What a ride down the Appalachians would look like next summer (for the solar eclipse!)
https://goo.gl/maps/6h2J4cJoXhz Elora, ON 4 h 19 min (286 km) Entering the United States of America (New York) 4 h 19 min (286 km) Entering Pennsylvania 3 h 11 min (224 km) State College, PA 37 min (40.0 km) Entering Maryland Entering West Virginia Entering Virginia Passing through West Virginia Entering Virginia 2 h 59 min (233 km) Entering Tennessee 1 h 15 min (82.9 km) Deals Gap Cherokee, NC 54 min (51.1 km) Entering Virginia 8 h 6 min (553 km) Lexington, VA Entering West Virginia Entering Virginia Passing through West Virginia 7 h 3 min (539 km) Entering Pennsylvania Williamsport, PA 3 h 38 min (274 km) Entering New York 3 h 38 min (274 km) Batavia, NY Entering Canada (Ontario) 3 h 44 min (243 km) Elora, ON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachia https://goo.gl/maps/JeeomohGEPv with hotel stops http://www.blueridgemotorcycling.com/destinations/#interactive-map http://ironhorsenc.com/ might be good for a couple of days in the Smokey Mountains. home
6 h 29 min (447 km) 1. Clearfield, PA 5 h 27 min (390 km) 2. Inn at Mountain Quest 6 h 41 min (518 km) 3. Knoxville, TN 1 h 34 min (94.2 km) 3.5 Deal's Gap - Tail of the Dragon 2 h 25 min (162 km) 4. Ashville, NC 8 h 26 min (581 km) 5. Harrisburg, VA 5 h 39 min (437 km) 6. South Williamsport, PA 7 h 3 min (496 km) home
I find myself fighting a constant battle with non-riders over just how dangerous motorcycling is. They can't understand why I would risk life and limb (or my son's life and limb) to do something so superfluous. Unfortunately, the press is more than willing to inflame this perception.
While I was away this weekend a news story appeared that threw more gas on the fire...
"In an attempt to avoid collision with the fifth wheel, the motorcycles came in contact with each other, creating a domino effect and one rider, the deceased, came in contact with the fifth wheel, Eight men and one woman were sent to hospital with multiple injuries. The driver of the truck was not hurt."
Where do I even begin with this? The people involved in this crash made a number of bad decisions that led to a disaster. A group mentality had them passing a vehicle en masse, something you never do. Any sane motorcyclist knows that your pass is yours and yours alone, even (especially?) when you're in a group. You make the move when it's safe and practical to do it, not because the people around you are. This is yet another reason why I don't like riding in groups, there is pressure to ride as a unit instead of an individual. That kind of thinking is the antithesis of why I ride.
A few weeks ago I met up with an eclectic group of riders up by the Bruce Peninsula. At its biggest we were about half a dozen bikes. There were a couple of times during the ride when people crossed double yellow lines and dived around traffic. They've all been riding a lot longer than I have, but I found some of the moves a bit reckless, and didn't follow. My ride is my ride, I make the decisions.
My best guess at what the point of impact looked like. In the video below it looks like the bikes are in a pile in the oncoming lane, so they attempted to pass to the left of a left turning truck and trailer. Done on Draw Accident Sketch.
Looking at video from the accident, it looks as though the bikers were trying to pass the left turning camper in the oncoming (left hand) lane - they were trying to beat the turning vehicle, which sounds like a bad idea no matter how you phrase it. This reads like a litany of things not to do while riding a motorcycle. Apart from the group mentality, attempting to pass a left turning vehicle on the left suggests a real deficit in road reading, let alone basic physics. This kind of riding is what stopped me from getting on a motorcycle just when I was going to get my license the first time twenty years ago. In that case a kid, late for work, gunned it through a red light and went over the hood of a left turning car; instant fatality. The cautionary tales that come from these situations always have more to do with poor road craft than they do with the perils of riding a motorbike.
Riding a motorcycle isn't easy. 10% of my class failed to get their introductory license through a combination of poor coordination and inability to manage the many things you're doing on a bike (you're using both hands, both feet and your whole body to ride it), and that was in a parking lot. On the road there are a whole raft of other considerations on top of operating the bike. You need to develop advanced defensive riding skills because you'll lose in any collision; it doesn't matter who is at fault when you get in an accident on a bike. My suspicion is that these bikers thought their numbers and loud pipes would humble any other road user into waiting to let them pass. Using intimidation as a road management tool is a slippery slope. I'm not trusting my life to other people's perception of me - more often than not they don't see me at all.
