Empty Algonquin Park

I managed a couple of days out on the bike around my birthday this year. Thanks to being freed from the shackles of the school year, I was able to do it outside of the May long weekend when the roads would be utterly mad with with ravening hordes driving the largest SUVs they could find and hauling every possible motorized toy to their second homes in the near north.

It ended up being just over 800kms over two days. 500kms on day one from home and up through and around Algonquin Park, then 320kms home on day two.  The Map.

The ride down Highway 9 to the 400 north was packed solid with transport trucks, to the point where I missed the turn north on Highway 27 because I was literally surrounded by the bloody things.

Finally on the 400 north (which was moving well on the Thursday morning before the long weekend), I let the Kawasaki fly and we shot up the road, finally clear of the convoy. I had three things going for me when I crested a hill right into the eyes of a waiting OPP cruiser.

#1: I was making time in the middle lane rather than the fast lane and was following another car

#2: The bike is awfully difficult to get a reading from thanks to not a lot of metal to bounce radar off of

#3: You can always count on some citiot blasting up the fast lane in a mega-sized German SUV

The cruiser lit the lights and pulled out only to collect said SUV out of the fast lane. He wasn't going much faster than I was but he can enjoy that ticket.

The 400 was (incredibly) fully functional and I was around Barrie in no time and moving up Highway 11 at pace. I pulled into Webbers because they have a nice new Starbucks where I got a coffee and stretched. In under two hours I'd covered the 172kms that got me clear of the gravity of the Greater Toronto Area and into the near north.

After a warm up (it was 5°C when I left just past 9am), I was back on the Kawasaki and heading north again. Gravenhurst was (incredibly) efficient and I slipped past what is often a backup without delay. By 11:30 I was grabbing a quick lunch and filling up in Huntsville and then it was Highway 60 into Algonquin Provincial Park.

I stopped at the West Gate to have a chat with the wardens and get my pass as I intended to stop at the Visitor Centre. After a nice chat with the young ladies at the desk I got my pass, set up the 360 camera and then got in motion ASAP because it's blackfly season and boy do they come out of the woodwork when you stop!

Into the park there was very little traffic. The only one I had to make space for was the massive German SUV thundering through one of the most beautiful places in the province at well over 120kms/hr (it's an 80 zone). If you play your cards like that, you're not likely to see anything!

Once clear of the traffic by the gate things got really quiet. An occasional car would pass the other way but there was nothing on the road in front of behind me as I went deeper into nature. It was midday so I wasn't likely to see any big animals (and I didn't), but birds were plentiful with birds of prey over the road and many others in the bush.

It was a glorious ride alone through the park - a place that comes as close to a church for me as anything can be. The bike was the perfect vehicle. I was moving fast enough to stay ahead of the blood sucking insects, but slowly enough to smell the lakes and woods and feel the thermoclines as a dipped into and out of valleys.

The visitor's centre is worth a stop if you're travelling through the park. The lookout off the back is a great view (and high enough up to be relatively bug free!). I would have stayed for a coffee and a snack but the restaurant was closed. It was a good opportunity to clean the bugs off my visor though.

By now it had hit the high of 12°C for the day and though it was sunny it was cool, especially when in motion on the bike. If I stopped I got sweaty and then the flies would come, so best to keep things moving. Out the east gate and then the plan was to ride south around the bottom of the park.

The Concours had been fantastic on the highways and had handled everything I asked of it. The only place I think the Tiger could have done a better job was on Peterson Road, which is your typical poorly maintained Ontario backroad with ruts and potholes that'll knock your teeth out. The sporty suspension on the Kawasaki didn't enjoy that bit of road. The Tiger's longer suspenders would have done the trick, but otherwise the Concours was the right bike for this ride, especially on the highways.

I finally pulled into Wilberforce about 444kms into the ride for a stretch and a drink (and to clean the bugs off the visor again). 

