Tim – Page 20 – Mechanical Sympathy

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.

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British Driving Culture

We’ve been in the UK for almost a week and yesterday spent the day skulking about London. Like the rest of England, London makes demands on a vehicle operator’s attention that many North Americans would find onerous. The small lanes, lack of shoulder and volume of traffic conspire to create a very intense and focused driving environment. Efficiency of motion isn’t an option, it’s an expectation.

A few years ago they set up a roundabout in our small town in Southern Ontario. The locals used to bring out lawn chairs and sit and watch the circus as Canadian drivers tried to negotiate an intersection that didn’t have lights telling them what to do. At a roundabout in the UK you tend to accelerate into an opening. If you slow down (or stop as many Canadian drivers do) before entering it, you’re going to create a chorus of honks behind you. You can expect others to see you coming and make space, but you need to be attentive and collegial in your approach. Ignoring others by cutting them off doesn’t fly here. Being a waffling idiot and not taking an opening won’t make you any friends either. A demanding kind of efficiency and cooperation that is foreign to many North American drivers is the expectation.

London traffic is that kind of urgent efficiency turned up to eleven. Oddly, British drivers are still very polite, waving thanks and making eye contact when they are facing a problem, like cars parked on an otherwise busy road blocking an entire lane of traffic, which seems to happen constantly. If the obstruction is on your side of the road you’re supposed to wait for traffic in the clear lane to pass, but people often pull over to let through cars that are stuck if it improves the flow of traffic and doesn’t slow them inordinately. This kind of consideration is another aspect of North American driving that is vanishingly rare, especially in the Greater Toronto Area where drivers tend to take on more of a ‘get yours and screw everyone else’ mindset.

Based on what I’ve seen, even a hesitant, relatively slow British driver would be considered near the pinnacle of driving talent in Canada, which is one of the reasons I find driving a car there tedious. Given a choice, Canadian drivers are content to give over about half of their attention to driving effectively, mainly because the massive roads with constant shoulders, signalling that tells you what to do rather than take initiative and minimal traffic volume encourage it. When things do get busy, as in Toronto, asshole is the default rather than let’s all work together to make this go more smoothly.

Even with steep congestion taxes London is a constant flow of traffic, but it’s all moving, and usually quickly. Into this maelstrom, thanks to demands of space and emissions requirements, motorcycles thrive. My first view when we got above ground and out of The Tube was a blood delivery bike effortlessly cutting through traffic on a busy Thursday morning. An older guy on a Suzuki Vstrom, he handled his machine with the kind of effortless grace you see of people who have a lot of miles under them. He seemed to see everything at once and disappeared through the delivery vans and cars in a flash of effortless speed.

Two wheeled delivery vehicles thrive in London, with couriers of all shapes and sizes on everything from 50cc scooters to big BMWs making the rounds. As we were walking toward Camden Market a rideere pulled into one of the few unused pieces of tarmac in London (the small triangle a car wouldn’t fit in before a curb) and carried out an animated conversation over bluetooth head piece with his dispatcher.

The efficiency of small vehicles like motorbikes isn’t ignored in England like it is in Canada. Bikes can squeeze through gaps that would cause a queue otherwise and split lanes. Parking is more efficient for bikes, so half a dozen commuters can and do park in the space taken up by one SUV.

Being a dispatch rider in London is considered a badge of distinction by motorcyclists here. If you can survive that you’re a good rider with exceptional awareness and control. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t last.

We’re now on a train to Norwich (my dad’s hometown) where we’re picking up a cousin’s car and driving in the UK for the first time. I always look forward to it because it’s engaging and challenging. You can’t eat or drink and drive here like you can in Canada, but you wouldn’t want to. You seldom stop due to a lack of traffic lights and a plethora of roundabouts and the roads are tight, twisty and require your attention. To top it all off everything is backwards. For the first couple of days I chant that like a mantra inside my head when I’m driving here. It keeps me on the right side of the road and gets me used to indicators and wipers being on opposite sides more quickly. Within a day or two I’m acclimatized and accidentally cleaning my windows way less.

