Thursday 6 July 2017

Three Wheeled Dreams

Once again I'm thinking about a Morgan3.  I found out that Ontario is offering a ten year pilot program for three wheeled vehicles, meaning you can drive one here now.  The federal requirements for three wheeled vehicles are just borrowed from other jurisdictions where they are already allowed, so the Morgan should be good to go.

It's probably the Polaris Slingshot and the like that have forced this to finally happen, but what I really want is that Morgan3.  With a big air cooled twin out front and a super wide stance, the Morgan3 is a silly amount of fun to drive and looks like an instant classic rather than the offspring of the USS Enterprise and a TIE fighter.  If you want to go fast, get an even number of wheels, but if you want something with character, go odd, and the Morgan3 is nothing if not full of character.



Of course Ontario can't do anything without making it pointlessly political and difficult, so anyone driving a three wheeled vehicle has to act like it's a motorcycle and is required to wear a helmet.  Like I said, pointlessly officious, it's the Ontario way.  

At least there are some stylish (though probably illegal) options for piloting the Morgan3.  A couple of World War 2 inspired fighter helmets along with aviator jackets and we'd be ready to roll.

As it happens, the Morgan factory is but one hundred miles north of us when we're on holiday in the UK and offers rentals.  That might warrant a day trip!  There is another option even closer to where we're staying.  Berrybrook is in Exeter, just down the road from the cottage we're at.


Wednesday 5 July 2017

Trying to understand UK PCP deals on motorcycles from a Canadian perspective

I've been trying to understand this since reading the
advertising, um, I mean buyer's guide in BIKE last year.
I'm trying to get a handle on PCP financing that seems to be popular in the UK right now. If you're going to buy a Kawasaki Z1000 with ABS in the UK, you're looking at a price of £10,389 ($17,453CAN). The on the road price in Canada is about $16,000, so you're already almost $1500 ahead, but cost of borrowing is where I get really confused.

If you PCP (personal contract purchase) you're paying a £2500 ($4200CAN) downpayment and then £147 ($247CAN) per month for 36 months. At the end of that time you've got nothing, all while paying 5.9% interest and having to ride the bike under mileage and keep it pristine to keep your investment intact.  You're also hit up for financing paperwork fees.  If you go over mileage or the bike is in any way less than mint when you return it you suffer additional costs. I imagine the same goes with any farkling you might want to do - don't. When you hand it back you've paid $13,092 Canadian dollars in interest and what basically resolves itself as rental costs; you own nothing. That's when they ask you if you want to do it again with another bike or now pay a balloon payment equal to the current value of the bike (assuming it's in perfect shape).

If you buy the same bike in Canada and put the same amount down, you're looking at a monthly payment of $348 Canadian (£207), and at the end of the 36 months you own the thing. There are no mileage restrictions, no worries about keeping it stock and perfect and if it is in good shape you'll have spent about $550 in interest and have a vehicle that UK Kawasaki says is worth £3628 ($6095CAN).

The pure costs of borrowing in the UK would be the down payment plus the monthly interest costs. That'll be £2500 down payment + £465 in monthly interest, all for the favour of giving you this great deal. The pure costs of interest on the PCP deal is £2965 ($4981CAN). The amount of interest you're paying to own (rather than borrow) the same bike in Canada is $460.

The context of borrowing in the two countries is quite different. The UK happily followed the US down the rabbit hole that caused the 2008 financial crisis by deregulating banks. That never happened in Canada where interest rates and the cost of borrowing has always been held to reasonable standards. Canadian banks still make huge profits (they now own a number of US banks that crashed in 2008), but they don't break the financial system in the process and people who live here aren't subject to the ridiculous costs of borrowing that British people seem to think reasonable.  I frequently see ads on UK TV for credit cards with interest rates that would be illegal in Canada.

With that in mind, maybe throwing away nearly five grand Canadian to borrow a bike for three years (that's $139 a month just in borrowing and rental costs!) makes sense, but it sure doesn't from this side of the Atlantic.