After a quick pit stop I was on my way again. The 118 is one of my favourite roads in the province and I twisted and turned my way down it towards Canarvon and Minden where I was spending the night. Only a long delay in Haliburton for road works slowed the ride down. At least I know the fans are working on the C14. They cycled three times while we sat there wondering what the f*** was going on. It turned out a water pipe had burst across the road holding things up.

I pulled into the Red Umbrella Inn just outside of Minden at about 5pm. After getting cleaned up I rode into town for some of the best Thai I've had at Suwan's Thai Cuisine and picked up a couple of local craft brews from Boshkung Brewing Social (Minden really has everything you need) before filling up and heading back to the inn for a quiet night by the lake.

The next morning I was up early and over to the Mill Pond for breakfast. Great eggs and bacon and then it was an empty ride down the 118 to Bracebridge, Port Carling and finally Bala for a coffee before the last stretch through Wahta Mohawk Territory before popping out at the 400 and getting into the rapid flow south.

I dodged and weaved around Creemore, stopping once to change into lighter gear because the temperature had shot up with the humidity and made it home before the thunderstorms started. A nice way to spend a couple of days on the road. I only wish I'd had more time.

Zipper Replacement on a Motorcycle Jacket

Back in 2016 we did a winter family holiday to Las Vegas and then drove down to Phoenix.  While there my son and I rented a bike and rode the Superstition Mountains just east of the city.  Having done some research, I thought I'd try buying a leather bike jacket while down there as US prices tend to be much kinder than Canadian ones.  I ended up with a Bilt black leather bike jacket that I've used on cooler rides since.  It's not high tech protection wise but the leather is thick and the jacket is a solid thing.  It was the last of the 2014 designs and I got it on sale ($159!) as they were wrapping up their Christmas shopping season at the CycleGear shop in Mesa.  Your typical excellent American sales service too.

Since then I've done thousands of miles with the thing and it has always done the job.  It isn't well vented so it tends to do early spring/late fall duties.  This past fall on my last big ride of the year I was wearing it for the 270km ride up to Deerhurst Resort and then it handled a torrential downpour when I rode into Algonquin Park the next day.

It was all good until on the way home I undid the zipper and it came off in my hand when I stopped for a drink before heading back south.  I managed to get the zipper to reconnect so I wasn't flapping all the way back, but a broken zipper meant the jacket couldn't be used anymore, which made me sad.  What followed was a deep dive into zipper technology as I attempted to fix it.

A six year old leather jacket might not be my first choice when getting caught in a downpour, but it did the job!  The hotel room had a lot of drying leather hanging up in it when I got back.

Some online research had me filling my head with new zipper related vocabulary.  The retaining box on the jacket had come off when I pulled the zipper down.  Most of the online advice (which turned out to be right) suggested that you can't fix a broken box, it requires a zipper replacement, but on a thick leather jacket that seemed like a bit much.  Of course, Amazon sells crap that insinuates that you can fix a broken retaining box, so I wasted money buying that and then found that it wouldn't grip and simply didn't work, even after multiple attempts.

Top Tip:  don't waste your time trying to fix an old zipper.  It took some effort, but removing the old zipper and installing another is just some work and isn't impossible.

I finally ended up buying a quality YKK replacement zipper (after learning an awful lot about YKK zippers).  My crafty wife has all the sewing kit so she gave me a seam ripper that made removing the old thread very easy.  If you've got an exacto knife or craft blades and steady hands you could probably remove the thread that way, but the seam ripper does it without damaging the material.  With the old zipper removed and the outer leather separated from the inner liner, the jacket ended up sitting under my work table for a couple of weeks because the thought of pushing a needle through the leather seemed like a bit much, but it's no harder than other mechanical work (makes your hands ache though).

I got some heavy duty coat thread when I purchased the replacement zipper.  This stuff is nylon-rope strong which helped with the sewing, which I did by hand.  The stitching doesn't look like it's done by a machine but it's consistently spaced and didn't cause any pinch points up the zipper.

I came in through the back lining and out through the existing holes in the leather.  By separating the layers I was able to line up the needle with the holes and then it was just a matter of keeping everything straight as I worked my way up the zipper hole by hole.  Alanna suggested I start at the bottom and work up - that was good advice.

