All taken with a Canon T6i DSLR using the kit 28-55mm lens…
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Tim King's homepage with images and writing about technology, education, visual art and motorcycles!
All taken with a Canon T6i DSLR using the kit 28-55mm lens…
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I’ve been thinking about an Appalachian ride, but didn’t get around to it this year. So here is a nice travel idea for an end of year ride before the snows fall…
Saturday, October 20: Ride from Elora to Hotel Crittenden in Coudersport, Pennsylvania (~350kms)
Sunday, October 21: Cross Fork/Snow Shoe/Jersey Shore loop (~360kms)
Monday, October 22: Liberty/Hillsgrove/Williamsport (~350kms)
Tuesday, October 23: Coudersport back home to Elora (~350kms)
Hotel Crittenden is a lovely four star hotel with a pub/restaurant on site. At this time of year it’s only about $150 Canadian a night. What’s nice about returning to the same spot every evening is that I can leave the luggage behind and ride light on the loop days, enjoying the twisty roads without the weight and faff.
The two loop day rides through the Appalachians were generated in Google Maps from Motorcycleroads.com’s northern New York State maps. It’s a good site for locating twisties anywhere you want to ride in North America.
All told it would be about 1400kms in four days, but any of the loop days have opportunities to extend or cut short the ride if conditions require it.
One thing to consider when riding this late in the year (within 8 weeks of mid-winter solstice), is that the days are short and getting shorter. Sunset in northern Pennsylvania in mid-October happens around 6:30pm, so you wouldn’t be pushing for 500+km/12 hour days in the saddle unless you wanted to be out on unfamiliar, rural, mountain roads after dark… in hunting season.
Pennsylvania has some of the largest northern boreal forests in the world. Most other forests this far north get too coniferous to be colourful in the fall. From Ontario down through northern New York State and into northern Pennsylvania, it would be a very colourful few days racking up motorcycle miles before the end of the always-too-short Canadian motorcycling season.
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On this trip we saw people travelling in all manner of vehicles from the bafflingly expensive recreational vehicle to the sports car. Corvettes were an obvious and particularly popular choice in the US. On most roads this massive sled’s six foot plus width completely fills a small lane, giving the driver no room to move at all and leaving oncoming traffic to dodge his wing mirrors if he’s looking for an apex. Coming around a corner on a small mountain pass and seeing an RV spilling over into my lane was a common occurrence. The sheer size of North American vehicles bring their own problems.
Decades ago Jaguar came out with one of the most famous automotive marketing slogans in history. It captured the luxury grand touring ethos of Jaguar to such a degree that it has remained in the public consciousness since. I’d like to repurpose that brilliant piece of marketing for the vehicle that best exemplifies it. The motorcycle, for all its short comings, offers you the space to move gracefully down the road. With that grace comes the pace that motorcycles enjoy, which would explain why we got overtaken by so many of them on this trip.
The opportunity to retrace my four wheeled journey, especially through Yellowstone and the Bighorn National Forest is on my mind now. It’s a fifteen hour slog west over the plains to get to the edge of motorcycling’s magic kingdom. From there it’s the South Dakota Badlands, Black Hills, over Bighorn and on to Yellowstone. That would be a truly stunning motorcycling memory.
Some roads from the trip that might prompt you westward (if you’re in the east):
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Bottom left: sometimes the road can’t hang on to the side of the mountain… |
Some suggested must sees as you head west across the northern US:
South Dakota Badlands Scenic Road:
The Black Hills are riddled with small twisty roads, just try and avoid early August unless you like riding slowly behind farm vehicles. We stayed in Custer, but Rapid City has great restaurants and is a full on city with everything you could need, so I’d suggest that as a base camp for exploring the Hills:
Bighorn National Park was a brilliant surprise. We did Shell to Dayton through Burgess Junction. The roads ranged from some of the most dangly and exciting we’d seen to miles of gravel, ideal for an adventure bike. The 2-up Harley riders didn’t look like they were enjoying the road based colonoscopy so much. The national parks stop at Shell Falls was brilliant, with all sorts of information on hand about where we were:
Cody is worth a stop. It’s a great town with everything you could need with a genuine western flair. The two loops in Yellowstone each take a day, don’t think you can burn around them as quick as you can (you can’t). Between small roads, animals that weigh thousands of pounds walking onto the road at random, your bike at seven thousand plus feet breathing hard, and the other tourists, you’ll find rushing Yellowstone stressful. You’d also be missing the point. Stop often and check out the geothermal features and stunning scenery. A day for the north loop, a day for the south loop, and enjoy taking your time.