I'm also left wondering what a flood of lightly used bikes will do to the marketplace in the next few years.  In classic short term financial thinking it looks like PCP will flood the market place with short term ownership and then flood the market again with bikes people couldn't afford in the first place.  Won't this eventually hurt new bike sales as dealers become swamped in returned PCP bikes?  Maybe the idea is to return the bike and the go looking to get a massive discount on it when you show up a week later and they don't have enough room on their lot to hold all the PCP returns.

I'm starting to see why the UK found keeping up with the EU too difficult to continue.  They seem to have a very loose grasp on how marketplaces work and seem determined to ignore anything like sustainability.  I'm heading over there in a couple of weeks and enjoying a great Canada/UK exchange rate thanks to their wobbly economic choices.  I'm curious to see if I can get a first hand look at what this approach to bike selling is doing.

UK Kawasaki's PCP calculator

Canadian Kawasaki's offer on the same bike...

Cost of borrowing on Canada Kawasaki's 36 month financing offer...

Last Grasps: A Well Timed Post Canada Day Ride



I've only got about a week left before we're off on airplanes, so I'm trying to find reasons to exercise the Tiger before five weeks of motorcycling abstinence.  After a couple of days of crowded rooms and even more crowded Canada Day festivals I needed some quality alone time.  Nothing does that like a motorcycle ride does.

It wasn't an inspired ride, and it took me to my usual haunts, but it was a lucky ride.  With thunderstorms passing through the area, they were where ever I wasn't, which was good because I was travelling light.

The idea was to get to Higher Ground at the Forks of the Credit before it got long-weekend crazy.  I managed to get a coffee, look at some Italian exotica and then get out of there before it got really full.  

With the ice cream shop owner moving bikes that were parking out of the way anyway and signs all down the rest of the building stating no motorcycle parking, I'm starting to wonder if Belfountain is getting fed up with its place as a summer time ride stop.  It's a boon to the local economy, but some people seem intent on stopping it rather than embracing it.  Every rider I saw there was considerate and cautious in entering the parking lot without revving loud pipes or blocking others, but I guess the locals have had enough.  I'm not sure how much longer Higher Ground can be the sole reason to stop there if everyone else in the town is telling us to go elsewhere.


I had Lee Park's Total Control on my mind as I navigated The Forks, and damned if I wasn't more stable and smooth through the hairpin corner by looking over my shoulder into the corner.  You'd think looking away from your direction of travel would be counter intuitive, and I don't get much opportunity to practice it on arrow straight SW Ontario roads, but with some practice it's definitely the way to go.

After a ride up and down The Forks I aimed north past the Caledon Ski Club and toward Hockley Valley.  It was a lovely, relatively empty ride up to the Terra Nova Public House.






The TNPH had a summer salad with fresh rainbow trout on it that was pretty much perfect, and it let me duck inside and watch the tarmac dry off from the downpour that had passed through ten minutes before I got there.

After a quick lunch I did the TNPH loop before heading down River Road to Horning's Mills.  Mr Lee's Total Control habits were still playing though my head and I was focused on late apex entries and clean lines while looking through the corners.  It's funny how you feel like you're going slower when you're going faster on a motorbike.



River Road was generally empty and I got a clean run all the way to Horning's Mills.  It was time to head home, so I cut south west through the wind fields of Shelburne before stopping in Grand Valley for a coffee.  A GS650 rider and his wife were sitting in the cafe and we got into a good bike chat.  As a fellow rider intent on making miles rather than a scene, we had a meeting of minds on what a motorbike should be for, it was a good talk.

The final ride home was, again, relatively empty and I pulled into the driveway mid-afternoon.  I'm still hoping to get down to the full eclipse over the Tail of the Dragon when I get back from and Iceland/UK foray.  Perhaps a motorcycling opportunity will appear while away, but if not, I'll get in some miles this week to make sure my riding battery is topped up.

Thursday 29 June 2017

The Utterly Baffling Biker

We're minutes away from collapsing from heat exhaustion on our rally ride the other week when I start to hear voices.  We're riding through Elora on our way to Fergus and a flock of cruisers have just pulled out in front of us.  The large man on a Harley ahead of me creates concussive sound waves that knock birds out of the sky whenever he cracks the throttle, which he has to keep doing because his Milwaukee iron doesn't idle very well.

