I can't access the library of images I have up there, many of which I have no idea where the originals are. At the moment I can't tell whether there's an issue or whether it's just as glacially slow as normal.

It would have been nice to have got a bit of warning and let me consider my options but that does seem to be the American way; one minute everything's fine, the next you're on your a*se on the sidewalk.

If they've shot themselves in the foot who else should I be looking at? SmugMug? Any others?

The ProCycle guy (Jeff) over on the DRriders forum was able to pull all his photos off Photo Bucket (no idea how). He has now set up his own domain (whatever the **** that is?)

I also have a Picasa account (Google product). It was fine up to about a year or two ago when they got "smart" and re-designed the whole thing ... thus making it nearly impossible for me to use! Nice! Thanks Google! It's all robots so you can't get help.

SmugMug has actual people who are ALWAYS there to help. The owner of ADV Rider site is Baldy, also owner of SMUGMUG.

His kids run SmugMug and I've dealt with both Son and Daughter over the years. Brilliant kids. For $30 a year ... to me it's a NO BRAINER. (I have zero brains for computers ... and could care less)

The greater issue here that no one seems to be talking about concerns the serious damage Photo Bucket's demise does to existing forums. I believe any photo posted there from PB ... will no longer appear. This means millions of pics on hundreds of forums will lose photo content ... BIG TIME ... thus ruining threads and devaluing the whole site.

I have no idea how Grant and Susan can deal with this. Seems unfair. It's unlikely members here or elsewhere will go back to every thread they have pic in and REPOST them using another host. But the problem is 1000 times worse to Site owners.

No way can they fill those photo gaps. Oh Well! Would be better if when a pic is posted, the site captures and stores it ... and essentially OWNS it ... so as long as site is up ... your pics are up. But that's a nerd problem, let them waste their life figuring this crap out.

Good luck!