Using the existing holes on the thick hide is the trick.  You might be able to do this on a machine but I don't know how you'd do that as the jacket material is thick and you'd need to align the holes the machine is punching with what is currently there.  Doing it by hand is a bit tedious but it works and means you're not punching any new holes in anything.

When I got to the top I tucked the zipper (I couldn't get one the exact length of the old one so got one about half an inch too long) into the collar which had been separated when I removed the zipper thread.  With the top of the zipper tucked into the collar, I sewed everything up using the existing holes in the leather.  Once again, separating the material let me align the needle with each hole one by one.

The final product zips up like new and has no pinching or clumping on the front of the jacket.  Sewing in the other side was easy.  I separated the zipper once one side was in and then  did the other just the same way.  By the time I was wrapping it up I'd gotten quick at it.

Alanna had a thick needle and that strong thread really helped the process.  With a leather jacket the trick is to use the existing holes in the material rather than trying to punch new ones, which in my case meant doing it by hand.  The end result is that my old leather jacket, which now has some nice patina on it, is back in service and ready for the 2022 riding season, should this never ending winter end.

If you lose a zipper on your favourite old motorbike jacket, don't toss it out.  A replacement zipper is less than $15 (CAD) and with thread and other odds and ends you should be able to replace that tired zipper with something that'll let you enjoy your well loved leather jacket for years to come.

Motorcycling For Sport On a Budget

LOGISTICS

The trickiest part about trying to arrange your motorcycling to provide you with a sporting outlet are the logistics.  You can't ride a track/trials/dirt bike to where you're going to ride it in a sporting fashion, so you need transportation options that'll get you and your gear to where you intend to use it.

The obvious choice (if you're looking for a budget choice) is to look at cargo vans - or so I thought.  Thanks to COVID, the market for these (like many other things) has gone bonkers as every unemployed rocket scientist in the world rushes out to grab a used van to deliver for Amazon.

Here are some current online choices:

My favourite is the fuggly Transit Connect that isn't even big enough to hold a single bike and is almost a decade old with over two-hundred thousand kilometres on it for $10,500, $8,500.  Eight and half grand for a heavily used POS.  Both my current on-road bikes, an '03 Triumph Tiger and an '10 Kawasaki Concours together cost me less than that, and they're both a joy to look at and operate, though carrying a dirt bike on them isn't likely.

If I want to get my Guy Martin on, New Transits start at thirty-five grand and can easily option up to over fifty.  The bigger Ram Promasters start at thirty-seven grand and can option to over twice that.  The wee Promaster City starts at thirty-four grand and can be optioned well into the forties.  Vans only really do the cargo thing and make any other usage tedious, and they're expensive!

The used car lot down Highway 6 has a 2015 Jeep Wrangler with 90k kms on it that they're asking $35k for it.  It isn't cheap but it seems in good nick and comes with the tow package.  We rented a Wrangler last year and I was impressed with its ability to carry weight and it's utility - it was also surprisingly fun to drive... and in the summer it'd get the doors and roof off and be able to do the Zoolander thing too.

A trailer goes for about a grand, this one comes with a ramp and he's asking $1300.  With a bit of bartering I could sort out a tow capable Wrangler with a useful trailer for under forty grand.  The Jeep isn't new, but it's only 6 years old and with a big v6 in it, 90k isn't too much of a stressful life - it actually works out to only fifteen thousand kilometres a year.

What's galling is that you're thirty-five grand into a years old almost 100k kms vehicle but the new ones run fifty-three grand - I guess you've got to have a lot of cash on hand to buy anything these days.

What'd be really nice is a state-ot-the-art Wrangler 4xe.  They tow, use very little gasoline and when things get sorted out with in-car fusion generators, I'd be able to take the gas engine out and go fully electric with it.  In the meantime, it'd carry all my bike clobber, would be a bulletproof winter vehicle and when the sun arrives I can pop the doors and roof off and enjoy it in an entirely different way; they really are Swiss Army knives!