Between hundred and forty decibel POTATO POTATO, a voice, as clear as a bell was talking directly into my ear. It was telling me about carpets, I should buy them, but they're all out of off white Persian.

From this far back you can't hear yourself think.
I wonder if he's in his happy place.  I'm not.
Am I losing my mind? It took me several moments to realize that the three hundred pounder in beanie helmet, t-shirt and shorts on his baaiiiike in front of me had the radio so loud it was like I was in the front row of a concert, if it was a concert about carpet advertising.  That we were at the end of a marathon ride and I was exhausted didn't put me in the greatest of moods, but genuinely, other than making me think I'd lost my mind, what was the point of this man?


Mushin: literally means no mind,
but he's doing it wrong.
I've had Lee Park's Total Control on Kindle for a while.  I got lost in Park's OCD maze of suspension minutia, but the latest chapters are much more accessible and are about your mindset when riding.  Lee describes the perfect motorcyclist in Zen terms: completely in the moment, aware of everything with no specific focus drawing attention away from that whole.  You should be using all of your senses to do this.  He's quite serious about how you should approach the zone of peak performance while riding (and make no mistake, you should treat riding like a competitive sport - one you don't want to lose).  None of it involves pipes so loud they cause small children to cry, a radio turned up so loud someone a hundred yards back can hear it clearly or wearing a beanie helmet and next to no clothes.

There is much I really dig about motorcycle culture, but it all has to do with excellence.  Watching a thirty-eight year old, six foot tall Valentino Rossi win a race again at the pinnacle of motorcycle racing last weekend was an example.  Watching Dakar riders survive the marathon they run (if marathons were run over two weeks) is another.  Watching a skilled road rider showing how it's done on a high mileage bike with a kind of effortless ease, that's impressive.  I've got a lot of words for what I saw last Sunday, but impressive isn't one of them.

At one point I'd closed up on him while he was adjusting his radio.  I revved the bike to let him know I was there and he practically jumped out of his skin.  As far as awareness and respect for the act of riding goes, I'm just not seeing it.

They puttered down the road ahead of us when we pulled over in Fergus.  A steady stream of traffic followed them down the road at their leisurely but loud pace.





Sunday 25 June 2017

Riding the Dufferin Highlands & Beating Up a 360 Camera

A colleague's retirement party at the far end of our school board meant an excuse to ride over an hour each way to the Dufferin County Museum, scenically perched atop the highest point in Southern Ontario.  It also happens to be within ten minutes of two of my favourite semi-local rides (there is nothing closer with any twisties).

I rode over to Orangeville and then down Hockley Valley Road.  We're getting over a flood, and the Hockley River was eating its own banks where ever I saw it.  The ride up Airport Road into the highlands was very green and equally floody.  The retirement party was unique in that more than 50% of the speeches weren't tedious and so filled with inside jokes that only the speaker thinks them funny - with a few exceptions I wasn't bored with the speeches, which never happens.

I didn't take any photos on the way out, but I met my wife at the party and then we thought we might go over to the Terra Nova Public House for dinner, but they had nearly an hour wait on a Friday Night, so we aimed elsewhere.  The Mono Cliff's Inn was both immediately welcoming and only ten minutes away over the glacial moraines of the Niagara Escarpment.

This time I kept the Ricoh Theta handy and took photos as we went into the setting sun:








After a great appetizer smorgasbord in the unique atmosphere of the bar downstairs at the MCI we headed home in the twilight.  I wasn't expecting much out of the Theta camera in the dying light, but as it has before, it exceeded my expectations:









By this point the light is all but gone and I'm beating up on the Theta.  A fixed lens fully automatic camera, 360° or not, struggles to manage low light, so this isn't where the Theta was designed to work, but it still does a credible job.  It's all but dark out when I take the last photo while travelling under the power lines.  I had to beat it up in photoshop a bit to restore some sharpness, but sometimes going with the blur gives you a painted feel to a photo which can give it an abstract vibe.  Photography doesn't have to be all about focus.



You can do quite a lot with the desktop software that comes with the Theta,but there are some special formatting options in the online version that are cool.  The Tiny Planet view in the online viewer is probably my favourite.  The embedded image at the bottom lets you see the whole photo in the raw.