I’d hoped to get down to Jackson Hole in the Teutons in the south, but didn’t. Maybe on two wheels in the future. West Yellowstone offered better hotel rates than the North Gate which tends to be busier with better interstate access, but cheap hotel options are few and far between around the park.
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I’m at the end of a month long drive across North America and back. It’s time to have a go at the RV/motorhome crowd after being stuck behind these monkeys for hours on end. The woman who got out of her truck/trailer combo near Creemore on the weekend, blocking half the pumps and causing a line just shrugged and said, “they’ll have to wait.” It’s that kind of thinking that seems to typify the RV owner’s outlook. The Germans renting them to drive across Vancouver Island to Tofino on the very twisty and rough Highway 4 also seemed particularly adept at getting in front of you and then stopping, but then they’re driving large, awkward, unfamiliar vehicles in a foreign country on difficult roads.
After following around Nomad Explorers and Freedom Masters for weeks on end, I’ve got some more realistic suggestions for RV names. |
Ignoring the hundreds of thousands of dollars I’d have had to pour into a motorhome or trailer and truck to pull it, the cost of us doing this same trip using a recreational (and I use the term lightly) vehicle would have been stratospheric. Ferry fees for a motorhome/RV onto and off Vancouver Island are six times what we paid, costing you well north of six hundred bucks for each crossing.
Averaging mid-thirties miles per gallon in our little SUV, we spent well under a thousand bucks in gas carrying three adult sized people and their luggage comfortably. An 8mpg (typical) RV would have cost us more than seven grand just in gasoline!!! We paid about five grand in hotels over the month on the road, some of that included a house rental. Our hotel and gas costs were less than gas alone in an RV. Had the three ferry trips been with the take-all-your-shit-with-you RV variety we would have been looking at a two grand ferry bill instead of the less than three hundred we paid.
I would have enjoyed a bit more space, and I’ve often wondered how big a vehicle I’d need to bring a motorbike along on a big family road trip, but with Honda Ridgelines and other efficient crew cab trucks getting high twenties in gas mileage, and modern, large utility vans getting up there too, there are agile, non-road blocking options that let me still get close to 30mpg while bringing a bike along, and I don’t have to live like a refugee while using them.
The idea of a reasonably sized vehicle to move people ends for me in the realm of a minivan. The thought of a hyper efficient human mover appeals though. VW is looking a few years down the road at re-producing a futuristic version of its mini-bus. That’s as far down the RV lifestyle path as I dare to tread. What VW is doing looks a bit sci-fi and improbable, but an efficient hybrid people mover that could carry a bike? I’m in.
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The reason a minivan would work is because I found a hitch mounted motorcycle carrier, which means I’d be able to carry a bike on the back of it. A trailer is such a pain in the ass and is so hard on gas and transmissions that I’m not interested, but this rack fits right onto the Pacifica’s frame mounted trailer hitch and distributes the weight on the back properly. The Pacifica is a strong towing vehicle with a frame mounted trailer hitch option. The rack can only carry five hundred pounds, but I wouldn’t need anything like that. KTM’s 690 Enduro is a Swiss Army Knife of a bike that only weighs 330lbs before fuel, so it wouldn’t stress the rack much at all.
