December 2020 – Mechanical Sympathy

Motorcycle Diaries: Win Your 2020 Dream Ride

Motorcycle Diaries is a website that shares rides from people from around the world. I’ve posted a number of Ontario specific rides on there. They currently have a 2020 Dream Ride contest going on until April 30th, so here’s my pitch.

My Moto-Bio:

I didn’t come to motorcycling until later in life. When I was very young, maybe six years old? I was at my grandparent’s house in Sheringham, Norfolk in England one spring Saturday morning in 1975 when a group of vintage vehicles passed by on what was probably a rally. I was the little blond kid standing on the railings by the side of the road waving at them as they thundered by, and many of them made a point of smiling and waving back, including a guy on a Triumph Speed Twin. It was one of those flashbulb moments you never forget. Nothing looked cooler than that bike and rider thrumming through the receding sea mist in the cool morning air.

Years later after immigrating to Canada, I was finally old enough to start considering driving and I immediately gravitated towards motorcycles, but my mother was strangely insistent that I not do that. Even though we weren’t well off my parents dug deep to help get me a car instead. I got deep into cars owning a wide variety of vehicles, learning how to repair them and even pursuing performance driving courses and cart racing while living in Japan, but that bike itch was always there.

After my mum’s suicide I discovered that my great aunt, with whom she shared a name, was an avid rider who was killed in a motorcycle accident a few years before I was born. I also discovered that my mum’s dad, who I was very close with growing up in Norfolk, was also an avid motorcyclist up until the death of his sister, which must have rocked the family since no one had even mentioned her to me. I’ve never understood how an accident like that (an army truck accidentally pulled out into her, killing her instantly) warranted this kind of silence, but my mum’s side of the family has always been… interesting.

Despite being a major part of the previous generation’s lives, motorcycling had evidently became a taboo subject that left me ignorant to a deleted great aunt who I now feel a great affinity for and a love of my granddad’s, who I thought I knew well.

I’ve been riding now since 2014 and I’m on my seventh bike. I’ve taken multiple advanced off road training courses and done some long, international trips, including a trip to the last MotoGP race at Indianapolis that had us ripping down the back straight of the historic Brick Yard on our own bikes – mine being an $800 field find I’d restored in my garage.

I’ve made a point of expanding my familiarity with different bikes by renting them and riding in places ranging from Pacific tsunami zones to the Superstition Mountains in Arizona, usually with my son on the back. We’ve had some great adventures. I’ve also made a point of becoming mechanically proficient with motorcycles, having just finished my latest restoration.

That’s my bio. Here’s the dream ride:

In discovering my family history around motorcycling I also connected my grandfather’s rather incredible Second World War tour of duty to riding where, among other things, he served in the RAF’s motorbike stunt team.

Bill served as an MP in the RAF and travelled with the British Expeditionary Force to France in 1939 in order to repel the oncoming Nazi war machine. When it all went wrong, Bill ended up trapped in occupied France for a number of weeks after Dunkirk before eventually finding his way back to the UK just in time to catch planes that fell out of the sky during the Battle of Britain. He then went on to fight in Africa for several years, but it’s his time in France during the ‘Phoney War‘ during the disastrous Battle of France and the allied retreat that is the basis for my dream ride.

After some exhaustive research I discovered Bill’s path through France from the autumn of 1939 to the spring of 1940. My dream ride would be to follow in my granddad’s footsteps on a period motorcycle through Northern France in the springtime, just as Bill did.

From letters to my grandmother and military records, I discovered that Bill was attached to RAF Squadron 73 who operated across Normandy and up to near the Belgian border over the winter of the Phoney War before being chased south under fire around Paris and through Ruaudin and Saint Nazaire before he finally found a boat back to Plymouth out of Brest, nearly two months after Dunkirk. In the process he failed to get to the Lancastria with the rest of his squadron, the majority of whom died on it as it was sunk by dive bombers in Saint-Nazaire.