The original

Some Photoshop on the original
Alternative photoshop a bit closer to the natural light

This is the original image in the online software.  If you click on the mirror ball icon and then tiny planet you'll see where I got the still images above.
Post from RICOH THETA. - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA

Friday 23 June 2017

Bailing Out: A WTF Rally Story

We knew it was going to be a hot one before we started.  We'd done the last Lobo Loco rally (with great success!) on an equally hot and dry day, so we didn't give it much thought.

Our cunning plan was to head up to Jeff's cottage and then drive from the shores of Huron up to Southampton and then down through Southwestern Ontario before finishing up in Brampton. We'd been pouring over the rally map for days working out the best route. Stops were thin on the ground this time around, so the 16 stop plan I concocted seemed eminently doable and quite competitive.

Last time we'd won the longest (worst?) route award. This time we were cutting over a hundred clicks off last year's marathon that had us burning through the atmosphere to get to the finish in the nick of time.


A wrench was thrown into the works a week before this rally when Wolfe Bonham, our improbably named rally master, threw a bonus in that had us radically rethinking our route.  If we could connect together towns that started with a 'W' a 'T' and then an 'F', we could pick up a cumulative bonus for each set of three.  We were out in the country with tiny towns everywhere.  This was a distinct advantage as those in the Greater Toronto Area had paved over all their small towns and called them one thing.  With points so thin on the map, this seemed like the way to go.

Jeff had headed up to his internet-less cottage the night before.  I followed him up the next day, about 12 hours before the rally would start with all sorts of WTF towns lined up and a Google Map saved on my phone so I could access it off-line.  It was cooking hot on the way up, well into the 90s Fahrenheit and with a relentless wind that had me riding with a permanent 10° lean.  Winds were gusting even higher by the lake.



After a good dinner we went for a walk and watched the sun fall into Huron before we got down to the business of mangling our carefully built route.

Each WTF town combo built on itself, and the only stipulation was that you had to do them in order.  You could do other bonuses in between, so in theory you could do multiple WTFs within and around each other.


Our initial route had us riding north out of Point Clark and up to Southampton before looping back through Chesney and Walkerton, down past where we live, over to the escarpment and then down the 401 to Brampton.  We threw out Georgetown, Milton and riding along the 401 to the finish line to begin with because neither of us like riding in population - that prejudice would end up derailing us later.

I was loath to throw out our loop north around Southampton and tried to fit in some early, multiple WTF town combos.  Our original score would have been in the seven to eight thousand range, but with a couple of cuts we'd have 7000 in regular stops and four WTF combos worth 1500, 2000, 2500 and 3000 points.  That would have had us finishing with upwards of sixteen thousand points; it felt like a sure victory!  Even with the extra stops we were still lower mileage than our marathon from last year, though with almost no highway riding at speed.


As the wind continued to howl around the cottage we finally put the map down and went for a short sleep.  The next morning we woke up to tree limbs down and many branches blown off.  Unlike most mornings, it was still wild and windy on the shores of Huron and the temperature was already climbing.

We got out early and filled up right at 8am at a little two pump gas station in Amberley.  Instead of heading north up the coast we cut inland, searching for our first WTF town bonus.

Along the way we stopped in Lucknow for a terrifying statue that suited the rally theme (WTF?).  After piling on those points I realized we didn't have to go all the way to Wingham for our 'W' as Whitechurch was on the way.  We were tripping over 'W' towns!

The combos had begun, except it was so windy that my rally flag blew onto the highway in Whitechurch and I had to stuff it into the fairing to stop it going walkabout again.

A quick Google maps detour had us in the scenic town of Teeswater only a few minutes later.  This time the rally flag flew into a farmer's field.  Since we were emailing the stops in as we went (an annoyingly time consuming task), we got a warning that rally flags needed to be in every shot.  Short of some crazy glue or a photo crew following us along, I wasn't sure how we were going to do that.

We pressed on to the even prettier town of Formosa which had suddenly gotten hilly as we neared the edge of the Niagara escarpment.  Once again I was comedically chasing the rally flag into ditches and missed it in the photo.  We were off again, this time headed for a village that didn't actually show up on most maps: the mythical berg of Westford (not to be confused with Westworld).



