Dipping a Toe in Georgian Bay

The plan:

The execution:

Why you going looking for the Niagara Escarpment: it's the only place where you're not riding on the crown of your tire all the time in Southern Ontario.

A bit windy, but otherwise perfect weather.  24°C in Elora down to 18°C on Georgian Bay in Thornbury; comfortable without ever being sweaty.  The 360° shots are from a Ricoh Theta 360° Camera, the rest are taken from my Samsung S5 smartphone.  Videos are at the bottom.

Getting ready for liftoff.

The wind fields of Shelburne

The look on my face when I'm about to ride up River Road out of Hornings Mills.

A thumbs up from Max, he likes the twisties.

A pheasant and baby!  But you can't see it due to poor resolution and lens distortion.  The Theta is an interesting idea,
but even with giant, unwieldy files, it still has poor image quality.

Thornbury Harbour

Thornbury

Big sky on the never ending farm field ride home.

Another Tiger double take.  There is another!

Smartphone pics:

Creemore for lunch at The Old Mill House Pub (never had a bad meal there)

The new adventurers (a Kawasaki Versys & Suzuki V-Strom), along with the Tiger
that has always been (mine's 13 years older - made back before Ewan & Charlie did that thing)

A map of the good bits:  https://goo.gl/maps/zpdGaSLMuy82

To A Thousand Islands & Back

We're looking at a few days in The Thousand Islands at the end of Lake Ontario before my wife goes to a conference and my son and I head home.  Fortunately, between here and there lie some of the best riding roads in Ontario.  I finally get a chance to Ride the Highlands!

The ride out is going to be an avoid the GTA at all costs exercise (like most things are).  Other than getting pinched in Newmarket, it should be a straight shot across the top of population.  Port Perry is nice and once I'm past Peterborough, Highway 7 is a winding ride into Canadian Shield.

Where I drop off Highway 7 at Mountain Grove and cut down to the godforsaken 401 looks like a roller coaster of a road.  A quick blast (no such thing any more) down the 401 should finish the trip at Gananoque where I'll meet up with the family and we'll hang out for a couple of days.

The Ride Back is an even greater attempt to avoid the GTA, but this time with a find the twisty roads vibe.  Using ridethehighlands.ca I linked together a series of suggested roads to get my son and I back to South Western Ontario in the lest efficient but most pleasurable manner possible.

We meander north west from the east end of Lake Ontario before finally cutting south around the end of Georgian Bay.

If we leave Tuesday morning, we'll overnight somewhere around Haliburton before finishing up the ride on Wednesday.

All told it should be about 1300kms of riding some of Ontario's best roads.

LINKS
http://explorersedge.ca/ride-edge-check-2016-top-touring-roads-explorers-edge/
http://ridethehighlands.ca

Motorcycle Media: Ride with Norman Reedus

A well made piece of motorcycle documentary!

I've been watching Ride With Norman Reedus on AMC over the past few weeks.  What you have here is an incredibly approachable celebrity who is obviously a giant bike nerd doing all the rides in the continental U.S. that he's never gotten around to doing.

This isn't some Harley-or-nuthin kind of biker exercise either, Norman throws his leg over everything from a Rolands Sands BMW R9T Special to a Zero electric bike, and that's just in the first episode!  By the end of the season you've seen over a dozen machines from half a dozen different manufacturers.  Norman obviously loves his bikes and he isn't particular about the flavour.

He likes his customs, but you'll also find him riding
everything from state of the art Ducatis to 1950s
BMWs, often in the same episode.

Another nice touch is that this isn't a boy's own/Charlie & Ewan masculine and manly bike trip.  Norman goes out of his way to find motorcycle subcultures when he's riding, and that often includes female riding groups and partners.  You don't notice what a change this is from the usual testosterone charged motorcycle media until you see it done this differently.

The production values are excellent.  With aerial establishing shots and a wide variety of atmospheric images used throughout the ride, it doesn't feel like you're following a map so much as actually being where the ride is (much like you would on a bike).  Norman himself has directed film and published a book of photography, and he's frequently stopping to take photos of his own or bragging on the nice little SLR he's using.  A camera geek after my own heart!

In stark contrast to the hard man he plays in Walking Dead, Norman has an easy going Californian vibe that makes him both approachable and a joy to watch.  When a woman at Deal's Gap says he looks like Darryl from Walking Dead he shoots right back, "yep, that's me!" with a big smile on his face.

This show is going to get a lot of people interested in trying out motorcycling.  I hope to goodness AMC is already planning for another season (though calling five episodes a season is a bit much).  This show can't cost that much to produce and it has a ready and expanding audience.  Ducati and Triumph should both get a nod for obviously ponying up new bikes for use in this, but it was money well spent.  The others should be lining up to provide bikes for the next round.  A surprise riding partner or two (Valentino Rossi?) would be most excellent.  Having Vale show Norman around Tavullia would be epic.

In case it isn't clear, I'd highly recommend this if you enjoy travel documentaries.  If you're into motorcycles at all you'll love it.  Norman in Europe?  Norman in Japan?  With so many motorcycle subcultures to explore, this could easily become a world wide phenomenon.