Lightweight, multi-talented KTM Enduro on the back of a fuel efficient Chrysler Pacifica? Yes please! |
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This past week I was taking first aid (again). I’ve been first aid qualified since I first did it in air cadets thirty three years ago and needed to be current to take my cyber-security team to the national finals in New Brunswick next month.  As we were wrapping up the course our instructor First aid instructor shared a Will Smith video about surrounding yourself with good people:
It’s a good piece of advice from a talented fellow who has made a lot of conscious decisions to nurture and grow opportunities across many genres; you’d think this is good advice that would apply to everyone, but for a lot of people building this kind of social network is nearly impossible.
I’ve been recently reviewing various situations that have happened to me through an aspie lens. It does a lot to explain why I’ve run into the problems I have. Knowing myself in this way earlier might have helped me understand why I was doing what I was doing and might have led to different outcomes. Being aware of a diagnosis would also have helped others understand why I’m not acting in a way they consider normal.
Back in air cadets I went for my pilot’s license. I did well at the training, commuting for the better part of three hours every Saturday to get myself down to where we met at the opposite end of Mississauga; commitment wasn’t a problem. I ended up missing a single meeting due to a work conflict and even though I communicated this, the guy in charge took the opportunity to drop me from the application for the summer flying scholarship course, even though I had the highest score in powered flight that year. I ended up despondent and frustrated by the process, hundreds of hours of volunteer effort disappeared in a moment.
That situation ended up ratcheting up an already awkward relationship with that officer and did much to prevent me from advancing through the ranks. In an organization I’d spent thousands of hours volunteering for, and one that I thought might lead me into a career, I ended up peripheral and bitter. As I got older I began taking opportunities to sabotage situations and undermine the command structure. I didn’t do this out of a maliciousness, I did it out of a sense of disenfranchisement. I was capable, I was dedicated and I was keen but I was dismissed as a kid they neither liked nor trusted because I didn’t fit into the hierarchy and act like everyone else.
In school at about the same time, I was hanging out with a bunch of kids who started to get into teen-related nonsense, from smoking to drugs and other darker experiments. Rather than value emotional connections with people over the nonsense, as everyone else did, I simply walked away. This wasn’t easy, and I was lonely, but it wasn’t in my nature to prioritize friendships first and follow those guys down the rabbit hole.
That approach to things has always made me socially peripheral even though I played team sports throughout my childhood. In many cases I played isolated positions like goalie that further limited my ability to interact with team mates, but then that was never the point of playing for me, as it was with pretty much everyone else.  As an adult, I couldn’t hang on to hockey because so many adult teams are friendship based and I was never good at prioritizing that aspect of the game. The mandatory after game beers in any sport seemed like an awkward social moment, but for many of the guys there it was the point of coming out.
In university I managed to alienate a professor I thought was one of the best I’d ever had. He got us to aggressively question the foundations of what we were doing, but in a case of Aspergers gone too far, I ended up questioning the group think he had generated in the class room and in doing so, once again made myself a pariah. I’m a perennially bad joiner.
At work I’ve run into similarly problems. When I moved out of the city and up to a rural small town school I immediately ran into complications. Being a big, white guy, you’d think the all white, all Canadian, mono-cultural class I suddenly found myself in would have felt more comfortable than the multi-cultural classes I’d just left, but the opposite was true. In the previous multi-cultural environment, everyone tended to fall back on a more rational approach to interaction because cultural norms couldn’t be assumed, but in a mono-cultural, rural classroom all sorts of really offensive (to only me apparently) norms were accepted. Students would use terms like, “he jewed me out of five bucks”, and drop the ‘n’ word in class like a password. They were doing this to confirm cultural conformity with each other. It made them feel secure and meant they all believed similar things, it drove me around the bend.
I ended up showing this senior English class the Canadian-written academy award winning film Crash, as a way to make them question their overt racism and discriminatory thinking. It’s a challenging film, but then that was kind of the point. It put an end to kids talking like that in my class, but it also got me removed from the school.
