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).
With the monkey butt I had from the oven-hot Indianapolis ride we did last summer, I picked up an AirHawk before leaving on the around Huron trip. They make some pretty aggressive claims about how good this seat cushion is, and 1600+kms around Huron in mega-heat would be a good test. While shopping for one at Two Wheel Motorsport I noticed that the larger 'medium cruiser' pad was almost a hundred dollars cheaper than the much smaller dual sport cushion. The only difference I could see between them was a fancy red stripe down the middle of the DS model. That's an expensive red stripe.
Bigger is cheaper in airhawk world.
An advantage to buying this from my local dealer instead of online is that I could go try it out, which the parts guy at Two-Wheel was more than willing to do. If you factor in shipping the airhawk cost within five dollars of what it's going for online, well worth the chance to try different pads and pick it up immediately. Calling my Triumph Tiger a dual sport is like calling a a Humvee a four by four. While technically true, it's a lot more than just a dual sport. The Tiger is a Swiss army knife of a bike. It can dual sport, but it can also cover long distances and tour, and it can do it in a sporty fashion. Airhawk seems quite flexible with what pad might go on what bike, and the medium cruiser pad fit the adventurous Tiger better than the dual sport pad did, and saved me almost a hundred bucks in the process. How did it perform? Frankly, I was surprised. I got a gel pad last year and it did very little to ease my discomfort on hot, all-day, multiple-day rides. The Airhawk is a revelation. It keeps you cool in heat, distributes your weight across the seat area evenly, removing any pressure points, and meant the end to my monkey butt. The first time you accelerate and don't feel directly connected to the seat (because you're floating on air) is a little off-putting, but you quickly get used to it. If you want to change the angle you're sitting while riding simple remove your weight from the pad and resit on it, and you'll find that you can adjust your centre of balance easily. Once the bladders in the pad redistribute the air the pad conforms to the shape of your backside and is very stable.
The arrow at the top points to the valve, which makes filling or emptying the pad easy and doesn't interfere with sitting at all.
Setting up the pad was easily done. I put air into it at low pressure in short bursts until it was about half full. The pictures online all seem to show the pads fully inflated, but I found inflating it until it had just enough air to suspend my weight worked well and kept me in better touch with the seat. The pad attaches to the seat using a couple of straps. If you're familiar with bra straps (and who of us isn't?), you'll find adjusting the pad a simple procedure. It stays in place remarkably well for such a simple device. The sticky rubber bottom seems to help a lot with that. It isn't cheap, and because of that, leaving it on the bike was never an option. Having to remove it every time we left the bike unattended was a bit onerous, but I'm not in the habit of leaving $160 items on a bike unwatched and in plain view.
Airhawk is pretty sure of themselves, and they have every right to be. Their warranty isn't going to be exercised in my case, this pad does exactly what they claim it will. On hot, high mileage days I was no longer in agony on the seat looking for opportunities to stop. This seat pad means I can ride and ride. What you get is a well engineered solution to a common problem. It isn't cheap, but it's well made and it works. You're getting what you pay for.
It's just past 8am on day one of the ride. Even this early in the morning it's already in the mid-twenties and the sun is relentless. The padding I thought I'd try in my helmet was a bad idea, and by the time I reach Creemore I'm working on a full scale headache. Thirty seconds after we stop the Roof lid is back to normal and it works like a champ for the rest of the trip. Motorcycle gear is an ongoing process of fine tuning, especially when you mess around with something that already works.
This trip grew out of a friend's cross country anniversary ride with his wife on his new-to-him Goldwing. We were originally going to drop down to the ferry on Manitoulin Island for the ride home after day one, but the ferry is booked solid during the day so I started looking at another way home. Having never been to Northern Michigan, it seemed like a good idea to wrap around Lake Huron. It's just over 1500kms of wilderness riding with few people in between.
The goodbye in Creemore went long as we'd been accompanied by friends out that far, so we got back on the road just as the sun was going fully nuclear. Day One was the longest of our trip, five hundred kilometres around Georgian Bay up to the small town of Massey, Ontario. A gas and lunch stop in Perry Sound followed by a couple of road side stops along the way made the heat bearable with lots of consuming of liquids at each stop. You know it's hot when you're sweating freely at highway speeds.
Mohawk Motel: clean, cheap & odd!
