West Coast Adventure - Day 1

This is it...the BIG trip. It's part of what I wanted to do last summer, but the BIG trip last summer turned out to be enough after about 5,000 miles and 5 or 6 weeks of travel. I left this afternoon and hope to see the western end of US-2 in about 7 days.

Some of you might ask, "why?" The answer, of course, is because I can...or maybe, more correctly, because I want to. To which the quizzical would give me a blank stare and ask again, "why?" For those who ride a motorcycle, no explanation is needed. For those who don't...none will really make much sense. The "why" is the same reason people climb mountains and go deep sea diving. That's why.

Believe it or not, today may actually be one of the harder days of the trip. It was only 275 miles, but it was almost all Interstate and I didn't leave home until after 3:00PM. Riding that far, with no windshield, on the interstate is actually a little draining. My arms and shoulders hurt tonight in ways they haven't in a long, long, time. However, once I'm on US-2, the speed limit is normally about 55, so that's going to help a ton. 55 to 60 with no windshield is manageable, in my humble opinion, while 70 to 75 is pushing it hard.

I could have left earlier in the day, taken 2 lane highways all the way up, and avoided the Interstate stress and pain, but I didn't...duh. I spent the morning and early afternoon running all the errands and taking care of all the little odds and ends one must take care of before leaving on a long trip. I could have done them yesterday, but I didn't...duh.

Once Black Max was loaded, it was pretty much off to the races. I just had one last errand to run and then a stop for gas and we were on our way.

Black Max is what I've decided to call my VTX...every bike deserves a good name, right? I'd say the name came to me in a moment of inspiration, but that would be a lie. I actually had a FB friend that was looking for names for a piece of jewelry and asked people to make up a name using the color of pants they were wearing and the name of their first pet...hence, Black Max. In truth, I was wearing black shorts with a tropical floral pattern on them..but Black Tropical Floral Pattern Max sounds kind of stupid, if you ask me.

Tomorrow is shaping up to be the worst weather day for the first week of the trip. There's a 30% chance of rain first thing in the morning that quickly escalates to 50% and then 70%. However, it looks like something I can move through/past if I time it just right. The forecast for my destination, Hurley, Wisconsin, has a very low chance of rain tomorrow...hard to tell what it will be like until I actually get up in the morning and scope out the forecast and radar. Modern day travel has it's silver lining.

First day is in the books...and we're looking pretty good...tomorrow is another day and another road.

Here's the route for Day 1:

Just Another Ride

So, about 5:45PM last night, I'm riding north on I-75 headed to Detroit to catch the Tigers and Yankees game. My buddy and I had been in Cleveland, where he spent the day visiting his mom and I bought tickets thinking the ballgame would be a great way to relax on our way back home. I'm cruising along in the farthest left of 3 lanes at about 70MPH. It's pretty heavy traffic and only the left lane is moving at the posted speed limit. In the lane to my right, is a large SUV hauling a boat. In the lane to the right of him is a tractor trailer.

Just as I pull even with the front of the boat, and the rear of the SUV is lined up with the rear of the trailer the rig is hauling, the driver of the semi decides its time to move over into the middle lane. I started braking, but still found myself needing to head to the shoulder to avoid getting crunched by the boat…the 4 foot wide strip of concrete that serves as a shoulder in this case…the very poorly maintained 4 feet of concrete that serves as the should…you get the idea.

Those of you from Michigan won't need an explanation of the "Grand Canonesque" trenches that demarcate the highway from the shoulder. Michigan's crack Department of Transportation allows these 5 to 12 inch wide, and sometimes several inches deep "cracks" to exist in the vacuum between the roadway and the shoulder. They can be anywhere from a couple feet long to several meters.

In the end, I'm lucky to be alive. The only thought on my mind after I hit the first of these trenches was "keep the bike straight and keep it up." I wasn't trying to swerve back into the road where who knows what would have run into me. When I hit the first trench, I felt the front start to wobble and slip, I immediate knew the front tire was flat…at 70MPH on the busiest highway in the state, with no safe shoulder to stop on…I felt pretty boned at that point.

Fortunately, my buddy was far enough behind me that he wasn't affected by all this, and there were 2 tractor trailers in the lanes next to him that saw everything and immediately slowed down. Because THEY were paying attention, I was able to get back on the roadway and get over to the shoulder on the right side of the highway, thanks to them blocking traffic, where I was finally able to stop and begin cursing the day the first truck driver had been born.

Here's a picture of my tire and rim. The rim bent on both side, but the left side was the worst.

 My buddy's wife drove the hour and a half to come pick me up and we took the backroads home while he rode in front of us.