I might try and find a motorbike rental while I’m home and see if I can find out where my Granddad Bill took that picture on his Coventry Eagle and get a photo of myself on something similarly English and iconoclastic, perhaps an Ariel Ace?

The other night I was in the car back to my cousin’s house and we were intent on making time. With the twisty, tight roads it felt like navigating a rally stage As we thrashed down the highway a Porsche 911 blew past us like we were going backwards. I love UK driving culture.

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Eye Of The Storm

We pulled into Creemore just past noon with rain forming on my visor. My lovely wife (who is very
good at finding a seat in a restaurant) got us just that on a covered patio at the Old Mill House Pub and we enjoyed our first meal out since the pandemic started while watching the rain fall.

The thunder cell past over just as we finished lunch so we had a nice walk around Creemore checking out the Creemore Bakery & Cafe coffee shop and the local, independent bookstore, Curiosity House Books. Of course, we stayed just along enough that the next cell was moving in, and it was a humdinger! We could have sat it out but the afternoon was getting long and we had a doctor’s appointment to get to back home, so we got ourselves ready and jumped on the bike just as the rain came again.

This wasn’t a summer shower like the last one, it was torrential. By the time we turned on to County Road 9 to follow the Mad River up the Niagara Escarpment and hopefully through the storm, the road was a river itself and visibility was down to just a few car lengths.

This was my first time tackling this kind of weather on the Concours and I was doing it two up and on a schedule. I don’t know if Kawasaki Heavy Industries makes nuclear submarines (they do, of course), but the Concours handled this biblical end of time storm like one. With the windshield raised I was able to duck out of the deluge in my face and track through the tsunami.

County Road 9 twists and turns as it follows the Mad River up the side of the escarpment and the volume of rain was already causing flash flooding. As we approached Duntroon a construction site on the left side of the road had washed out leaving half a foot of muddy water running across the road. I angled the bike to hit it at 90° and we crossed effortlessly leaving a wake of muddy water. Further up the river had burst its banks and had flooded the dirt roads leading over it.

Stopping seemed more dangerous than the alternatives so I just pressed on. As we climbed out of the valley the rain, which had been thumping down in quarter sized drops so heavy I thought they might be hail eased and stopped as quickly as it came. As we crested the summit the sun broke out, highlighting the green valley behind us that was still under a diabolical sky. We pulled up to the intersection with Grey Road 124 which would lead us down toward Horning’s Mills, Shelbourne and then home, except the sky south of us wasn’t just dark and sinister, it was green, like a fresh bruise.

“I don’t think I want to ride into that,” I said to Alanna.

“Noooo…” Alanna said, eying the apocalypse south of us.

“How about we jog west to Dundalk instead?” I said, nodding to the turnoff just south of us.

The sun was out and the road was steaming as we sat there watching Shelbourne getting rocked by a storm cell that would go on to Barrie and wreak havoc half an hour later.

A deke onto County Road 9 and we were passing through county side washed clean by the passing storms. We caught another followup cell past Dundalk but it was nothing compared to the submersion we’d experienced coming out of Creemore.

It was one of those moments when you bond with a new bike. You ride it well and it performs like the fantastic piece of engineering that it is. As we thundered home (making the appointment with 10 whole minutes to spare), I found myself appreciating the Neptune Blue Kawasaki in a new light. This bike offers a level of versatility, even in the most obtuse situations, that opens up riding opportunities that I might otherwise not have considered.

On Friday we’re taking a run at Lobo Loco’s Comical Long Distance Rally. We’ve got the right bike for the job.

Some Kawasaki Concours fan-art…

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Recognizing Your Own Accomplishments

I’ve written a number of negative end-of-year reflections on this absurd year of teaching and not shared them because swimming in those waters is poisonous. I’m glad I was able to write and reflect them out of me though. They’re hanging in the blogger draft space and I might just let them loose one day in the future when the idiocy of this past year is a distant memory. I think it’s important to critically assess everything that went wrong in this human disaster in the hopes that it won’t happen again.