Being able to follow Bill’s chaotic retreat with his squadron through France while finding evidence of the great conflict and seeing things he saw between moments of terror and heartache, and doing it on an RAF Norton H16 or a period Triumph Speed Twin would be a heart wrenching and mind blowing experience that would connect me back to a forgotten piece of family history on a number of levels.

What a dream ride that would be.

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Local Bike Shops

Around the horn on local bike shops

I recently took a little road trip to local bike shops, two of which I hadn’t been to yet. So far I’ve been a diligent Royal Distributing
customer, they are closest and offer a big selection. It’s pretty much serve yourself, and the kids working there don’t seem to know too much about riding as opposed to selling stuff. They also tend toward cheaper, mainstream gear.

To expand my options I thought I’d drop by A Vicious Cycle in New Dundee (great name) and Tri-City Cycle in Waterloo.

A Vicious Cycle had knowledgeable guys on the counter who were less focused on a quick sale than giving me good advice. They knew what they were talking about and took the time to figure out what I needed (as opposed to what I’d seen online). I think I might have found my new favorite bike shop.

Tri-City Cycle is a motorbike dealer, so the main building is all about selling bikes. There is a small room in a building in the back that sells gear, but I found the selection quite limited and the vibe was quick sell, though the guy there did know of what he spoke. Like Royal Distributing, Tri-City has a more mass market vibe; it was stuffed with product moving through.

My new favorite

A Vicious Cycle (which I never get tired of saying) was clean, well stocked but organized and, as mentioned, the sales support was excellent. I’m going to go for the Macna summer pants they have on offer. They seem to be of excellent quality and are by a European manufacturer that aren’t the same same old brands pushed everywhere else. Most importantly, the knowledgeable and patient sales guy took the time to show me a pair and how they work.

I’d never suggest going to a single retailer for all your gear. At various times different retailers will have what you’re looking for on sale or on hand, but when you find a place that you like, it’s nice to know you have a first go-to that won’t let you down.

Follow Up

I got the Macna summer pants and they are excellent. I ordered online, A Vicious Cycle sent me updates so I knew where things were in the delivery cycle, and I received my pants a day before they said I would. The pants themselves are very high quality and unique looking compared to the matt black look popular in North American gear. Unlike the Joe Rocket pants I tried which are far too long in the leg, the Macna’s fit me perfectly, off the rack. Between the the quality of the online service and quality of the product, I’m very happy with A Vicious Cycle.

The Triumph Tiger 800: the bike I’ll get hard luggage for

Thanks to their honest advice about how much I’d need to put into getting a hard luggage rack that works well with the Ninja, I’ve decided to go with a tail bag and save the carrying gear for a future bike more suited to the task.

In the meantime, I can’t say enough about the quality of those Macna pants. They breath like crazy, even on hot sunny days, and because they aren’t black they reflect their share of heat as well. If you’re looking for a summer pant, these are excellent!

Jeep Motototing South

Over the winter we got whacked by a snow plough and the insurance rental ended up being a Jeep Wrangler 4 door. I worked in an automotive shop to pay for university and Jeeps usually involved bringing an umbrella with you because they leaked so much, but this 2019 model has evolved from that poorly made thing. The mileage was better than I thought it would be for a big six cylinder, but I also discovered they come with an even more efficient turbo four that manages mid-20s MPG.

While we had it I stuck it in four wheel drive and went over a mountain of snow in a parking lot that would have beached anything else – and it did it on all season tires! At another point I had to take about 1500lbs of ewaste out of the school I work at and the Jeep swallowed it all with ease and it didn’t even seem to strain the suspension. On one particularly snowy night in an empty parking lot I four wheel drifted it and it felt surprisingly obliging doing something that athletic. I found the size of it also a nice surprise. I have to fold myself into the Mazda we have, but the Jeep felt like it fit.