Once again, I’d failed to adopt social norms and conform to group-think and instead went after a moral absolute. People really don’t like that. What people like is when you reinforce their prejudices and act like they expect you to. In this case, one of the students in the class was the daughter of a local church leader and he decided this would be an excellent excuse for a good old fashioned witch-hunt. I got moved out of there by the school board before things got sillier. I’m sure nothing has changed up there and everyone is still more than happy being racist red necks – and this is precisely my problem.
When our teacher’s union lost the plot I couldn’t help but make a stand based on principle rather than supporting the people in the organization no matter what. I’m a staunch believer in unionism – left to their own devices, the rich would happily disenfranchise everyone and return us to the middle ages. An argument could be made that I should have supported the union at all costs considering this ever-present threat to the middle class, but I don’t think that way. When the union broke its own rules around fair voting practices and forced an illegal contract on our members, I fought it tooth and nail. No one had to strike and members got a contract (albeit an illegal one that has since cost tax payer millions), shouldn’t I have encouraged that? I could have complied and ingratiated myself to the powers that be and found myself rising up the hierarchy, but not doing that is precisely my problem. Rising up hierarchies depends on conformity of thought and valuing relationships before principles. This is the single reason why I don’t pursue leadership positions.
Back to Will Smith’s advice. I’ve always found it hard to make friends, let alone find supporters who will stoke my fire, though I’ve never lacked for flames. I’m driven and capable, but I find it impossible to put social expectation above rational and moral consideration. An inability to do that means I never develop the deep levels of trust that other people lean on in their careers.
Yesterday at PD we were looking at White Ribbon scenarios and they all seem absurd to me. Cases where teen age boys agree to isolate drunk girls to take advantage of them? Evidently it’s a thing now in Toronto where groups of high school boys are convincing girls to perform sex acts for money. If that’s what neuro-typical, socially focused people end up doing with those tight networks they develop, then I’m glad it’s beyond me, but then so is Will’s empowering social network.
Of course, there are precedents for aspies building great success, but in a lot of cases they don’t do it with a supportive social network, they do it through sheer malicious will. I tend to fixate on creative and technical challenges, people domination isn’t in my wheelhouse. Most business-successful aspies are fixated on that kind of dominance.
Finding people with complimentary skills sets is a way around this impasse. The problem for an aspie is that the people who tend to be very good at social discourse find our lack of it trying and don’t associate with us. In many cases, those are precisely the people who have attacked me socially. It has been the rare socially skilled person who has been able to see past my lack of tact and recognize what lies beneath. Finding a leader who stokes my fire rather than pouring water on my inabilities is a rarity.  I long to find people worthy of being loyal to, but they are vanishingly rare. When I do find people like that, I’m the staunchest ally imaginable, as long as we fighting the good fight.
Looking for people to fan your flames is a difficult proposition at the best of times. Without the deep at-all-costs social ties most people leverage, the aspie is left depending entirely on their technical skills to get anywhere. Most people factor in trust when making hiring and promotional decisions. That trust is usually based on their sense of how loyal a person is to them. In almost any management decision this emotional bias means the technical aspie loses out to nepotism – something that has happened throughout my life: don’t expect fair or skills based promotion, expect nepotism.  In a world where who you know always takes you further than what you know, this is perhaps the single largest disadvantage this aspie has faced.
NOTES:
Asperger’s inside the ASD spectrum: high functioning autism without specific titles.
A survival guide for people with Aspbergers
ASD and aging: peaks and valleys of youth and old age
Zuckerberg: coping with Aspbergers
ASD as flavour:Â this kind of thinking gives me hope that my son won’t suffer the same prejudices that I have – perhaps he’ll even be given a chance to take Will’s advice and build that empowering social network.
An interesting piece of ASD media:Â Â Roman J. Isreal Esq…
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Some moody and increasingly atmospheric and abstract media from the icy morning we’re having here.
Taken between 9 and 10am on Saturday, April 14, 2018.
Using the OnePlus5 smartphone camera.
Videos modded in Windows Movie Maker.