On Friday I attended a webinar put on by a group of professional creatives that focused on recognizing your own accomplishments. This group formed to look at ways of maintaining creative output for a living. This isn’t something most people have to worry about since their jobs are quite prescribed. For too many teachers their teaching is prescribed but I’ve never been a fan of that approach. For me teaching is a creative, never-rote activity and talking to professional musicians and visual artists helps me find the capacity to teach in the ever-evolving way that I want to.

I struggle with public acknowledgement of accomplishments. I don’t do what I do for accolades and I prefer to step out of the way and let students take the limelight. As long as I’m able to find the resources we need to be successful then I couldn’t care less about acknowledgement, except acknowledgement is frequently a mechanism that has brought us the resources we need to succeed so dismissing it out of hand isn’t sensible.

In listening to the artists in this webinar talk about their wins, I still struggled with the idea that this just sounds like tooting your own horn. Creative output, for me at least, always comes with a healthy dose of humility. Having crushed any rose-coloured glasses I’m able to get on with the difficult job of creation without any delusions, but this isn’t very marketable and marketing kept cropping up in discussion. Does creativity have to include suffering? Can you be clear eyed about your creativity or is being creative inherently delusional?

The other side to this harshness in terms of metacognitively accepting and being able to speak productively about accomplishments is that not being able to recognize your accomplishments can hurt you psychologically and ultimately make you uncreative and unproductive. If you fall into a depression over abuse or unfairness then you won’t be able to do what you do. Striking a balance with recognition of accomplishments is both a personal mental health and a being a functional creative issue.

From any rational point of view I should be viewing this past year as a towering success in my career. My students fought their way to two places in the national finals of the CyberTitan Canadian National Student Cybersecurity Competition and both overcame all sorts of adversity in order to produce our best results ever. Being top ten twice out of over 150 teams should be something we acknowledge positively.

Over in Skills Ontario we did backflips to keep student competitors engaged and although we had one competition drop out, the others performed exceptionally well. We’d only ever won medals in IT & Networking previously but we didn’t just keep our string of IT medals going for a fifth consecutive year, we also won our first provincial medals in electronics, coding and GIS as well. That too deserves positive reflection that encourages future attempts.

Meanwhile, from a classroom teaching perspective, we managed to retain very high engagement rates in this rudderless year of hybrid simultaneous face to face and remote or fully remote learning. Even in the final quadmester our fully-remote (again) and exhausted game-development students produced fantastic examples of what digitally fluent Ontario high school students are capable of. We also punched through to new heights in terms of student achievement while also saving those that were drowning in the sea of systemic failure. I couldn’t see that though because what we were doing was only ever a fraction of what we normally do in a school year.

As a teacher I suddenly found myself being put up for awards and winning them. NCWIT not only awarded two of our graduating women in technology their provincial award but also acknowledged me as a 2021 educator of the year for supporting girls in technology and engineering. Then my board gave me an Everyday Hero Award and OTIP let me know I was an honourable mention in their provincial teacher award. These are the hardest for me to talk about because my reflex is to step back and let students take the accolades, but the support of parents and students in writing those applications means the world to me so ignoring them is neither appropriate nor appreciative.

I’ve been unable to give these things the positive reflection they deserve because of the cruel year we’ve just been dragged through. Next year doesn’t look much better with the same sabotaging political mismanagement in an education system paralyzed by our own political failures, but if I let the good things fade into the malaise from all these elements beyond my control then I’m lost.

I’ve put down several extra jobs this summer in order to find my mojo again. I can’t go back into the classroom having lost all hope in the credibility of our education system. If I can get my feet under me again I can stand up and fight for what matters for another year.

When the education system fell apart around me and work became frustration piled on frustration I found a creative outlet to release myself through. Starting last fall I was up at 4am every morning when work anxiety wasn’t letting me sleep writing and I’m now 160,000+ words into a novel that I never thought I’d find the time to write.

I’m energized by teaching because it lets me pour my efforts into something that is difficult, important and credible, ideally while being surrounded by people doing the same meaningful work without pretense. With credibility circling the drain this year and pretense the new normal, I needed to do something real that wouldn’t take anything other than my best effort.