What surprised me most about it was that it was genuinely enjoyable to drive. Initially I found myself fighting the big wheels on the road, but once I came to trust the different driving dynamics of the thing I found it a comfortable long distance coverer. Being up higher means I’m not getting all the slush in the face, which is nice too. We never got to try the roof-removing modular nature of it because it was freezing, but that’s another feather in its hat. I’ve been four wheeling in a tiny hatchback for so long that driving just feels like tedium. The Wrangler made driving feel like an event instead of just a necessity.

With that all swirling around in my head, I first looked up the Wrangler and found it cost sixty grand, which is ridiculous, but that turned out to be a leather clad special edition thing. The one I’d be looking at comes in at about forty grand, about the same as our last car, and there are big discounts on them at the moment. They’ve got one with all the needed options on for about $41K nearby.

Knowing how this thing handles loads, I started looking up bike hauling options with them. MotoTote has a 600 pound trailer hitch mounted motorcycle carrier that the Jeep could easily manage for $569 (I’m assuming that’s USD – so about $780CAD). Also knowing its go anywhere cred and how big it is on the inside, I had images of my son and I taking it camping and off-roading. A trailer with ATV and dirt bike on it would do us well. Parking up in the wilderness and then camping out of the thing seems like a real possibility. The Jeep’s outdoor image means there is a rich aftermarket of related products, even roof mounted tents, though it doesn’t need them. The fold flat rear seats open up a massive back space that two sleeping bags could easily fit in. A back attached tent makes a bit more sense in that case.

It’s a cool thing that could make the long wished for trip south in the winter a possibility.

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Hibernating a Motorcycle: Oil Changes

That ain’t a cheap oil change, but as expensive as it is,
it’s way cheaper than rebuilding a motor.

In a previous life I was an automotive technician and then service manager at a Quaker State shop. For a few years there I was right up on my lubricants. That background makes me very conscious of my motorbike fluid habits. One of my standing rules when I put away a motorcycle for the winter is to change the oil before I do it.

You watch someone like Nick Sanders ride up and down the Americas for tens of thousands of kilometres and you wonder how his Yamaha looked like it had barely been used at the end of it:

Engines are designed to be running. The very worst thing you could do is start and stop an engine over and over again (like we all do every day). In the case of Sander’s epic rides from Alaska to Argentina and back, while what the Yamaha did was astonishing, the fact that the engine was in good shape shouldn’t have been a surprise. It was barely ever allowed to cool down.

Oils become acidic and moisture seeps in as things continually heat up and cool down. Leaving old oil in your engine over the winter isn’t doing it any favours. Swapping out contaminated oil for clean oil before you put it away is a great idea, so your engine isn’t soaking in the bad stuff.

Swapping it again in the spring is just a waste of money. Oil doesn’t go bad sitting, but once you’re into the heat up cool down cycle again keep an eye on your mileage, and keep up on your oil changes, your engine will appreciate it.

Chemistry is where the big advances are happening nowadays. Today’s oils have astonishing temperature ranges and abilities. Here are some links on what’s going on with lubricants:
http://ift.tt/2foVjAW
http://ift.tt/1XixINJ
http://ift.tt/1aUeBGc
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http://ift.tt/2foVlc2

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Bike Evolution

I’ve been pondering motorbikes as the season ends here in Canada and the darkness closes in. I’m only 300 miles away from putting the Concours over the thirty thousand mile mark, which has been the goal this year.

The Concours has been a revelation. This year I’ve gone international with it, doing thousand mile trips and circumnavigating great lakes. I continue to modify and adjust, making it more and more long distance worthy.

Surprisingly, I’m finding it very satisfying in the twisties, and that 999cc Ninja motor wails like a banshee if you wind it up, so there is no lack of visceral thrill in riding it. So satisfying is it that I’m left wondering what more I’d need in a road bike.

That’s where the KLX came in. As an off-road tool it’s purpose built, but I’m finding that I don’t have the time or the local access to dedicate to off road riding. I enjoy it, but the cottage I was thinking of using it at isn’t really that accessible and other than riding around on dirt roads, I’m finding it difficult to justify, especially for what it cost.