This video was shared with us by a man who stayed at campground on the roadway where this mass accident took place pic.twitter.com/ySWNYx2FYw
Shortly after this happened I came across this great article explaining to car drivers why motorcycles act the way they do. I'm willing to bet the people involved in this accident had no familiarity with these habits. Riding a motorcycle is a difficult thing, but doing it well is very satisfying. Doing it poorly is just asking for trouble. If you're a non-rider and you want to trot this out as an example of why motorcycling is dangerous, it's a poor example.
If you read the blog, then you've already gone on our ride around the Superstition Mountains in Arizona. Motorcycle Mojo picked up the story to run in this month's (August) edition. I then got an email from the editor of noplacelikeout.com saying that I'd been included in their recent list of top 25 motorcycle bloggers. It's always nice to get a compliment, and I'm in the company of some pretty major bloggers on that list (you'll find many of them in the blog roll on the right side of this page).
Five or so years ago I stopped playing video games after wracking up 1000 hours on Left For Dead 2 (I was really good!), and then reading Chris Hardwick's excerpt of The Nerdist's Way on Wired. Gaming never got in the way of my career like it did with Hardwick (the breaks I got involved manual labour in 100° warehouses), but that thousand hours spent shooting zombies had me asking myself a difficult question, "what the fuck are you doing with your time?"
I went cold turkey on video games. I'll occasionally play with my son, but a single game and not often. What I did instead was kick off a hobby that I'd always wanted to do (motorcycling) and reinvigorate my dream of getting published as a writer. A few less electron zombies have been killed by me, but the things I've done instead feel a lot more satisfying because they are, you know, actual things.
ˈentrəpē/ 1. lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder. "the old bike finally succumbed to entropy amidst the weeds." synonyms: deterioration, degeneration, crumbling, decline, degradation, decomposition, breaking down, collapse;
Out of high school it looked like my life's work was going to be mechanics. I apprenticed as a millwright and quickly found a comfortable living doing work that I found satisfying. When I put down the tools and went to university I spent a lot of time chasing down philosophy and literature that was looking at a perfected idea of the world. The thought of spending my time thinking about machines that were in a continual state of decay (in fact, every time you use them they are literally falling apart), seemed silly. That they also produced pollution (both in operation and manufacture) and were generally quite wasteful put them further from my mind. I ended up leaving mechanics and my love of vehicles behind and going into I.T. after university for those reasons.
I'd been teaching English for a number of years when I had an opportunity to switch to computer engineering. I ended up going back to school to get my teaching qualifications as a computer technology teacher. At that training my instructor put me on to Shop Class as Soulcraft. Suddenly, here was a deep, insightful argument against academics for the sake of academics and a profound argument for why you should not only exercise, but celebrate your manual technical skills. Those skills are what can ground our intelligence and give it meaning in the world around us. You sometimes hear the term, 'it's academic' - meaning it doesn't matter in the real world. If you've spent any time in institutions of higher learning, you've probably noticed how insular and self serving they are. The value they assign to academics is generated entirely by the people involved, there are no subjective criteria. When you tie intelligence to something in the real world, the real world will cruelly and repeatedly correct assumptions that would otherwise happily exist in academia. Having real-world hardened technical expertise is a very different thing than a background in academia. One is relentless and demanding, the other political and collaborative. As long as you tow the line in academia, you generally do well. You can tow the line all you want in engineering, but if you don't submit to the demands of reality you won't get anywhere, no matter how well you get on with your colleagues. I find I'm able to integrate the intellectual muscle developed in university with my manual skills very effectively; they aren't concordant, they're complimentary, but the idea that what I'm working on is in a constant state of entropy still bothers me. The very best you can hope for with a machine is to maximize the time it's operational before it inevitably fails. I missed the perfection and timelessness of ideas found in academia.
A meditative mindset in the wind.
Like Pirsig in Zen, I often find myself ruminating while I ride. The complex machine interaction, balance and awareness needed to operate a motorcycle sets your mind in motion, but leaves your intuition free to chase down ideas. I write better after I've been riding because my brain is full of meditative juices. On our recent ride around Lake Huron, I was pondering this idea of entropy. I'm in my late forties now and the concept of entropy no longer applies to just machines. I'm watching everyone get older and struggle with the inevitable. Entropy isn't just a state in machines, it's how reality works. Everything is in the process of disintegrating, the trick is to dance gracefully in the decay. Holding back the inevitable is what life is, and if I can perform that life affirming act by resurrecting an old bike, or replacing a failed component in an injured machine, it's not a wasted effort. Perhaps that is part of the joy I feel when I see an older vehicle on the road long after it should have gone to scrap; it's a symbol of defiance against the inevitable. *** Do not go gentle into that good night Dylan Thomas, 1914 - 1953 Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) THE SECOND COMING Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Samurai Jack & The Mountain
The journey's the thing - if you've got 20 minutes and
haven't seen this before, it's worth the time (and two bucks).
https://goo.gl/maps/6h2J4cJoXhz
Entering Virginia
