What Is, What Was, and What Shall Be

Today as I sit in my beige cube with grey carpet, I ponder the finer things.

I relive a lazy afternoon ride home after leaving work early. I reflect up the memory of the setting sun casting long shadows before me as I climb Umptanum Ridge heading south in July. I recall quite vividly riding Idaho Route 3 in the late afternoon as we tore through the curves on the way to Orofino. Even racing back to Beaverton during the Beaver Run as lightning struck the surrounding hills, or ripping through the leaf-strewn roads along the Skagit River on a crisp autumn morning.

Some might rather contemplate the rides they want to take. Maybe rocking your way through the corners of the Crater Lake Loop is more to your liking. Possibly your preference is the striking Yakima River Valley and its fastastic curves, or the Nestucca River Road and its tight, technical corners as you climb the slopes of Oregon's Coastal Range. Or might it be to ride down US 101, rolling through oceanside bends on the Pacific coastline.

Treasured memories all, they're far better than sitting in a featureless office coffin. I can't say the work isn't stimulating, for it truly never fails to surprise me. But one doesn't truly live when you're 20 feet underground and going through entire winter days without seeing daylight. I, like any any other motorcyclist, live out there on the open road. I live bent over at 60mph rounding a corner at Muddy Creek, a good 50 miles into the St. Helens Volcanic Monument where your heart is pounding, your skills are sharp, and your knee is skimming just a few inches off the deck. This is where I live, where time feels like it's nearly stopped entirely and the corners could stretch to the horizon. There does the motorcyclist truly feel free.

Early Spring My...

I'd say we've been launched right back into winter, regardless of what ye olde weatherman has to say. It's still pretty blasted cold out there.

Was 36F yesterday and a chilly 41F this morning on the way in. Getting tired of this cold weather, almost tired enough to buy an electric jacket liner in fact. The $250 for the Kanetsu and attendant thermostat is a lot to swallow though.

The Road Ever So Slightly Less-Traveled

I'd had enough of I-5 for one day. 15 miles of 50mph HOV lane nail-biting and yellow line hugging as I crawl past traffic that's completely stopped on the I-5 mainline. Drivers just waiting for the tiniest gap to swerve out into the HOV lane forcing you to stand on the brakes and maybe get a new car out of the deal when you pile into them. No thanks.

I opted for Airport Way instead. It was busy, but not in that aggressive caffeine-fueled bloodlust way so often seen out on the freeways. Road surface stinks, but at least you can hop onto the sidestreets if things get sticky or a road-rager cager decides that he wants to flatten you in order to make his day a little less crappy. Lot of that crap going on lately too. Tiny pecker syndrome SUVs and fart-pipe equipped imports trying to take out bikers. Getting very tired of that crap.

Exoticism

As I pull into the garage this morning, what do my beady little eyes espy? An older Cagiva sportbike being parked by its owner. A bike that hasn't sat in the corner of the garage collecting dust. A bike that's been out on the open road, as evidenced by the slightly faded color in its fairing. A bike that has been on the twisties, and not sat merely in someone's collection.

It's red. And just looking at it, I can imagine what it looked like the day it looked off the showroom floor nearly 20 years ago. Judging by the photo I took of it this morning, it's a Cagiva 650 Alazzuro.

It's also very light. I'm used to the brute force concept of Honda engineering. Build a frame, and pack every conceivable cubic inch of space within that frame with gadgets. Not so on this air-cooled Italian beauty. I can walk right up to it and see daylight between the cylinders. I can walk up to the simple weathered gauges and see down through the steering tunnel to the wheels.

Hmm, maybe it's time for me to find a bike like that. I'm getting kinda tired of levering a 600lb. bruiser through the twisties.

Egg Drop Soup

A much nicer name than Pea Soup. Yes, this fog was thicker than Egg Drop Soup. Thankfully, it wasn''t the color of said Egg Drop Soup, but it was quite opaque if not actually viscous.

Couldn't see my glove in front of my face, and the faceshield was less than worthless. I thought cold air and warm water was generally the problem with/cause of the fog, except it was nearly 50 degrees when I set out this morning. I doubt the ever-shrinking and nearly dry ponds in the recently-arid Wetside are warm enough and/or large enough to cause very thick fog to nearly uniformly cover 80 square miles of South King County.

Now that I've crossed 70k miles, I now have 7500 miles on my Avon Azaro ST AV45/46 Sport-Touring tires. My 84 Honda Sabre 1100 doesn't exactly have your modern tire-shredding power, but it acquits itself well with its 101hp. The tires have stood up very well, and after spending a lot of time commuting, they haven't gotten unreasonably hard. There's another 3-4k miles left in the tread, and wear has been very even up until recently. A good weekend or two of canyon-carving up in the Cascade foothills has generally been enough to round out the tire profile and restore the very even streering response.