There is also the culture side of it. I get a nostalgic jolt out of the idea of riding a classic Scrambler all over the place, but MX riding? Not so much. It all seems a bit Ricky Racer to me. I like green laning, and trail riding, but I’m not so much about the radical off road stuff, so a less MX like bike would do the trick. One that scratches that nostalgic itch at the same time would do double duty…

Triumph’s Bike Configurator makes dreaming a bit too easy…

Maybe next year will evolve into a Scrambler while running the ever present Concours – a sport tourer and a multi-purpose classic would each get a fairer share of the time I can dedicate to the saddle.

The new Bonneville/Scrambler is something else again:

Bigger motor, lighter bike. The 2016 Bonneville Scrambler is a piece of fast art!

A Bits & Bytes Reboot

Hello TVO,

I’m active on Teach Ontario and my wife has been a regional councillor with you; we’re both big supporters of TVO.

A long time ago as a 10 year old new immigrant to Canada in the early 1980s I came across Bits & Bytes as I was teaching myself how computers worked. This became a career in IT that has since morphed into a career in education where I’ve coached students in my small town to national championships in Skills Canada and ICTC’s CyberTitan Student Cybersecurity Competition.

I frequently write about the dearth of computer skills in the education system and society at large. This one from 2017 is a good example. The article that kicked off that blog post offers a staggeringly dark view of digital fluency not just in Canada but around the world. We have all become increasingly dependent on computer technology while simultaneously wallowing in ignorance around how it all works.

I think back to how Bits & Bytes influenced a whole generation of Ontarians to take on this emerging technology and think it’s time for a reboot. If we’re going to plug our children into networks for their learning and live our lives in digital spaces then we all need to have a basic understanding of how these digital technologies work or we’re inviting abuse and manipulation. ICT (information and communications technology) is now considered a critical infrastructure by the government of Canada, yet most Canadians are essentially illiterate in it even as they come to depend on it more and more.

If you ever decide to put together a B&B reboot and are looking for people to work on it I’m all in. TVO’s mandate is to transform learning through digital technology, but if we don’t understand that technology then we’re nothing more than easily manipulated consumers of it. Addressing this illiteracy would also raise Ontario’s place on an increasingly interconnected world stage. Bring back Bits & Bytes 21st Century Edition and help educate Ontarians on the technology we’re all living our lives through!

Sincerely,

Tim King

Elora, ON

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Academic Integrity And Other Lies We Tell About Pandemic Teaching

My son works hard at school and just got his grade 10 honour roll in the mail. At the same time we got his first quadmester of pandemic learning report card and we were all shocked to see a precipitous drop in grades that means he won’t be on next year’s honour roll. Unlike previous years where the school made a point of acknowledging his individual education plan and supported him by ‘encouraging’ teachers to follow the medical recommendations on it, this year any support provided had to be snuck in because all support has been officially cancelled due to COVID19. Classroom teachers can have double cohorts of 20 students coming off busses with 35+ students on them every day, but all supports are cancelled because we don’t want to spread the virus. Keeping up with the demands of SAFETY when they are so arbitrary and ineffective is exhausting and frustrating.

As a parent of a child with an IEP I’m concerned that our double digit drop in grades is a system wide situation affecting hundreds of thousands of students with special learning needs across the province. Talking to parents of students with special needs, this seems to be what is happening everywhere. Kid’s with special needs are getting ground down by this rushed and cruel schedule.

The pandemic schedule slapped together by school boards is different all over the province as the Minister and Ministry of Education failed to demonstrate any leadership in planning a centralized response to this emergency. The result is a cobbled together mess that makes a mockery of educational expectations in (what was once) one of the highest ranked public education systems in the world.