SPORTS RIDING OPTIONS: Trials

Once I've got the moto-logistics worked out I could then focus on some sporting motorbiking.  This ain't cheap either, but some sport motorcycling is cheaper than others.  Trials riding is probably at the cheaper end of things with used bikes starting at about two grand and new, high-end performance models going up to about nine grand, though you can get a new, modern, Chinese made machine for under five grand.

I'm partial to older machines as I don't have to deal with dealer servicing and can do the work myself.  This mid-80s Yamaha TY350 comes with lots of spares and is in ready-to-go shape for about $2600.  Since I'm not looking to take on Dougie Lampkin, this'd more than get me started in trials.

The Amateur Trials Riding Association of Ontario offers regular weekend events throughout the summer and fall and would make for a great target to aim for.  I'd be a rookie, but I'm not in it to win it, I'm in it to improve my moto-craft and trials offer a unique focus on balance and control in that regard.

I'm disinclined to exercise for the sake of it, though I've never had trouble exercising in order to compete in sports, it's just hard to find any when you're a fifty-two year old guy in Southwestern Ontario.  Having trials events to prepare for would be just the thing to get me into motion.

There is also the Southwestern Ontario Classic Trials group, who also offer a number of events and categories and seem very newbie friendly.  That old Yamaha would fit right in with classic trials and would let me do my own spannering.

Our backyard has everything you'd need to practice trials, though tire tracks all over the lawn might not endear me to my better half.  Even with all that in mind, trials riding would be the cheapest moto-sport to get going in.

SPORT RIDING OPTIONS:  enduro/off-road riding

What's nice about the dirt-bike thing is that I could do it with my son, Max.  He got handy with dirt biking last summer at SMART Adventures so if we got into trail riding we could do it together.

Used dirt-bikes start at about $2500 and creep up quickly.  Most seem quite abused but appear to hold their value regardless.  For about six grand I could get us into two 21st Century machines that should be pretty dependable on the trails, the problem is there aren't any around here.  We'd have to drive for hours to get to the few that are left in Central Ontario.

The Ontario Federation of Trail Riders would be a good place to start in terms of working out trails and connecting with others interested in the sport.  Off Road Ontario offers access to enduro and motocross racing, but I'm not really into the yee-haw MX thing, though long distance enduro gets my attention (every January I'm glued to the Dakar Rally).  I also watch a lot of British television and I've seen a number of endurance off-road events on there that are appealing, so I wouldn't wave off enduro without looking into it a bit more.

SPORT RIDING OPTIONS:  track racing

There are motorcycle track days around Ontario from May to October.  The Vintage Road Racing Association seems like the best way in for someone not interested in becoming the next Marc Marquez but who is looking for some time on a bike working at the extreme ends of two-wheeled dynamics without having to worry about traffic.  The VRRA also offers a racing school to get people up to speed (so to speak).  I can't say that having a racing licence wouldn't be a cool thing to have.

The challenge with racing on pavement is that everything gets more expensive, from membership and training fees to the cost of equipment and bikes, and of course what it costs to fix them when you chuck them down the road.  Road racing offers a degree of speed and has obvious connections to road riding that are appealing, it's only the costs that make it seem like a step too far.

Sport motorcycling is tricky to get into.  You need the equipment to transport yourself and your bike and gear to where you're competing and then you also need the specialist motorbike itself, but there are options that can make it possible on not to extreme of a budget.  I'm hoping to find a way into this over the next few years.

Long Distance Rallying: Lobo Loco's Comical Rally

We were up early on Friday morning getting ready for the Lobo Loco Comical Rally. This was a tricky one with super-hero themed locations but without a set start and finish location. It sold out well before the start day and had people from all over the place participating in it.  A long distance rally like this gives you a list of theme based locations you have to research and plan to visit in a set time period.  This one also had a minimum distance requirement of 400kms in 12 hours.