I prefer to put my energy into something I believe in and that appreciates and respects that commitment. When I couldn’t find that at school I did what I could to help and refocused my energy on this creative writing project that had no room for pretense. Should anyone ever read the book I think they will find the frustrations of the last year written into it large. France’s collapse in 1940 against the German Blitzkrieg has many parallels with Ontario’s approach to COVID19 in the past year.

Dusty World is going on hiatus for the summer and I’m going to focus on finishing the novel. Now that I’ve gotten this negativity out of me I don’t need to carry it any more and I’m putting down teaching at least until the ECOO Conference in August because even in a year when I’ve lost faith in education I still can’t help but go above and beyond and start my school year weeks early in hopes of making it better for everyone.

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Ergo-cycling: Concours 14 vs Tiger 955i for 6’3″ Me

Cycle-Ergo, the motorcycle ergonomics simulator, is a great online resource for getting a sense of what you’ll look like and how you’ll fit on a bike. Unlike cars, your options with bikes aren’t as easy as sliding your seat back or adjusting the steering wheel. To make ergonomic changes on a motorbike you need to change hardware and make physical changes to make it fit.

The other day I was out on my trusty 2003 Triumph Tiger 955i. I came off a Kawasaki Concours 10 to the Tiger and while the Connie was comfortable, it made my knees ache on long rides. The first time I sat on the Tiger it felt like a bike built by people the same shape and size as me because it is. I can go for hours without putting a foot down without a cramp on the Triumph. This got me thinking about the differences between the big Kawasaki that sits next to the Tiger in the garage these days.

Cycle-Ergo gives me a quick way to check out the differences. Forward lean is much more pronounced on the Concours 14 (12° vs an almost vertical 4° on the Tiger). Knee angle is the same and my knees aren’t bothering me on the Connie but hip angle is 6° tighter on the Kawasaki which explains the cramps I was feeling after today.

I sold a Honda Fireblade to bring the 1400GTR in and that bike had an extreme ‘sports’ riding position which was basically like doing a push-up on the bike (you lay on it) – it ain’t easy on the wrists. There are advantages to this aggressive riding position. When you want to get down to business in corners a forward lean gives you a more intimate relationship with the front end, which is why sports focused bikes tend to sit a rider the way they do. If I lived somewhere where roads were dancing with the landscape instead of cutting straight lines across it I’d have happily kept the Fireblade but in tedious Southwestern Ontario it didn’t make much sense.

Today I did a 200km loop on the Kawasaki and the constant lean does make it tiresome on the arrow straight roads around here (I have to ride 40 minutes to find 10 minutes of curves). In the twisties the Concours is much more composed that the tall, skinnier (and ADV) tired and leany Tiger. The Concours is a 50+ kg heavier bike but you can see in the animation that it holds its weight much lower than the Tiger. In the bends today the Connie was fine but the Ontario-tedium I have to deal with most of the time has me thinking about ways to ease that lean.

There are solutions to this in the form of ‘bar risers’ which are blocks of machined metal that you slip in under the handlebars to bring them taller and closer to you so you’re not stooped. For me the lean also means I’m putting a lot of weight on my, um, man-parts, which end up pressed up against the tank in the lean.

I had a look around at bar-risers. There are number of people who put them together including some cheaper Chinese options but I ended up going with Murph’s Kits C14 bar risers. Murph is well known in the Concours Owners Group and has been producing Concours specific parts for decades. His risers aren’t quite as tall as some of the others and look to solve the problem without over-solving it by giving too-tall handlebars that spoil the lines and the purpose of the bike.

The biggest ergo-thing I did on the Tiger was getting a Corbin seat for it which makes it a long distance weapon. I’ll eventually do the same thing for the Connie but I think I can make do with the stock seat this year and then do the Corbin over the winter. That doesn’t stop me from mucking around with the Corbin seat simulator though:

By next spring I’ll have a C14 that fits, but it isn’t as easy as sliding the seat back in a car. In the meantime we’ve got the Lobo Loco Comical Rally coming up at the end of the month. That requires a minimum of 400kms travelled in 12 hours and will need more than that if we’re going to be competitive. I’m hoping my bar risers will be installed and I’ll bring the good ole Airhawk out of semi-retirement to keep me limber over a long day in the saddle.