I’ve worked in Ontario’s public education system for sixteen years and while the system has been far from perfect it has always made attempts to follow data driven, responsible pedagogy. The other night I attended an online meeting of Ontario Education Workers United who are trying to stop stacked simultaneous face to face and online classes. It was jarring to hear them talk about pedagogical best practices because it has been so long since I’ve seen any. I’ve always been led to believe that we follow the research in order to produce the best possible educational outcomes for the widest variety of students. Those days focused on best practices are far behind us. I’m still trying to work out how we were on strike last year trying to protect student learning, but this year a virus gives us an excuse to throw it all in the toilet. I really don’t know what any of the players in public education (unions, school board, ministries, colleges of teachers, etc) that I pay for actually stand for as 2020 closes. It certainly isn’t equity and support for students with special needs.

What I do see in public education, especially in the past two years, is a government intent on dismantling it for private, for-profit interests. Meanwhile, as the funding dries up, educational management (which you can only join with a raft of post-graduate degrees) operates on their usual bias of protecting the students most like themselves. This is upsetting both as a parent and a teacher. When money is thin those special needs are just an expensive and expendable bother. This is starting to feel like an unwinnable battle as the parents of special needs kids have to stand up against a biased system and a political party that seems determined to hurt them.

COVID has only intensified this inequitable situation. This slapped together, high-speed schedule that fakes an appropriate amount of instructional time (we’re at 52.5 hours of face to face instruction down from 110 hours) has no room for students with special needs. I’d love to see the live data we’ve already got for quadmester one but no one will want to show it because it won’t be flattering. We only follow the data when it suits us these days. The credit completion rates of fully remote elearning will pile on top of the grade drops and failures with face to face students to paint a damning picture of this ‘new normal’, but no one wants to work from that kind of data.

I sympathize with teachers struggling to retain some form of academic integrity when the system itself has made a mockery of it. Ontario curriculums are designed to be 110 hours long. Teachers are desperately trying to meet those requirements while being given a fraction of the time needed. We’re doing 52.5 hours of in-class instruction in multiple cohorts so students are in either face to face in the morning or the afternoon. This is done to keep group sizes under 20, which is wise during a pandemic, though when they stream off buses with up to 40 students on them (while f2f spec-ed support is cancelled) you have to wonder where the random lines are being drawn, and why.

More confusing are the instructions around the online half of the school day students are ‘supposed’ to be doing at home. That remote work is where we’re supposed to make up the other half of lost course time, but we’ve been told we can’t assess anything done remotely and students and/or parents can opt out of it entirely while still earning a credit. Most teachers seem to have responded to this by marking in a way that is specifically damaging to students with special learning needs, all in the name of academic integrity.

An argument might be made that if the same qualified teacher is running their own remote cohorts then a degree of online instructional effectiveness might be achieved, but I’ve yet to have a teacher qualified to teach my subject as remote support and I’m currently remote supporting a class I’m not qualified or experienced in. My make-work job there is reduced to helping students find links and make things work online, if they bother to show up, which a third of the class (the third with IEPs) aren’t doing anyway. We could have limited class sizes to single cohorts for classes with only one qualified teacher in the building, or even connected remote teachers between schools for specialized classes, but none of that happened because qualified teachers and even instructional time doesn’t matter anymore.

You can find this right on the Ministry webpage, but it isn’t true in a pandemic. The only thing your child with special needs can expect at the moment is to get run over by speeding quadmesters. Do try and keep them engaged and upbeat during a marathon health emergency though because you can’t expect their schools to be doing it.

Many IEPs will state that a student needs extra time in order to see success in their class, and board administration is expected to adhere to supports for these special needs. Our own experience getting run over by a rushed quadmester with little or no communication and sudden drops in marks without explanation, support or even an option for extra time is the result of teachers clinging to academic integrity when no one else is, from the Minister on down. It’s a war parents of kids with special needs can’t win because it seems as if the entire education system has come out in favour of punishing students with IEPs.