Anyway, I'm not sure how other people react the day after death grabs their nuts and squeezes like he's not going to let go…as for me, I decided it would be a good day to modify my Honda VTX a little more. I recently had it painted and customized to have a lot of the chrome blacked out.  Here's a few shots.

Watch me ride...

Went for a ride with my buddy, Jason, today. Buddy might not be the best word to describe him. Jason's my friend. A best friend. The kind most people are lucky if they have one of...in their whole life.

We rode over to the Dark Horse Brewery for lunch. Yummy! I'll have to go back to sample more of their menu sometime.

Here's a video I shot. It's 30 minutes of me, on the ride back. Enjoy it.

If you actually watched that whole thing...it must have only been for the music. :)

Sometimes...

MayBay Day 2

What a great day for riding! It was warm. It was sunny. Good people, decent roads, lots of great scenery...those of you who ride know what I'm feeling.

I went with a group of 16 bikes that headed north from the hotel. The destination was the top of Mount Equinox, part of the Green Mountain National Forrest range in Vermont. We made good time, clocking about 80 miles in a little over an hour and a half. Good time, in this case, might be understood to mean that speed limits weren't necessarily obeyed. :)

We each ponied up $10.00 to pay the "toll" to open the gate at the bottom of the mountain.


We queued up to begin our ascent....and had to wait for the girl running things in the gift shop to come out and start chucking tokens into the toll gate, one token per bike, with a little "jiggle" of the token box to get the gate to open. The ride up the mountain really wasn't bad. A couple of hairpin turns, a few steep climbs, but nothing too harrowing. The view from the top...green. Green everywhere. Trees, trees, and more trees.


It really was beautiful. You can see for just about ever, I'm guessing you can easily see New Hampshire and New York, maybe even Massachusetts, from up there. The trip up and down reminded me a lot of Brockway Mountain Drive, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, only the road was in better condition and Mount Equinox is a lot taller than Brockway Mountain.

We all stopped for lunch in Manchester, and I decided that I'd ride back to Lenox on my own. The group ride up was great. Lunch with my fellow riders was wonderful fellowship, but...

...sometimes...a man just needs time to himself.


I choose to head north out of Manchester, taking Route 30, Route 100, Route 8, and Route 9 in a loop around the national park, and back down to our rally location. It was a good 106 miles. Lots of time to think, to look around, and to notice...

On August 28 & 29, 2011, the remnants of hurricane Irene unleashed their fury on the New England states. The results were devastating. There was widespread flooding, damage to roads, bridges, homes, businesses...and lives were lost. To be honest, they've done a great job cleaning up the damage. There are new bridges everywhere. Roads have been patched. The obvious signs have pretty much been taken care of...but the less obvious ones remain.

Route 100 follows rivers and streams through the mountains. If you're not paying attention, it's easy to miss the fact that there were devastating floods just 9 months ago. But...if you look closely...you can see the signs. The riverbeds are often still full of debris; trees uprooted by the waters as if they were merely toothpicks. The banks of the streams and rivers are torn apart; earth rent asunder and opened like a gaping wound by torrential waters. The cleanup crews have come in and done great work, but they can't do much for the river banks. Those have to heal on their own; nature has to take over and take however long it needs to "reset" the river's edge.

It was these images that stirred my empathy. I could understand this devastation. It felt familiar. Not because I've lived through physical floods...because it's how I feel on the inside, like there are parts of me that have been flayed open, exposed for the world to see, not by choice, but by catastrophic chance.

It's been over 15 months since I lost Sara and Miranda on that snowy highway; but, the banks of my "river" still feel exposed, torn apart by the flood of grief. Everything uprooted, spun around, and jumbled into a debris field called "my life." You, my friends and family, are my cleanup crew. You've helped rebuild the bridges, patch the roads, get the utilities turned back on...but, I'm slowly learning that the banks of the river take longer to recover.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Lenox, MA, USA

Let's talk about expressways...

On the road again. Not sure what came over me, but I decided, just a couple days ago, to ride out to Massachusetts for the Volusia Rider's MAyBay rally. I went last year and enjoyed meeting a whole new group of people, many of whom I had previously only known through the forums at volusiariders.com.

Today was a good day. Cool, sunny, windy...485 miles in a little over 8 hours in the saddle. About 425 of that was on the expressway.

Let's talk about the expressway...

Normally, riders like me (non-commuter, leisure rider) tend to avoid the expressway. They're for cars, semis, and crotch rockets. I think most people who ride for fun tend to only take the expressway if they have a need to get from point A to point B in the fastest, or shortest, way possible. Hence, today, I'm on the expressway. Lots of miles to cover and only so many hours in the day.