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Lobo Loco Comical Rally: July 2021

It doesn’t matter where you live, this one is a start anywhere, finish anywhere timed rally on Friday, July 23, Saturday, July 24th or Sunday, July 25th. You need to cover at minimum of 400kms to be considered a finisher but otherwise it’s an open event.

https://wolfe35.wixsite.com/lobolocorallies/blank

Comical Mini Rally

Motorcycle Scavenger Hunt

Friday, July 23rd to Sunday, July 25th, 2021

(Any 12 hour period)

Our Mini Rallies give riders the chance to get involved in Scavenger Hunt events without having to travel to the start lines. You can start these ANYWHERE; we’ve had riders from all over the world do them each time! You can also choose when to start your 12 hour ride clock, so you can adjust the event around your own work schedule and the local weather.

This event will have you looking for the Super Hero themed locations…

along with other Villainous twists & turns that Lobo Loco Rallies likes to throw your way!

12 Hour Rally – Starts ANYWHERE

Note: You will need to ride a minimum of 400km

in order to be considered a Finisher.

Only $30 per bike!

Here’s the Facebook page: https://fb.me/e/1a7Io8CY6

If you’re looking for a reason to put some miles on your bike and see places you wouldn’t usually go during a strange summer where the rules of travel aren’t very clear, do this! You’ve still got a week to sign up.

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Overlanding

I came across Overland Journal in Indigo that other day and the combination of reasonable price ($12CAD) and very high quality (it compared favourably with magazine-book combos asking $25+) had me picking it up. It isn’t motorcycle specific but does include off road and adventure bikes along with pretty much any vehicle you might go off the beaten path with.

I usually do that kind of off-roading with completely inappropriate vehicles. In the early noughties my wife and I beat a rented Toyota Camry to within an inch of its life on the the logging roads in the interior of Vancouver Island. Another time we were in a rented Citroen mini-van in Iceland watching arctic foxes run across the empty landscape. In both cases we got deep into the wilderness in rental 2wd vehicles, but then we got a Jeep Wrangler as a rental car last year and it started giving me ideas.

I put myself through university working as a service manager for Quaker State’s Q-Lube and whenever a Jeep came in you needed an umbrella when you walked under it for all the fluids leaking down on you. That negative experience put me off the brand for years but last year we got a Wrangler as an insurance rental after and accident and it changed my perception.

It was a 2019 Jeep Wrangler four dour with about 20k kilometres on the clock and it was tight! Everything worked and felt quality and it did something that no car has done for me in the past decade; it felt like an event driving it.

Since bikes set in I’ve fallen out of love with cars (trucks, whatever), but the Jeep made driving feel special again. Performance cars seem kind of pointless when I have two bikes in the garage that are faster than anything but apex million-dollar plus super-cars, but the Jeep came at it from another angle. The big tires made it a challenge to manage on pavement and the big V6 in this one was a stark contrast to the sub-two-litre mileage focused appliances I’ve been driving but maybe that’s what made it feel special.

There was a point where we could have taken the other car (a Mazda2) down to Toronto but took the Jeep instead and it made the whole experience less like a long, difficult winter drive and more like an event. Being higher up off the road meant I wasn’t looking through other people’s road spray all the time and if I wasn’t heavy on the gas the thing was getting mid-high-twenties mpg.

Another time we were out in it and my brother-in-law (a former Jeep owner) and our sons went out for a ride and I shifted it into 4wd and drove right over the snow mound in the Canadian Tire parking lot, much to everyone in the car’s amazement. This was a ten-foot plus high mound of snow and the Jeep went right over it – with road tires on! Deeply impressed with the vehicle’s capabilities and character is where I was when we handed it back after our car got returned.