30 Hours

Elora to Creemore to Owen Sound to Lion's Head to Oliphant and back home again in about 30 hours.  We started out as three and expanded up to seven at one point before finishing with the original three again.  It's amazing how much you can get done in a day...

Photos and video done on a Ricoh Theta 360° camera and my Samsung S5 smartphone.

Through the wind fields - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA

Elora Ontario on the bridge on 2 wheels #theta360 - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA

On the dock of Big Bay https://goo.gl/maps/eoWBzaD5FFN2 #theta360 - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA

Stills from the 360° camera...

Some other shots from the smartphone...

Perseverance & Patience

Steady on, it's not that bad.  I shall persevere!

The never ending tale of Concours carburetors continues.  My most recent attempt was to check the fuel amounts in each bowl and then reinstall and test (I'm getting very quick at this).

Once again the old Connie coughs and backfires and dies on throttle application.  The removals and re-installations have upset the old connectors between the carbs, which have developed a gas leak, so the whole thing came off (again) and is now apart on the work bench (again).


I contacted the local Kawasaki dealer for

The plastic bits that connect the carbs have
become brittle and leaky.

parts last weekend, but they've been radio silent.  The parts I need were easy enough to find, but maybe 22 year old carb bits aren't sexy enough to warrant a timely reply.  Maybe I should have ordered them online, in spite of a number of magazines lamenting people's lack of support for local motorcycle dealers.  Had I ordered them online they'd probably have been here by now.  Instead I'm left wondering if I can even get these parts.

The goal now is to take each carb apart, double check float depths and ensure all the internal jets and such are properly installed, then it'll all go back together again with new connecting pieces and go back on the bike (again).  With any luck I'll get some sort of clue that I'm moving in the right direction.  That's been the most frustrating part of this process.  I make changes and there is no change when I fire it up.  Whatever the problem is, I haven't come close to touching it yet.  At least a fuel leak is an obvious and easy fix.

Any day now...

And Then There Was One

When I started riding I began to voraciously consume motorcycling magazines.  It took me a while to figure out which ones were good, but for a while there I just went all in.  Being Canadian I thought it prudent to get a sense of Canada's motorcycling media, so I made a point of looking past the wall of American magazines to find a Canadian voice.

 The two I settled on were Cycle Canada and Motorcycle Mojo.  CC seemed to be edited by a writer with lots of motorcycle experience (rather than an expert motorcyclist with little writing experience).  Reading other magazines sometimes felt like reading a kid's essay that they'd been made to write.  No one seemed to revel in writing like Neil Graham did.  He was consistently acerbic, challenging and opinionated, but he clearly enjoyed writing.  I really looked forward to reading him each month.

I found Mojo a short while later.  Its modern layout (many other Canadian magazines looked like they'd been designed on a photocopier), and crowd sourced travel pieces got me hooked.  Mojo feels like it's put together by a community rather than a small group of motorcycle industry insiders who don't know how to write very well.

A few months ago CC arrived at my door.  As I got into it I discovered that the two writers who do the majority of the heavy lifting in producing the magazine were leaving.  Many readers seemed relieved to see the back of the complicated and difficult Graham, but I missed that voice.  A magazine that was once a drop-everything-and-read-it proposition (and Canadian!) was now filled with news pieces that looked like they were written by an ESL writer in single, giant paragraphs; a computer could construct better grammar.  The new writer they brought in was an old writer they'd let go.  His MO seems to be to say something controversial at the beginning of each article even if what he's saying is inconsistent from page to page.  The article on the new Harley Davidson is making fun of sport bike riders, the article on a sports bike makes fun of cruiser riders, and his recent piece on the new Honda Africa Twin allowed him to take pot-shots at adventure bike riders.  I get no sense of who he actually is or what he likes.  This approach seems disingenuous and makes me hesitate to trust him.

The newsletter modelled magazines that feel like they are driven by industry interests rather than independent editorial opinion have already been dropped.  Mojo & CC were my only Canadian subscriptions to renew, but now it's down to a single Canadian mag.  The hole left in the Canadian motorcycling publication landscape by Graham leaving Cycle Canada has made a sure thing a has-been.

 In the meantime I'm looking world-wide for my motorcycle periodicals.  The three I've settled on are Motorcycle Mojo (Canada), Cycle World (US) and BIKE (UK).  The last two are driven by professional writers who know motorcycles and not only write well, but seem to enjoy doing it.  I've never read a complaint about having to fill up space with writing or meet deadlines in either, although this seems to be a common subject for editorial discussion in many Canadian magazines.

I'm not reading any more magazines, Canadian or not, that make me feel like I'm reading an essay a kid was forced to write for school.  If the writing is that difficult, don't work for a magazine.  Writing is a skill unto itself, and it should be something you enjoy (it's what will make you work to improve it instead of just trudging up to deadlines while complaining about them in print).  Just because you're an expert in the subject area doesn't mean you're an expert at communicating it in writing.  Life's too short to read things written badly by people who aren't that good at it and couldn't care less about their writer's craft.