For us we were looking at a warm (28°C), sunny day in Southern Ontario. Our plan was to create a 'skeleton' map of where we wanted to go and then research locations on the route that would get us points. Because this rally was a human-focused one, it made sense to head into population to find locations, so I elected to make a route that would lead us to Niagara Falls eventually. This would mean riding in the dreaded "Golden Horseshoe" - the most populated area in Canada and usually a sure way for me to lose all hope in humanity.

I usually aim away from population when I ride. Sitting in traffic and dicing with distracted drivers isn't on my to-do list when I go for a ride, but one of the advantages to doing a rally is that it pushes you outside of your comfort zone. In this case it would help me hone my highway riding and traffic management skills.

The plan was to take the new Concours 14 on the trip but after a pre-rally ride on it we got home and looked at the Corbin seat on the Tiger and decided to take the older, less dependable and less long-distance touring ready bike simply for a saddle that doesn't feel like a sadist's dream.  The Tiger also has nicer foot pegs for pillion and wasn't giving me any reason to doubt it so I spend the day before making sure everything was tight and ready to go.

By 10am we were on the road getting points.  We looped through downtown Elora to catch our first super-hero bonus (IRONMN1) and then bounced over to Fergus to get our first villain bonus at the Lutheran church there (LUTHOR1), then it was down to Guelph to catch a Spiderman themed stop (a science building at a university) before heading on to our first comic book store stop at The Dragon in the south end of the city.  We'd hoped to also do a motorcycle themed comic book cover in the store but thanks to COVID they were running on reduced hours and weren't open yet.

We'd done a lot of research and planning for the rally but you've got to be ready to pivot while you're in a timed rally in order not to burn time.  Unfortunately, at that moment the Tiger decided to get temperamental and wouldn't start.  I finally got it going again so we decided to grab a MOVIEP bonus for a superhero themed movie poster at a theatre nearby instead (you could only pick up 3 stops in teach location).

The Tiger wouldn't start again after stopping at the theatre (turning over but not catching when hot).  I was now anxious and worried that we'd get stranded while far from home during a never-ending pandemic.  It finally started and we pulled over at a local Starbucks to have a coffee and a think.  The bike was working perfectly other than the hot-start issue so we decided to press on.  Because we parked the bike for 15 minutes while we had the coffee, the Tiger fired up no problem - so it starts, just not immediately after you turn it off.  This is a problem in a long distance rally where you're starting and stopping up to 25 times, but a manageable one.

South down Highway 6 we immediately got stuck in traffic coming off the 401 mega-highway.  It was starting to get properly hot now but once we got moving the temperature was bearable.  We were going to stop at Flamborough Patio Furniture to get a photo of one of their giant chickens (the INHULK bonus was to get a photo of an oversized road-side attraction), but there was no place to safely stop and I'm very conscious of safety when we're rallying, so we pressed on to Terra Greenhouses where we got the GOBLIN1 bonus for finding garden gnomes.  We stopped long enough that the Tiger fired up no problem - 10 minutes seemed to do the trick, so on we pressed to Hamilton and our next three targets.

Another science building stop at McMaster University almost got us the REALHOx real hero bonus (get a  real-life hero to sit on or stand by your bike) when a nurse came out of the hospital still in scrubs on her way home, but we couldn't find her once we pulled into the university parking area.  After McMaster we headed downtown looking for a Wonder Woman bonus (stature of a woman), but construction meant we would have been sitting in traffic for 20 minutes trying to get there so we bailed, hit the Levity Comedy Club for a JOKERx bonus before riding out along Hamilton's rough dock area.

The next target was Do Eat Sushi in Grimsby where they serve octopus on the menu (the OCTOPI Doc Octopus villain bonus!).  We stopped for an excellent lunch at Station 1 across the street before pushing on to St. Catharines.  Our Skills Ontario GIS medal winning son was at home so we had him look up an alternative Wonder Woman statue we could do and he found a great one!  St. Catharines was the end of the Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape the land of the free south of us.  Harriet Tubman was a real-life wonder woman who helped free hundreds of slaves and then went back to the US to fight for the Union in the civil war.  Her statue in St. Catharines, where she lived for a time, was in a meditation garden on the side of a small church in a rough area of the city, and it was lovely and all the better for it because we were originally going to just grab a statue of a queen instead.  Canada has a lot of hidden history like this but queen statues are a dime a dozen.