I also used it to take a thousand plus pound of ewaste to recycling from work and the heavy duty suspension and utility of the thing made this an easy job when the little hatchback would have been blowing shocks and wallowing under the weight. Having a vehicle that takes on larger utility tasks makes sense when you do a lot of it.

I’m getting to the age now where things seem strangely expensive. My first car cost me $400 and took me a hundred thousand kilometres. A Honda Civic hatchback I had in the early noughties took me over a quarter of a million kilometres for less than seven grand. The only new car I’ve ever purchased (that Mazda2 that has been flawless for over 120k over ten years of ownership) cost me $17k new, all in. My wife’s Buick Encore cost an eye-watering forty-grand back in 2016 new and I’m not interested in double car payments so won’t be looking until we finally pay that one off (which seems like it’s taking forever with our strange new world of 7-9 year finance schemes). When that debt finally gets cleared I’ll be looking at a Jeep Wrangler.

From an ‘overlander’ point of view, a dependable long distance vehicle capable of going off the beaten path means my wife and I can do what we’ve always done, but more so. In the pre-covid times we drove from Ontario to the West Coast in 2018:

In 2019 we took the same tiny Buick Encore to the East Coast of Canada, but the vehicle we drove limited our ability to go off the beaten path (or even off pavement). What a Jeep would do is enable us to do the things we defer to (in rental cars) in something designed for that kind of nonsense.

This has me encouraging my lovely wife to join us at SMART Adventures this year to learn some off road driving in a side-by-side while we dirt bike. Which brings the overlanding vehicle back to bikes again. You can go deep in a Jeep but you can get places on a dirt bike that you can’t in any other way. The Jeep would be a fantastic platform for all manner of biking shenanigans.

Whether it’s taking a dirt bike to a trail or a trials bike to an event, the Jeep would be capable of doing it efficiently. With some canny rear mounted racks it wouldn’t even require a trailer.

The cost-no-object green option would be to pick up a KTM Freeride and an Jeep Wrangler 4xe and then work out how to charge the bike from the hybrid Jeep’s electrical system.

Overland Journal has a lot of advertisers who specialize in making vehicles long distance ready, including many that specialize in prepping Jeeps for the long haul. A Wrangler 4xe with a roof mounted camping option, KTM on the back and the ability to go self-contained into the wilderness for days at a time would make for a thrilling combination.

KTM’s Freeride electric off roader gives you 90 minutes of charge, weighs less than 250lbs and (with the battery pack removed) would be barely noticeable on the back of the Jeep. With some canny wiring the bike could charge while on the hybrid Jeep.

The Jeep Wrangler 4xe is the most powerful Wrangler yet, has astonishing mileage and would also offer some interesting electrical generation options when off the beaten track.

The bike and the fanciest Wrangler would cost less than a base model BMW mid-sized SUV, so it isn’t even crazy expensive (well it is, but that’s just because I’m old – everything’s expensive!).

KTM and Jeep should join up on this. Two legendary off-road manufacturers combining to create a futuristic zero emissions expedition!

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Overlanding

Whether it’s taking a dirt bike to a trail or a trials bike to an event, the Jeep would be capable of doing it efficiently. With some canny rear mounted racks it wouldn’t even require a trailer.

The cost-no-object green option would be to pick up a KTM Freeride and an Jeep Wrangler 4xe and then work out how to charge the bike from the hybrid Jeep’s electrical system.

The Jeep Wrangler 4xe is the most powerful Wrangler yet, has astonishing mileage and would also offer some interesting electrical generation options when off the beaten track.

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To The End of the Road North in Ontario & Quebec

Ontario has hundreds of miles of ocean coast line but being Ontario there is no way to ride there. Quebec hasn’t been so lackadaisical in connecting its northern communities by road. If I cut out of Ontario just east of New Liskeard I could then make use of Quebec’s better northern infrastructure and actually ride to the coast of James Bay almost to the point where it opens out into Hudson’s Bay:

I’m not the first one on an adventure bike to want to ride to the end of the road north in Eastern Canada:

…though apparently only (new) BMW riders make the trek. Bet my old Tiger could do it.