Special education is a human rights issue, but you can bet the lawyers are all over the health & safety not withstanding piece in there right now, though they’re strangely quiet about 40 kids on a bus. Discarding spec-ed supports is a top down decision done by a government with a history of special-needs abuse

At a time when everyone is under exceptional stress and trying to deal with a seemingly never ending health crisis you’d think the education system would focus on equity and support for those students most in need, but the opposite has happened. Service providers have an obligation to accomodate a person’s needs but this pandemic has unfortunately shown the true colours of both this government, the ministry it has infected and school boards who were more focused on rushing out a solution instead of looking after our most vulnerable students. Now that the new system is in place you can expect it to continue running over students with special needs which now includes an increasing number of non-IEPed students who are facing anxiety and depression as a result of the pandemic.

Expecting reason and compassion from the minister is a lost cause. I can only hope people in leadership positions elsewhere in the system take their responsibilities more seriously and start acting to support students and redirect teachers away from playing a part in this latest round of systemic inequity. We need to stop the myth that these cobbled together pandemic quadmesters have any kind of academic integrity, equity or kindness. Only then can we fix it, and fix it we must.

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Kawasaki KLX250 Suspension Adjustment

I can pick the thing up, so lifting up the wheels isn’t the ordeal
it is on the massive Concours. To get both wheels up I used
a wooden box on a jack and some jack stands on the back.

Today I had a go at the suspension of the KLX250. The previous owner is a much smaller fellow than me, so he had the suspension at stock levels (preset for a 150lb rider with no luggage or passenger). For a big guy like me (6’3″, 240lbs) the front was wallowy and the back felt loose.

The suspension adjustments are on the bottom of the forks at the front. The rear has rebound damping down at the bottom of the shock and compression dampening at the top.

I’ve included photos of each below. Tightening up the suspension was quick and relatively painless. The clicks are obvious and about half a turn of the screwdriver each. After cleaning up with wd40, I had no trouble turning any of them.

Click on any of the photos to get a bigger image.

front forks

On the bottom of the front forks you’ll find a hexagonal opening. There is a rubber cover in there. It’s designed with a flat edge and pops out easily with a small, flat screwdriver. Inside you’ll see a small, flat headed bolt. Each half turn creates an obvious click. I turned each side clockwise four clicks. No more wallowing, and the forks feel tighter on cornering. On braking I get a single, less pronounced drop. That was a quick fix.

compression damping
adjuster

rebound damping adjuster

rear suspension

The rebound damping adjuster is on the side of the bottom of the shock housing. It gets dirty under there so wiping it down first helps in finding things. It’s easy to get a flat screwdriver on the adjuster bolt, and it turns easily. The clicks are obvious, I turned it up (clockwise) four clicks.

The compression damping adjuster is obvious behind the cutout in the fairing. It was tucked in behind an electrical connector on mine which easily pushed aside. Since it’s out of the muck, this one doesn’t get dirty. The clicks were again obvious – I turned this one up four clicks as well.

I then took the bike for a quick ride to get gas. On the road it corners more tightly with none of the previous wallow. On the way back I tried to ride as directly as I could rather than follow the roads. I got to the end of pavement in a subdivision and found myself on a deeply rutted dirt road which led to a hydro station. I then nipped down a walking path to the road behind my subdivision. This bike is so quiet a rabbit was surprised when I puttered by. There is a large dirt pile where I came out of the bush so I zipped up it and back. Off road the bike is much tighter. There is still a lot of suspension travel, but I could feel what the wheels were doing much more clearly, the bike just feels tighter. I was just hoping to calm the wallow. That happened, but the whole bike dynamically feels so much more suited to me now.

Now that I know where the bits and pieces are, I’m intending to keep monkeying with the settings to get it customized to my size and preferences. With the settings that easy to play with, why not?

The Kawasaki KLX250 Owner’s Manual

Touring Ninja redux

I’ve been doing some research on a topbox for the Ninja again. Having a permanent carrying option would allow me to make the bike more usable on long trips by giving me lockable storage on the bike. It would also give my son a more comfortable and secure pillion with a backrest. If I could take him with me on some extended day trips we’d be able to make some miles this summer.

I’d initially thought of getting a bigger bike for two upping with my son, but the cost of insurance on larger cc bikes for new riders and the doubling up of insurance when you own two bikes (though you can only ride one at a time) has put that on hold. In the meantime, perhaps some storage on the Ninja would make it a bit more useful as a tourer.