From Harriet we worked our way through St. Cats getting a Peter street and a Parker Street along with another science building to complete the Spiderman combo bonus (Peter & Parker streets, GOBLIN, OCTOPI and science building - so all the Spiderman - points).

We headed out toward Niagara toward Queenston Heights for our second wonder woman statue (Laura Secord this time) but the canal was closed while a massive ship with what looked like huge steel building construction on it closed the way over.  Some cars were turning left so we followed them down the canal to the next bridge and got over as the big ship was entering the lock upstream.  It was cool to see but slowed us down.  I missed a turn to get on the highway and we ended up travelling through Niagara wine country instead, which was an improvement.

As long as we didn't stop the Tiger and expect it to start right away it was flawless, though the clutch was starting to make some odd noises.  Maybe it's time to change the sparkplugs.  We collapsed in a heap on the grass in the Queenston Heights across from Laura's statue at 5pm.  At that point we'd done about 160kms and hit 14 locations.  Our initial plan was to do 24 locations (one under the 25 limit) and continue on to Niagara Falls before looping back and catching our final stops in Cambridge and Kitchener on our way home, but my phone was acting up and the bike was causing worry and I was concerned about our stamina (over the past 3 years our family has faced cancer and heart surgery).

As we sat there with our boots and socks off (I took my pants off too), we had a picnic of apples, granola bars and water, cooling off and stretching, we made a decision to call it.  With better circumstances, a less questionable bike and better stamina on our part I think we could have aimed for a 10k score, but for this one my main goal was to finish and do it with a smile on our faces.

Finishing meant we had to do a minimum of 10 stops and cover at least 400kms.  The distance requirement was going to be tricky and we wouldn't meet it by retracing our steps.  Just before my phone died I mapped an alternative route that would have us dodge west on the 403 to the 401 before heading home on the highway.  Going this longer way around on the highway would mean we wouldn't be on the road so long (but it would be at speed in rush hour traffic) and we'd just get over the distance requirements.

We set out about 5:30pm and bombed down the QEW without any slowdowns.  When we got to the bypass around Hamilton things ground to start-stop with compression waves of impatient people cutting each other off and making it worse.  We sat amidst the rows of idling SUVs, minivans and trucks, all spewing carbon into the atmosphere while everyone made a point of slowing things down in hopes of getting themselves a few feet further down the road.  In circumstances like this it's hard not to see every GTA rush hour as a metaphor for why we're willing to make the world uninhabitable just to get ourselves a bit further down the road.  It takes a special kind of blindness to not see that when you're sitting in it every day.

The jackass in an Audi wagon with fifteen grands worth of carbon road bicycle on his back bumper who ran right to the end of a lane before cutting in front of the row of traffic was in the majority.  Nothing makes people worse than there being too many people, and there are more too many people in the world every day.

I'd suggest lane splitting for bikes but after watching Ontario drivers fail to indicate and drive irrationally just in order to get ahead one space in traffic, I don't think Ontario can handle lane splitting or filtering of motorcycles, we don't have the culture or the driving skill to do it safely.

Once clear of the idiocy that is Canadian city driving (there's a reason the only accidents Ewan & Charlie had when they rode around the world was in a Canadian city), we made tracks on the 403 away from the apocalyptic Golden Horseshoe.  The Tiger doesn't have much in the way of wind protection (it's basically a tall, naked bike), but the motor is a treat and we bombed down the 403 to Woodstock where we stopped to fill up at about 7pm.  The Tiger was managing over 50mpg two up with luggage.  The long ride into the setting sun had dried us out so we grabbed a Booster Juice and stretched before hopping back onto that lovely Corbin saddle for the final run home.

The 401 is a lot like Mad Max but without the speed limits.  As we got out onto the near-empty mega-highway we merged with 18 wheelers already doing 120km/hr and made tracks for Kitchener.  We got there in what felt like a matter of minutes and ducked off at Shantz Hill to take Regional Road 17 past the Waterloo Regional Airport and home.