While the steering effort is noticeably greater than the more-triangular D205 previously mounted, their straight-line stability has much to be said for it. While the D205 were absolutely rock-solid in the middle of a corner they tended to wander when upright and the fork-mounted fairing/D205 tire combination was far more sensitive to cross-winds, a problem that completely disappeared after replacing the Dunlops with the Avons.

You might ask, how did he get radials onto a 1984 Sabre? The previous owner had the rear rims widened (and sub-fender hacked up) to accept a 140-width rear. I ran the 110/80-18 tire on the front, and the 140/80-17 on the rear. Not exactly fitment for your latest sportbike, but not everybody rides the latest sportbike either. I see a whole bunch more Goldwings and Harleys on the road, and this is a surprisingly long-lasting yet very performance-minded sport-touring radial.

Gas Cap, Gas Cap

I sit in the nasty 4th Ave traffic this morning, moving the average 30 feet per minute past the traffic obstruction. Past me rolls an import SUV of some sort, one of the little ones.

Sitting atop the roof against the rear spoiler is a gas cap. And so I ponder this.

Is it his gas cap? If it is, does his car have a little warning light like mine does when there's no gas cap? Was he merely the lucky recipient of a gas cap that fell from the sky or off an overpass? Where would flying gas caps come from? And why hasn't it bounced off the back of his SUV on this farce that passes for a street?

Questions. Questions.

Memorial Day in March...

You know those Christmas in July sales, well, today was Memorial Day weather in March. We should be cloudy, soggy, and dripping wet right now but we got up within spitting distance of 70F degrees today (21C). Had to throw all the windows in the house open today to keep the house's air conditioning from kicking on at 78F. My wife (who's pregnant) is continually complaining about the gasoline fumes in the garage because the tank is half empty and was filled up when the weather was 30 degrees cooler.

''Broke'' 70,000 miles on the Sabre today. That gives me 8,000 miles for the last 12 months. Not bad for a guy who spent most of the summer in the office. A mistake I don't plan on reproducing this year.

Herf 'n' Turf

Our group got together for a cigar party and barbecue up in Skagit County. A good time and a good ride were had by all. I put in about 230 miles that day, and found some nice new roads that ran roughly north-south situated east of State Route 9. Lots of 90 degree turns in between farms and a few sections of linked Esses through the valleys of those foothills.

Rode up there by myself and rode back with one other rider. I'm starting to find that I'd rather ride by myself. I'd rather not have to worry about maintaining speed to keep a group together when leading, or having to worry about the person behind me. Many folks seem to argue that it's safer to be in groups, but I'd rather not. Hell, unless I'm in an all-fired hurry I'd rather not be on the freeway at all, let alone in a group.

What the Hey?

Today was a fine day, albeit a little foggy at the house. Wife was not happy that I was riding to work. As expected, the fog ended quite quickly, just a few miles from the house.

Of course, with with fog I can't see the backups on the Freeway from the back deck. Or the backups on the secondary highways. Or the backups on the side streets. Instead of my usually 50 minutes trip down the HOV lane, I endured a 100 minute ordeal slogging my up way Interstate 5. Every single light I came to had a backup of some sort, I really don't know what the blazes was going on today. Maybe it was the weather, or the prospect of the commuter trains being shut down by a dispatcher strike in Texas.

One thing for sure, the freeway was a bloody mess. 21 out of the 27 miles between on-ramp and off-ramp were a parking lot.

Happy, Sunny

Glorious day for a ride. It was above freezing, no fog, and no rain. Even the freeways were moving without significant delay today.

I think the battery''s going bad though. When I'm at idle the high beam light is so dim I can barely see if when the turn signal flashes on. Not a good sign for a gel cell battery. The rectifier probably fried it, since that thing's always been flaky. At 40F, the rectifier runs the voltage in the low 15s. If it gets above 70F, you can expect as much as 16.3 volts to be running into the battery. Not good. Too bad the previous owner soldered the rectifier directly into the bike's wiring. Grrr.

Dress for the Crash

Here's one I haven't seen for awhile.

I'm hopping off the freeway and slowly rolling through the backup on my way to the parking garage. A little cruiser rolls past me, and I notice that the rider is wearing some fairly substantial gear, with one glaring omission. Coming out of the ends of his riding pants, I can clearly see very nice dress shoes and socks.

Very strange. How would one shift without ruining the shine on the shoes? Those little rubber shifter booties would leave some fairly serious marks on the patent leather shoes, I would think. It certainly wasn't a heel and toe shifter.

It would be pretty darn cold too at freeway speed. It was only 47F this morning, and was still spitting a few raindrops. Even if it wasn't actively raining, you'd lose the feeling in your feet due to the wind chill effect on your exposed ankles' arteries. My handy-dandy Bikelog says that would be about +10F or -11C.

We won't even discuss the possibility of damage in even a minor get-off. Remember folks, dress for the crash.