We rolled into the Mohawk Motel in Massey just past 4pm. The grass was brown and crisp, just like us. The motel was basic but clean with air conditioning. Everyone cold showered and relaxed for a while before we wandered out into town only to discover that the only restaurant was closed early due to it being hot. We were told to walk down the street to a variety store that also doubled as the local fast food joint. Forty five minutes of waiting in forty degree heat later I'd paid forty bucks for a cheeseburger, fries and a couple of slices of pizza. We staggered back to the hotel and called it a day. The next morning Massey totally redeemed itself with a fantastic breakfast at the Back Home Bistro. As we finished up the eggs and bacon, rain moved in. It was still in the mid-twenties, but humid and wet. We rode into heavier and heavier rain as we traveled west over the top of Georgian Bay. A brief stop in Blind River to check on my stoic pillion had us bump into a couple doing a similar route to our Huron circumnavigation; it wasn't the last time we'd meet them. The rain came and went before finally relenting as we rode into Sault Ste. Marie. We parted ways after a surprisingly excellent and cost effective lunch at Pino's Supermarket where you can get a brick oven baked pizza and amazing sausage on a bun for next to nothing.
Jeff & MA were on their way to Wawa up on Lake Superior, while Max and I were headed over to the border crossing into Northern Michigan. After a day and half together we'd made good time, covered a lot of ground in all sorts of weather and everyone still had smiles on their faces (a good Italian lunch helped there). After a quick goodbye we saddled up and headed over to the bridge only to bump into the couple from Blind River again. We followed them up onto the bridge to discover a massive line up. Inching a fully loaded two-up bike five feet at a time up the side of a suspension bridge is about as much fun as it gets. Fortunately we had a great view of the river beneath us. Sault Ste Marie is one of those places that reminds you just how big the great lakes are. In the hour plus we were inching our way over that bridge I tried to imagine the tons and tons of water that rushed beneath us out of Superior and into Huron, it feels very powerful and boggles the mind. A highlight of the interminable wait was getting to the peak of the bridge. From that point up until the customs gates we were going downhill, so the bikes stayed off and in neutral as we glided forward, inches at a time. As I said to our doppelgangers, 'at least it isn't yesterday!' That bridge on a forty degree sunny day would be unhealthy. My magic power kicked in at the split into lines for each gate. Which ever one I pick will immediately stop, and of course it did. The couple ahead of us were down the interstate a good fifteen minutes ahead of us while we sat there pondering karma, or just plain old bad luck.
Once finally freed into Michigan we headed south into the tail end of some very violent
thunderstorms. The mist became rain, and then strong winds came up out of west. It was an hour of tacking against the wind down i75 to St. Ignace and The Breaker's Resort. We got in about 4pm drenched and weary after a long day in the rain broken up by the better part of two hours crossing the border in five foot increments. Java Joes provided a first class milkshake and coffee before we headed over to check in. They weren't ready for us, but housekeeping did back flips to get us into the room ASAP.
We enjoyed the hot tub and pool, but Breakers is a family resort, kind of like Disney World but with a great lake instead of mice. If you like screaming, unmanaged children and drunk, indifferent parents on smartphones, this place is for you. Max and I vacated the pool in a flurry of OCD after a kid pretended to be vomiting water out over and over again. Dinner was takeout pizza from Java Joes, and it was exceptional. With everything scattered around the room in a vain attempt to dry it out, we crashed on the beds and watched Seth Macfarlane cartoons as the fog rolled in outside. After two days and the better part of a thousand kilometres on the road, we were both pretty knackered. We woke up early in backwards world to blue skies and the sun rising out of Lake Huron (the sun goes to sleep in Huron where we're from). A savoury breakfast of heavily processed meat pucks and bad coffee with large Americans eating all they could while watching Trump speeches on FoxTV (we are far from home my son), had us ready to hit the road. I wiped down the trusty Tiger and we loaded up for a day that was more about exploring than making distance (though it eventually turned into both - you're always making distance if you're trying to get around a great lake). After a quick fill up and a slow ride around St. Ignace's lovely harbour, we got onto the interstate and headed for the Mackinac Bridge, it was spectacular:
The Mackinac Bridge is worth the ride!
We took our border-buddies' advice and headed over to the Tunnel of Trees. This put us on the shore of yet another Great Lake (Lake Michigan). The micro-climate on the west shore of Michigan's northern peninsula produces fast growth. As you ride onto that side of the peninsula everything is super green and the trees get Pandora big. The M-119 is a twisty little blacktop that runs through those forests along the shore. It's barely two lanes wide with no curbs or runoff. You need to keep your eyes on the narrow lane, but you're never moving that quickly. Surrounded by a sea of green, you quickly get into a meditative mood. The Tiger can be whisper quiet when it wants to be, and we purred through that green cathedral in near silence.
You can't help but get that look on your face on the M-119.