Givi is pretty detailed in how to apply its luggage to my particular Ninja. I went to them first to figure out what the hell the difference between monolock and monokey luggage is. Basically, Givi monokey is the heavy duty kit and monolock is the light duty system. Monokey can be switched between top and pannier duty as well as being built heavier and tougher. Monolock is topcase only and meant for smaller bikes doing lighter duty. Think monokey for a big touring bike with lots of luggage and monolock for sports bikes, smaller bikes and scooters.

Givi suggestions for a Ninja 650r ’05-’08:
http://www.giviluggage.co/givi-product-focus/bike-overview-kawasaki-er6-nf-05-08/

What I need for the Ninja Topbox:

Not bad for turning the Ninja into a two up tourer and long distance traveller. I see some Givi luggage coming from A Viscous Cycle in the near future.

The Great Escape

This time of year always feels like Groundhog Day – go to work, go to sleep, wake up, do it again. It becomes so repetitive that it leaks into your mind, filling your thoughts so there is little room for anything else. This year it’s amplified by the negativity surrounding my work. All that combined with no riding for dark months on end and it’s hard not to get jammed.

If I time it right I can sneak out of Ontario on an above zero, dry road day. You can still find double digital daily highs in Cincinatti and south. A plugged in electric kit bonzai ride to Cinci and I’m out of the snowbelt. From there it’s a less ragged ride south to New Orleans. From Cinci I’d angle over to Memphis and follow the Mississipi down to the Big Easy…

After reading books like Todd Blubaugh’s Too Far Gone and watching Austin Vince Mondo Enduro the planet, I’ve often wondered what it would be like to get lost on the road. Once out of the snowbelt, I’d be in no rush to be somewhere. Without that very Western time fixation, I wouldn’t have to get wound up over deadlines.

If I’m not fixated on a destination the daily goals might not be that linear. With local knowledge I’d hope to find things off the beaten path as I meander…

Off the top of my head, I’d leave New Orleans along the Gulf, visit Austin and then ride the Twisted Sisters in Texas Hill Country. Austin’s also the home of the only North American MotoGP race, so if I timed my return with the race, I could be passing back through Austin on the way home in early April and catch Marc and the rest of the aliens doing their thing. The goal on the way south would be to get familiar with Austin’s weirdness for the return stop.

After wandering Texas I’d take a run up to the Very Large Array in New Mexico and do my best Jodi Foster immitation. New Mexico and Arizona have a pile of strange sites to see, so the wandering would get intense. Norman Reedus did a Ride episode in New Mexico that does a good job of showing what’s on hand out there.

Even that far south the mountains can also catch you out with northern temperatures as we found out a couple of years ago in the Superstition Mountains just outside of Phoenix in early January, so not rushing and timing your rides is important when at altitude. There are pile of old western towns and ruins in the US South West, along with some astonishing pieces of engineering. Meandering from photo opportunity to photo opportunity would be a nice way to ease into this slow motion ride.

Tuscon is home of the Aeroplane Boneyard where thousands of retired air force planes sit in the desert. A wander around there at sunset would be a glorious thing. I’ve done the Phoenix area a couple of times and travelled from the north end of Arizona from Las Vegas, but haven’t travelled as far south as Tuscon. From there I’d head across to Yuma, another famous western US location, before diving south into the Baja Penninsula. A desert riding tour would be a pretty cool way of seeing Baja.

Mexico is a whole other world. Most riding-the-Americas types blitz through it looking for a fast route south,but Mexico (with a final lunge into Belize) is where I’d wrap up this great escape from the never ending Canadian winter. Some crystal caves, Mesoamerican pyramids and Belize beaches during the deep freeze and then working my way back up to Austin for early April…

Seeing the Ozarks and the Tail of the Dragon during the weeks after the race would be a nice way to wind up this great escape, getting back to the frozen north just as it’s not frozen anymore.

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