After the road turned to gravel, then dirt, then went into a full on bayou as we entered the Greenock Swamp Wetland Complex (I couldn't make this up), we found Westford!  As we took the picture to start our second WTF town combo we got a message saying our rally flags weren't showing.  Whether this was a warning or a three thousand point penalty (we wouldn't be losing our first WTF bonus, we'd be losing our last), it took the wind out of our sails.  We'd been having a great time on our big adventure bikes slashing through the wetland complex to find the nearly fictional village of Westford only to wonder if our first 90 minutes of hard going had been for nothing.

We tried to shake it off as we saddled up and headed over to Tiverton for our next target.  The sun was starting to bake everything and the wind was relentless, but for the next little while we had it at our backs, so life was good.

The roads got gravelly, then dirty, then muddy!  Circumnavigating the Greenock Wetland Complex was a good time!


Tiverton arrived, but now we wondered what it was worth.  At that point we re-prioritized getting the rally flag clearly in every picture.  Since we were partnered up this was a relatively straightforward prospect, Jeff would take a photo of me with my phone then I'd take one of him with his.  I still wonder how other competitors working solo managed to take photos of themselves, their bike and a clear rally flag in sixty kilometer per hour gusts.

We were now working our way north up the coast Lake Huron and past the Bruce Nuclear power plant.  By mid-morning the temperatures were soaring.  Fortunately the great lake next to us did something to take the edge off.  At no point were we lolligagging, with quick stops and efficient speed between them.  We pulled into Southampton well before noon and collected two more regular stops.  From there we angled eastward and then south, into that fearsome wind, for the main leg of the rally.  We felt on top of the time and ahead of schedule.

Passing under the main output from the Bruce Nuclear Power Plant.  An operator there was the former owner of my radioactive orange Tiger!


Southampton was busy on a sunny June weekend with lots of traffic and lights.  Up until then we'd been safely ensconced deep in the country, but now we were trying to make time with people all around.

A big dog and a house covered in lawn ornaments (I know, WTF, right?) and we were back out on country lanes making (hot) wind as we headed east toward Owen Sound.

I'd never been to Tara, Ontario before, though my parents once entertained ideas about moving there.  It's a pretty little town with lots of old, brick buildings.  That became a theme of this ride.  Small Southern Ontario towns have these beautiful old brick buildings in the empty hearts of most of them.  In Southampton an enterprising group had turned one into The Outlaw Brew Company.  Passing it I was struck with the idea of just stopping and going in.  Why am I tear assing around like this?  Jeff and I both put a pin in that one though, we'll be back.

Visions of reclaiming an old brick building in rural Ontario and turning it into a motorcycle themed digital foundry, coffee shop and nano-brewery (only for local consumption) floated around in my heat soaked brain.  The stop in Chesley included a giant cow (WTF?) and then we were on to Walkerton for a sadder WTF.




Walkerton was where my son Max and I drove to pick up the Tiger on a cold spring day over a year ago.  I've got a soft spot for the place.  

The memorial gardens to the people who died in 2000 when local water treatment failed to protect its own citizens was a difficult WTF stop to see.  That it's not downtown but hidden away by the municipal buildings in the south end bothered me.  We finally found it and got our photo by the memorial waterfall.  We left Walkerton (our third 'W' town) in a reflective state of mind.
We were pushing into the afternoon now and I started to fear for time.  Even with 'aggressive navigation' between these towns, riding through them meant not being a tool and staying on the speed limits.

We got lost going south out of Walkerton on our way to Wroxeter to start another WTF town loop, but only lost about five minutes.  Trowsbridge was a shot in the dark, barely a dot on the map, but we found it, and then wrapped up this loop within a loop within a loop in Fordwich.  Checking the time we chucked Mount Forest out the window and started to run south.

We needed to close the Walkerton and Westford-Tiverton loops.  Teviotdale got Walkerton hooked up and Fergus would close one of the two.  We were originally going to head a bit west and hit Floradale, but we were running out of time fast.  I then remembered that Forks of the Credit actually has a village sign, so that would close our last WTF town loop.