It’s remote but the vast majority of the 1600+ kms north are on paved roads. North of Hotel Matagami (just over half way up) services get thin. It looks like there are road side truck-stop type accommodations on the James Bay Road but most of what’s on offer is camp grounds and sparsely spaced gas stations. Sounds like a perfect adventure bike thing to do!

Lots of good advice for riding motorbikes in the remote north around James Bay can be found on the James Bay Road website. The challenge here isn’t twisty roads and nights in the bar, it’s the extreme isolation of the far north. You need to be able to keep your machine moving or it will end expensively, or worse. Getting a tow out would cost thousands. Worst case would be getting stuck without any means of getting out, then it could quickly get dangerous.

For people who have only ever travelled between other people this’ll be hard to wrap their heads around. On a ride like this you’d find yourself hundreds of kilometres away from the nearest people and even further away from infrastructure that could help you. Self-sufficiency would be central to a successful run up to James Bay.

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Hiding History Behind Politics

History isn’t just an informational subject, it’s also very much about critical media literacy. Trying to get a clear view of history through what’s left to us is nearly impossible because human beings will immediately want to spin it for their own benefit. These prejudices come from the people at the time, the people who decided what survives and the people in charge now. This propagandist approach has a great deal of power when applied to the study of national history because it produces dangerous byproducts, like patriotism based on national myths that systemically exclude whole swaths of our society.

This is the cover of Flashback Canada, the history book they handed me to teach a grade 8 class during my teaching practicum in Peel in 2003. I wasn’t a Canadian citizen when this piece of propaganda was handed to me and I was told, as an agent of the system, to indoctrinate the class (most of whom were also new Canadians) with this violently untrue rendition of Canadian Federation.

I can’t find the full illustration from inside the book (it’s a two page spread!) but I recall it had indigenous groups in traditional garb, unaccompanied women and many BIPOC characters fictionally back-written into the narrative of a multi-cultural Canadian history that never happened. Teaching this “we’ve always been multi-cultural” myth of Canada made me very uncomfortable so instead of teaching the text I found some other historical images of Confederation done close to the time and then the students and I looked at the differences between the textbook’s rendition and other historical documents. As you might have guessed, Canadian Confederation in 1867 was a lot of white dudes (because they were the only people considered as people under the law – no one else could vote or politically mattered):

How did this play with a lively, very multi-cultural class of grade 8s in 2003? Code-switching wasn’t a common term back then but many of the BIPOC students talked about how stuff like this makes them doubt their own experiences with racism in Canada. This made my older, white Canadian supervising teacher uncomfortable. These days I’m sure she would be on board with the current ‘woke’ white settler types who want to make make a lot of noise in this moment that will quickly fade to leave us with our lousy status quo again. Dwelling in the discomfort by prompting discussion and then making systemic change as a result is a way to move beyond our reflexive need to retain a status quo built on lies.

I’ve talked about historical prejudice before on Dusty World but the events currently happening in Canada are bubbling it all to the surface again, though I don’t understand why anyone is so surprised by them. These children disappeared in plain sight and reports of the nastiness of religious residential schools aren’t new. Choosing to be surprised by them now feels like political spin. Part of that latest push is to cancel Canada Day but this politically divisive move only shames anyone who disagrees while amplifying the voices of those who want to leverage this disaster for their own political ends.

I’ve heard (smart, historically aware) people advocate for cancelling Canada Day because aboriginal families are mourning the recent discovery of thousands of children’s graves from the Canadian religious residential school genocide, but the only people reeling from this ‘discovery’ are politicized left-wing Canadians who have now decided to (loudly) acknowledge this hiding-in-plain-sight colonial history. I doubt native families are ‘stunned’ by these ‘findings’ as they’ve been living them for generations. This ‘white surprise’ must seem disingenuous.

I’m left wondering if children’s history text books are still as multi-culturally white-washed as that one I was handed in 2003. My approach to that lesson caused friction with my (white, established-settler Canadian) teacher-mentor. Teaching rote curriculum out of prejudiced texts works much like taking down statues and cancelling holidays: it’s an effective way to revise historical fact to suit the current political narrative which is itself a nasty piece of work.