GIFs made using the EZgif online tool:Â Â https://ezgif.com/maker
You can find more media on the ice here:Â Â https://photos.app.goo.gl/CwEOjz8TqYfF1QAM2
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1. Enjoy the silence. You don’t realize what a noisy contraption you’ve spent your life in. Blood pressure, thumping heart, straining muscles, bones and meat. When it all finally stops listen to the world, even if it’s just for a moment, without the factory noises you’ve been experiencing your whole life.
2. Let it all go. Unclench from all of those assumptions foisted on you by other people. From the truly fictional like economics, religion and politics, to our trivially incomplete understanding of the universe, let it all go because none of it matters, none of it is real. All the things you thought you were: your nationality, class, race, gender, religion, values, they’re all just constructions foisted on you by other semi-sentient hairless apes, usually for their benefit. You’ve laboured your whole life to maintain those fictions. Enjoy the freedom of realizing it’s all nonsense. The debts you paid, the country you lived in, the church you attended, all of these fictions are just that. There is no heaven or hell, there is no reckoning. You are made of reality and back to reality you go, complete and unencumbered by fear, doubt or coercion.
3. Enjoy the thought of no thought. Why on earth would you want to cling to this semi-sentient, broken way of existing? Our minds are barely conscious. Moments of lucidity are fleeting at best, then we’re back to habit and impulse driven by instinct. Living forever in this limited mode would be agony! Hopefully you spent your time as a bipedal ape on the third rock from the sun being a good animal, helping more than you hurt, but if you’re typical of your species you took as much as you could for yourself exploiting all those fictions in the process. An eternity as an instinct driven, selfish, barely conscious monkey? I’ll pass. Enjoy the end of thought from that power hungry miracle brain you’ve spent your whole life feeding so that it could convince you you’re something more than the universe that created you.
4. Become other things. You don’t really have a choice in this, and it’s been happening even while your gimpy conscious strings together enough moments to make you think you’re you. We’re constantly becoming other things. You aren’t made of the same stuff you were when you came into this world, and now all that you are will become a myriad of other things. So it has always been. Fall back into the scheme of things; enjoy going home.
5. Laugh at the inevitable. Death isn’t something to fear, and it certainly isn’t something we should be trying to stamp out with religion or technology. Death isn’t darkness, it isn’t a lack of light. It isn’t peace, it isn’t a lack of conflict. Death is the end of having to stand knee deep in the shit people believe in, it’s the end of having to stand at all. Your oh so brief moment of sentience is at its end (thank goodness!).  As human being recedes and you cease to be you, laugh and enjoy the experience, you won’t have any more. Why would you want your last moments peering through this shackled and misunderstood existence to be ones of panic or regret? That’s such a human reaction. Laughter is a way to embrace selflessness.
Barely above freezing, but the sky is clear and winter blue. The camera is a Ricoh Theta S on a Gorilla Pod wrapped around the rear view mirror, until it wasn’t. Without a hint of a problem it suddenly let go at 80km/hr as we rode down a country road. The tripod and camera slid down the pavement for 50 odd metres before coming to a stop. We turned around and went back to find the camera case popped open and electronics hanging out, I figured it was dead. (check out the bottom of this post for an update – it looks like the Theta didn’t survive after all).
Once home I put the guts back in and snapped it shut again and it powered right up. All the photos on it were fine, only the plastic piece at the top shattered. It’s now covered in tape and looks like the tough little camera that it is. If you’re looking for a hardy 360 camera, the Ricoh Theta has survived thousands of miles on a motorcycle taking all sorts of photos and videos, and now it has hit the road at high speed, and it still keeps on ticking (kind of – see below).
I’d kinda hoped that this nixed the Theta S so I could upgrade to the new Theta V. That might be what ends up happening now.
I had the camera set to take a photo ever 10 seconds. I hoped that it happened to be taking one as it came off the mirror, but no luck. In the meantime, here are a selection of stills and 360 movable images from the Ricoh on the ride:
Dress warm for a cold ride. – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA
Cold, easly spring #Triumph ride #theta360 – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA
Westmount Rose Covered Bridge https://goo.gl/maps/sCEvFbtqgrC2 – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA
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