South out of Teviotdale we ran into a steady stream of Sunday traffic heading for Elora (it's very pretty, I know, I live there).  The next few stops were in our own backyard, but time was slipping away, and more problematically, we'd both gotten to the point where we obviously weren't thinking clearly, which is bad when it's almost a hundred windy degrees out and you're on a motorcycle trying to make time.

We bombed south toward Elora, passing on the broken line when we could, but short of some back to the future motorcycling we weren't going to do this thing.  We had to stop for gas and I ran in and grabbed energy bars since neither of us had eaten anything in over seven hours.  Chugging Gatorade and watching the heat waves come off the pavement, Jeff asked a good question: "do we want to go all the way to Brampton?"

For the first time I got off the must-finish train and thought about it.  If we made it it'd be mighty close assuming a clean run into the GTA, which never happens (it turns out it wouldn't have, there were miles and miles of construction on the main highway leading into Brampton that we learned about afterwards).

We were both spent.  It was oven hot, we'd been fighting the wind all day and it looked like that same wind had thrown thousands of points in stops into question.  The thought of fighting our way into the shity um, city, especially when we were standing in our own backyard was too much to take.  We both had to go to work the next day and another three hours in the saddle (conservatively 1.5 hours each way plus surprise construction) put the final nail in the coffin.

That last picture of me passed out on the side of the road happened to be right outside of the Breadalbane.  Ten minutes later we were sitting in the shade re-hydrating and ordering some locally sourced chicken wings; our day was done.  The ride home from there was 7 minutes long with no traffic.

We texted our tap out but there were no regrets.  We had a great day seeing all sorts of things we hadn't seen before and finding several places that don't officially exist.  The missed flags at the beginning knocked us off our game, the heat and wind beat us down and ultimately the thought of fighting our way into any part of the GTA at the end was too much to bear.

A few days later we discovered the winner had over twenty-one thousand points and had made thirty-five stops while covering over 450kms.  I'm still trying to work out how that was possible.  We would have hit 25 stops on our way through a 435km ride had we done the whole thing.  

Google Maps says that should take 6 hours and 2 minutes, but that assumes no stops.  If you've got to find each place, a place to safely stop the bike where you can take a picture that meets the requirements, take the photo, send it via email, saddle up and go again, that sucks up time.  This assumes that you immediately find each stop with no problems and don't need to stop for gas, or eating, or drinking, or anything else.

35 stops at 3 minutes apiece (an astonishingly quick stop time) would mean you'd have six and a quarter hours to cover 457kms.  That works out to an over 73km/hr average speed.  That is quick if you take into account having to slow down and get back up to pace after each of 30+ stops, stop signs, traffic lights and traffic, not to mention speed limits on anything other than a highway.

We spent most of our time on empty country roads and we weren't lollygagging.  At one point Jeff told me to ease up because I was likely to attract the popo.  If we came upon traffic we generally passed it.  We covered 358kms and pulled the plug in Fergus at 2:48pm - 6hrs and 48 minutes in.  Google tells me it was another hour and twenty-four minutes of riding to the finish line on our route, not counting the time needed to stop four more times.  Our not lollygagging average speed before we pulled the plug with nineteen stops done was 52.65 km/hr.  To make up for traffic lights, riding in towns, stop signs and traffic, we were doing a bit more than that most of the time.  We didn't waste time with silly things like eating.  Until I've figured out how to bend the laws of physics it looks like a rally win is beyond my capabilities, or my willingness to take risks.


A doable map - that we didn't do.
I'm away during the next two rallies, but I'll be out there again in the fall.  I've never done Port Dover on Friday the 13th, so that'll give me an excuse to overcome my cruiser phobia and go.

I think the idea of pushing for a big points day is no more.  I'll enjoy the ride, see things I don't normally see and make sure I'm not pushing so hard that I can't enjoy the camaraderie at the end.  That was the most disappointing aspect of the day, not hearing about all the other adventures that happened to everyone else.

In case you feel cheated by the lack of photography in this post, there is even more here:
https://goo.gl/photos/eNxvnX.LW6Lbd2AyP8