In the next two centuries the selfish decisions made by current generations around rampant overpopulation, wasteful consumption of resources and pollution of our limited ecosystem will make any previous genocides look tame, yet we’re quick to burn anything historical that doesn’t meet our myopic ethics. That well-travelled, carbon spewing first-worlders who hop into their 4×4 SUVs wearing sweatshop made clothing are so loudly self righteous is another example of temporal prejudice, but then you don’t see a lot of humility or self-awareness in history.

It’s easy to criticize previous generations without making any attempt to contextualize their decisions in the time that they were made. This temporal prejudice is every bit as corrosive as racial or gender prejudice. Mass consumers waving social justice flags while making decisions that will kill billions in the future are just as blind to their own contextual short-comings. Wouldn’t it be something if everyone tried to overcome the pomp and circumstance of history with humility, honesty and fairness?

Cancelling holidays that are guaranteed for you but not for others at the rough end of the socio-economic spectrum reeks of privilege, while taking down statues and renaming things is more about rewriting history to make it less uncomfortable than it is about making any genuine systemic change. What we should be doing is legally deconstructing confederation and taking the colonial prejudices out of Canada’s political structure. First past the post British electoral systems prop up old prejudices and should be dismantled but won’t because party ‘representatives’ that could make the changes won’t because the status quo is what handed them power.

The nastiness of Canadian colonial history isn’t easy to stomach but throwing a cancellation blanket over it isn’t going to solve anything; we need to dwell in this discomfort if it’s ever to prompt real systemic change. Politically driven divisive ideas like cancelling national holidays and renaming everything to make it less offensive is more likely to support the status quo than change it. We’ll never overcome historically prejudiced propaganda by spinning more of it. Real change has to happen at the legal level or we’ll just keep spinning lies to maintain this poisonous politically charged status quo.

RESOURCES

https://blogs.umass.edu/linguist/secret-path-residential-schools-reconciliation/

“Come learn about indigenous people’s history that you probably weren’t taught in school…”

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/first-nations-right-to-vote-granted-50-years-ago-1.899354

First nations Canadians didn’t get the vote until 1960! Canada’s concept of representative democracy has always been flawed and yet it’s treated as sacred – which is how you ensure that status quo continues. These days the old white guys in charge casually dismiss the Charter of Rights whenever it suits them.

https://www.cbc.ca/kidscbc2/the-feed/why-it-took-so-long-for-women-to-get-to-vote-in-canada

“…in September 1917, the Wartime Elections Act was passed in Canada. It granted the vote to women in the military and women who had male relatives fighting in World War I, but it also stripped away voting rights from many Canadians who immigrated from ‘enemy’ countries.”

https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/chinese-canadians-get-the-vote-in-1947

Asian Canadians didn’t get to vote in Canada until after WW2!

https://humanrights.ca/story/the-chaotic-story-of-the-right-to-vote-in-canada

“The story of the right to vote in Canada is the story of a centuries‐long struggle to extend democratic rights to all citizens. It’s a chaotic tale that includes rebellions and riots, as well as protests, and visits to the Supreme Court of Canada.”

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/confederation

“Indigenous peoples were not invited to or represented at the Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences. This despite the fact they had established what they believed to be bilateral (nation-to-nation) relationships and commitments with the Crown through historic treaties. (See also: Treaties with Indigenous Peoples in Canada; Royal Proclamation of 1763.) The Fathers of Confederation, however, held dismissive, paternalistic views of Indigenous peoples. As a result, Canada’s first peoples were excluded from formal discussions about unifying the country.”

You won’t find anyone on the Canadian Encyclopedia page who isn’t an old white dude because they are the ones that confederated Canada, specifically while denying anyone who wasn’t from their background any participation. Re-writing history to ignore what actually happened isn’t a great way of learning from those mistakes.

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Comical Mini Rally

Motorcycle Scavenger Hunt

Friday, July 23rd to Sunday, July 25th, 2021

(Any 12 hour period)

​

RESOURCES