We ended up getting redirected off the tunnel road due to construction and never found our way back. We eventually got to Petoskey, which I was interested in seeing because it was where Earnest Hemingway used to spend his summers as a child. It's box stores and hotels bent under the weight of lots of tourists nowadays. If Hemingway were to return, I'm not sure much of it would ring a bell. Out of the heat in a McDonalds at lunch we ran into our doppelgangers again. They suggested an alternate route out of Petoskey and we wished each other a safe trip once again. A short time later one of the retirees working there walked up to chat about bikes, he had a big old Harley in the lot and couldn't identify the Tiger. When I told him it was a Triumph he got the same happy, nostalgic expression that a lot of people did when I told them what we were riding. There is a lot of good will and nostalgia around the marquee in the States. On the road again we struck east across the peninsula aiming for Alpena on the Huron coast, but between the heat, increasing traffic and the strong westerly winds, we were both losing the will to get there. We turned south on 65 and wound our way through Huron National Forest, stopping for an ice cream in Glennie. The lovely young lady who served us told of her hours spent horseback riding the day before, then three local farmers came in for a cone and were curious about the Triumph. It was all very nice. When we left she came out to her car that had a big 'Vote Trump' bumper sticker on it. I found it hard to reconcile how nice Americans were with the insane politics they practice.
Old Detroit charm - built back in the day when the motor city was a world traveller destination, the Bay Valley Resort reminds of the golden years.
When we finally turned onto 23 heading back out to the interstate I gave a barbaric yawp in my helmet, as it felt like we'd never get there. The final blast down the interstate in 60km/hr cross winds was performed using shear will power. We staggered in to the Bay Valley Resort after nine hours and over 450kms on the road in strong winds and relentless heat. Bay Valley Resort was a real treat. Cheaper than Breakers, but better in every way. If you like modern hotels, this isn't for you, but if you like character, Bay Valley has oodles. The doors are made out of wood (!), and the entire resort is situated in the middle of a golf course. It's much more adult orientated, but it had all the accoutrements my son loves. The pool is an indoor/outdoor design with a river between them, and the spa was a hard hitting jet affair with strong bubbles perfect for loosening up sore muscles after a long day in the wind. The whole thing was set into patterned concrete. The on-site restaurant was swathed in dark wood and was both classy and dated, I loved it! The food was chef prepared but priced very reasonably. We fell asleep feeling well cared for in the silence of a golf course at night - no sounds of screaming children anywhere. We woke up the next morning and hit the pool one last time. Max wasn't keen to mount up for yet another day on the road. Day one had been a high mileage sweat box, day 2 a rainy, windy ride with an interminable border wait, and day 3 was a high mileage meander across the peninsula in heat and high winds. We were both tired, and having to get my pillion in motion made it even heavier. After a late breakfast we finally got on the road just before 11am and I made a command decision to take the Interstate rather than head over to the coast on another back road ride. No wind and less heat made our interstate jaunt through poor, old Flint, Michigan a relatively painless affair. Flint feels like a ghost town at the best of times, but this year it felt abandoned. We stopped at a rest stop on the i69 on the way to the Canadian border when Max got a leg cramp, but otherwise high-tailed it home.
Distracted Stratford drivers put that look on my face.
It took all of five minutes to line up and cross the border back into Sarnia. Heading into The States was misery, coming home was a dream. We stopped in Sarnia for lunch and then hit the bricks for the final ride home. We thundered up the 402 on the long legged Tiger before angling off toward Stratford on back roads. After over sixteen hundred kilometres of riding, much of it through wilderness, it was the ride through Stratford and its dithering, well dressed theatre patrons that was the most dangerous. We were cut off and almost run over by people less worried about killing us than they were making their curtain call. It was the only moment on the trip that I was tempted to chase someone down in order to thump them.
Back in the stable after a flawless 1600+kms ride, what a champ!
We finally pulled into the driveway just before 6pm, sore but elated. The ride had its challenges, but the memories made were keepers. The road into Sault Ste. Marie is lovely and surprisingly mountainous. The Mackinac Bridge is a must-do experience, and riding down the tunnel of trees is like attending the best church ever. Java Joes makes a good food stop and Bay Valley Resort is a forgotten gem worth staying at if you're in the area. All in all it was a great adventure, albeit a trying one. Sometimes, usually when it's least comfortable, I wonder why I'm doing this to myself, but the memories sort out the discomfort from the awesome, and the awesome always wins.
Riding the Tunnel of Trees road in northern Michigan http://www.motorcycleroads.com/75/309/Michigan/Tunnel-of-Trees-Road.html#sthash.BxFBBpqw.dpbs - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA
https://goo.gl/maps/6h2J4cJoXhz
Entering Virginia