Why avoid the expressway? For starters, I want to live. The expressway is typically full of lots of other vehicles, many of which have drivers who treat motorcyclists as if we were also in steel cages, protected by sidewalls, airbags, and the lot. They tailgate, they cut in when there's not much room, etc. Riding on the expressway usually requires the expenditure of copious amounts of energy, both mental and physical, just to avoid death.

However, today I realized there is actually a particular kind of expressway I LOVE riding on...the rural expressway, especially after 5:00PM. I can give you three immediate examples of the type of highway I'm talking about: US-127 north of Mt. Pleasant (even after it merges with I-75), I-95 in Maine (especially from Bangor to Canada), and I-86 in New York (from Pennsylvania to Corning.) What is it that sets these roads apart from a regular expressway?

There are two main things that make this type of ride fun:
1. The expressway in these areas is very scenic. The visual experience is rolling hills, pastures, trees, etc...in short, there's lots of pretty stuff for the eyes to drink in.
2. The expressway is, for all practical purposes, deserted. You pretty much have it to yourself. You'll have the occasional car or truck pass you and you'll occasionally pass another car or truck; most of the time there's not another vehicle within a half mile of you, or more.

The benefit here is that you can actually enjoy the ride, covering a lot of distance while minimizing the physical and mental efforts...thus giving you time to look around, enjoy the sights, and, most importantly, time to think about something other than avoiding being killed.

As I got off I-90, I knew I was in for a treat. No one else was getting off at I-86 with me. I already knew, from looking at the route on a map, that I-86 was going to be a highway with very few straight sections (lots of curves) but I wasn't expecting the hills (mountains?) and scenic views. Over 150 miles of them. One of my first thoughts was that this is a highway I'd love to come back and ride in the fall, when the leaves are in full color. I imagine that the hills must look like they're on fire if you're driving along the highway, heading east, as the sun sets. I can already feel plans for a return trip, sometime in late September or early October, taking root in my brain. I'm also looking forward to the miles I have left to ride on this stretch of road when I get going in the morning.

As my eyes drank deep the beauty of God's creation this afternoon and evening, I was humbled. Humbled to think that in this vast expanse, among the billions of people on the planet, I am truly insignificant...and yet, He cares for me, as if I was the one and only one here. Thank you, rural expressway, for being there when I needed you the most.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Corning, NY

MAyBay

It's spring (and had been since about December here in Michigan) and the riding bug has set in. I only have 2 trips planned for this year, but more are bound to pop up.

I'm heading to the Volusia Rider's MAyBay Rally, in Lenox, MA, starting today.  You can follow my ride progress here:

Ahhhh...

I had a chance to ride a little this weekend...when I say a little I mean a little, no big miles, no full day rides, just a little...here and there...no more than about 20 miles at a pop.

The highlight was getting my VTX 1800N out and riding it today. After nearly 6 weeks, and over 6,000 miles, of riding either the Triumph Rocket III Touring or the Victory Vision Tour getting back on the VTX was a true joy. The Victory and the VTX are both V-Twins, but they are NOTHING alike. In some ways that is an obvious fact. The Vision is a touring bike; made obvious by the fairing, windshield, side bags, trunk, stereo system, etc. The VTX is a more stripped down cruiser; obvious by the lack of any of those things that make the Victory a touring bike. The Victory has a belt drive and a 106CI engine (1731cc) while the VTX has a shaft drive and a 110CI engine (1795cc). The Victory weighs in at a massive 850 pounds while the VTX is a nimble 804 (seriously, even though the difference is less than 50 pounds, the VTX "feels" a lot lighter when you're lifting it off the kickstand.)

So yes, there are some obvious differences in the way the two bikes look...but there's also some obvious differences in the way they ride. One of the first things I noticed was the brakes. Honda has really perfected the linked braking system. It is so nice to be able to lay on the brakes and just come to a stop without locking anything up or having the bike act like it can't slow down fast enough. Victory could take a page out of Honda's handbook if they're looking for ways to improve an already great bike.

Another thing I noticed right away was throttle response. Don't get me wrong, the Victory is a sweet ride, and it's got plenty of power; but, it's a touring bike, designed for comfort and/or long distance riding. The VTX just feels like it can't go fast enough. The smallest twist of the throttle results in torque that you just don't find in a lot of bikes. You don't just pull away from a red light, when it turns green, you push away from it, as if the bike can't get away from that stop fast enough. In addition, the response is the same at almost any speed; you twist the throttle and the engine screams "Yes, sir!" The cost of this powerful response is noticed at the gas pump. The Victory has been getting about 41 to 45 miles per gallon on average while the VTX will only get about 35 miles per gallon with the same driving habits.

With all that being said, it's a true blessing to have my choice of two great rides to choose from.  Even with the differences, there are no complaints. :)

Tomorrow is another day, and another road.