Legendary Rush drummer Neil Peart has posted a new BubbaGram entry on his official website featuring some spectacular photos from Crater Lake National Park in Oregon while on the R40 Tour. An excerpt is available below.

"On the afternoon of the Portland show we were joined by Tom Marinelli—pictured here in the vivid yellow helmet he insists was an emergency purchase: 'The only one that fit.' A few degrees of separation brought Tom and me together on the R30 tour, ten years before, when he joined us on a ride from Ann Arbor, near his home in the Detroit area, through Indiana and Ohio to Cuyahoga Falls. Tom and I were drawn together by a shared dark fate—Tom lost his daughter Jenn in 1997 when she was about the same age as Selena had been, and within a month of my loss. People who have lost children often complain that there’s no name for us—you can be an orphan, a widow, or a widower, but we’re just . . . losers.

Sometimes it can be helpful for us losers to know each other and share what only we are unfortunate enough to understand—what one of the grief books called The Greatest Loss. Tom is also a serious and highly competent motorcyclist and a good travel companion, and after he moved to St. Louis we rode together around Missouri, Arkansas, and Nebraska. These days Tom also lives part-time in Oregon, so on the past couple of tours he joined us there.

That night Tom rode with us on the bus out of Portland, with his BMW GS in the trailer, and Papa John parked us in the quaintly named Cottage Grove, Oregon. We must have liked it there pretty well because, an hour after leaving, we were right back there again. But only to get gas. Our first sortie into the nearby unpaved roads had ended where an active logging site blocked our way, and searching around and ahead of us, I decided it was wisest to head back to where I knew we could get gas. Wise, but . . . frustrating.

Perhaps my major ambition for that day was to get riding photos of Crater Lake. After five or six visits over the years, I had never managed to capture the “sense of place” in a single image—and if I could do that with a motorcycle passing through, that would be the ultimate."

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Peart has chronicled the band’s R40 Live tour in the upcoming book called Far And Wide: Bring That Horizon To Me! The 312 page hard cover book will be released by ECW press on September 13th and is described as follows:

Thirty-five concerts. 17,000 motorcycle miles. Three months. One lifetime.

In May 2015, the veteran Canadian rock trio Rush embarked on their fortieth anniversary tour, R40. For the band and their fans, R40 was a celebration and, perhaps, a farewell. But for Neil Peart, each tour is more than just a string of concerts, it’s an opportunity to explore backroads near and far on his BMW motorcycle. So if this was to be the last tour and the last great adventure, he decided it would have to be the best one, onstage and off.

This third volume in Peart’s illustrated travel series shares all-new tales that transport the reader across North America and through memories of fifty years of playing drums. From the scenic grandeur of the American West to a peaceful lake in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains to the mean streets of Midtown Los Angeles, each story is shared in an intimate narrative voice that has won the hearts of many readers.

Richly illustrated, thoughtful, and ever-engaging, Far and Wide is an elegant scrapbook of people and places, music and laughter, from a fascinating road — and a remarkable life.