The sun was low in the sky and the sunset was beautiful.  We passed through several small, Germanic communities around Kitchener and I figured at least one of them would have a Lutheran church so we could pick up another LUTHOR bonus, but all the little village churches had switched to United Church and I didn't have it in me to go hunting this late in the day.

We pulled into the same Esso station in Elora that we'd left at 9:40am at 8:30pm and 407kms later.  If you factor in our three extended stops, we were in motion for 9 out of those ll hours averaging 45km/hr including 14 stops for points.

If you've never done a long distance rally like this you'll find that you're exhausted at this point.  Riding a bike is much more physically taxing than driving a car, especially an air conditioned one on a hot day.  We'd made a point of hydrating whenever possible but you always end up in a deficit doing an event like this.

This was our first timed rally as a team and we both have a much clearer idea of what's needed to be more competitive next time.  An ergonomically sorted Concours would be a better tool for this kind of long distance work, especially covering the highway miles, and it would erase bike mechanical worries.  Stopping for hydration and to sort ourselves out is a good idea - being frantic and chaotic on something like this doesn't help you maximize points.  We got penalties for misspelling not putting addresses in some of our emails, though our photos were good so we've got that down.

I had to get the Send Reduced App on my generic OnePlus Android phone in order to meet the size requirements for attachments which adds extra work to sending in stops.  Iphones and Samsung Android phones do these file reductions automatically in their email programs so that's one place to trim wasted time and maximize scores.

It took us 9 hours in motion to make 14 stops.  You don't want to rush stops because you can lose points making mistakes, but you also don't want to end up with stop lag.  An efficient stop would probably be a couple of minutes if you're finding a safe place to stop, parking up the bike, getting the rally flag ready and taking the photo and sending it correctly.  Some of our stops lagged up to 10 minutes.  If we're running for maximum points we'd need to tighten up our stops, but retaining the breaks is a good idea to maintain hydration and limberness.

The biggest place to pick up points would be in building our stamina so we could run competitively for the full 12 hours.  This would require physical training.  There is also an element of circumstance/luck in a long distance rally.  If you get stuck in traffic or COVID reduced business hours you end up missing points that might otherwise fallen to hand.  I've always felt that if you practice your luck it will improve; experience makes luck happen.

Our rally prep is strong and our ability to pivot away from bad situations while in motion was good.  If we can improve our tools and stamina we could aim for a 10k+ finish points wise which would put us mid-pack.

The Concours is a better bike for this kind of work compared to the 80 thousand+kms, older and cantankerous Tiger, but I haven't ergonomically tailored it to our needs yet.  A phone that streamlines submissions would help as would an on-bike navigation system rather than me trying to do all that through my generic and increasingly disappointing OnePlus Android phone.

TomTom makes a moto-specific GPS system (so does Garmin) that would allow me to create a full rally route rather than the limited number of entries Google Maps allows.  G-maps is also (like all Google apps it seems) a poorly designed afterthought designed to collect user data rather than provide an optimal service - we pay for free in many different ways.  Having a navigationally specific tool would make for much more streamlined directional plan.

Our goal was to finish the rally and we achieved that.  By building on our strengths and consolidating this experience and improving our tools and processes, we'll be able to aim for a more competitive result next time.

Here's our rally planning spreadsheet: 

If you've never tried a long distance rally, give it a go.  It's a great way to hone your bike craft while riding with purpose.  You also end up finding things you might not otherwise known about, which is one of my favourite things about it.

Below are the final scores.  We finished, but just.  Check out the mileage on the top runners!  Managing over 1100kms in 12 hours means you're averaging over 90kms/hr for 12 straight hours.  I can't quite wrap my head around how that's possible if you're still stopping for points all the time.  Even if you're pulling up, taking a photo, sending it and then immediately going again, you'd have to be really moving to manage that.  Even our perfect run wouldn't have gotten us in the top 20.  The skill and stamina shown by the top runners is incredible.