The Ride Report

I just signed an offer letter on a new job that starts Monday, so now I can stop worrying about having to sell my bike to pay the bills. Whew! I’ll have a paycheck AND a motorcycle, all at the same time. What a concept!

I’ll have a new entry up soon about my road trip to Reno with the club last weekend, but first I have to get over this cold I came home with. Between 24/7 Nyquil and my exploding sinuses, all I want to do is sleep now. Good thing I don’t have a job to stay home from ’til Monday…

I am never washing my bike again. EVER. I went six months or more without fucking it up with soap and water and everything was fine, but I took it out today for the first time since washing it on Thursday and I seriously wondered if I’d make it home alive. I must have washed off the bike’s mojo along with the dirt, because everything went wrong today.

This started out as a long entry going into too much detail about every step of everything that went wrong with the ride today, but the short version is:

* 472 bicyclists racing where we were riding, forcing us to dodge 10-speeds, Spandex and mooseknuckle most of the day
* Blowing my line on a turn because I was hotdogging for a camera, crossing the yellow line into oncoming traffic, and missing being a hood ornament by inches
* My bike starting to leak gear oil from the primary
* Dropping my bike off a lift — onto me
* Discovering my rear fender has been rubbing on the wheel and using a pry-bar to fix it

The lesson I’ve taken from all this? Washing my bike is bad mojo. Pre-soap? Everything was fine. Post-soap? “Danger, Will Robinson!”

Screw washing it. A clean bike is a dangerous bike.

Regular readers (and even the irregular ones, maybe — depends on how much fiber y’all are eating) may recall that I keep bitching about my right floorboard being ground away to nothing. I bought a new pair of “floorboards” awhile back from some yutz on Craigslist who didn’t know a floorboard from shinola and they’re still gathering dust next to me here on the floor of my office; and I’ve been watching them go for gold-rush prices on Ebay; but I’ve been doing without until today.

It finally occurred to me to post an ad on Craigslist saying I was looking for a floorboard, and within about two hours I had three offers in my in-box. One of them turned out to be from the P of a local MC whose members I run into from time to time, so I worked it out with him. He dropped it off at my place this morning and I had it installed about 10 minutes later. Nice. Now I can go back to really scraping through the turns again instead of being frustrated at the silence.

Here’s some before and after shots, just to prove that I wasn’t making it all up.

I also “fixed” my saddlebag today. I discovered when I was washing my bike the other day that one of the saddlebags was missing a little rubber cushion that sits between the bottom of the saddlebag and the support rail beneath it. The saddlebag has been sitting directly on the rail and muffler support bracket, with the bag rubbing the paint off the support rail and the muffler support wearing a hole in the bottom of the saddlebag. Judging by how deep the holes are in the bottom of the saddlebag, it looks like it’s been like this since I got the bike.

I’ve always had this metallic knock that sounded like it was coming from the engine but didn’t sound like an engine-knock kind of sound, if that makes any sense. I’m wondering (hoping, actually) if this is what it was — the saddlebag rattling on the muffler mount. I’m going for a ride with the guys tomorrow, so I guess we’ll find out. (Edit: It wasn’t the saddlebag. Whatever it is that’s knocking is still at it.)

And, again, here’s a few pictures to prove I wasn’t making it up. I’m feeling very defensive today, apparently.

I was riding out to Simi Valley this afternoon to have lunch with a buddy and was cruising through a long downhill sweeper on the freeway when things started feeling a little funny. Not funny ha-ha, funny wrong.

My bike gets this weird slow wobble when I’m going through a long sweeper like this one, and at first that what I thought it was. The ass end starts oscillating and the handlebars start gently wobbling and the whole bike feels like it’s weaving. It starts out slowly, gently, and it builds the longer I hold the turn until I counter-steer to stop it. This time, though, it did all of that, but bigger. And counter-steering didn’t stop it. So I backed off the throttle and that helped a bit.

But it did it even more in the next sweeper, and then I could feel the ass-end trying to track out sideways when I was going straight, and I knew something was wrong. I thought maybe I’d broken an engine mount, but when I pulled over I found that it was a flat rear tire. Another flat rear tire.

I’m a magnet for flats. Always the rear tire, though, never the front. But I’ve had more rear flats than anyone I know. This is my first one with this bike, but on my last one I got something like three flats in one year. It seemed like every time I turned around I was sitting on the side of the freeway waiting for a flatbed truck to show up.

And then there’s this bike… My buddy came with his truck and picked me up and we got the tire fixed, but as we were driving to the shop it occurred to me that this is the third truck my bike has been in the back of. Between broken throttle cables and work transportation issues and flat tires, my bike spends a hell of a lot of time in the backs of trucks.

So I offer these pictures, photographic evidence of how I and my bike roll: in the bed of a truck.

I’ve been going a little crazy waiting to hear back on a job interview I had last week, so I went out for a little clear-my-head putt yesterday afternoon. I was riding the closest twisty road to where I live — Mulholland Drive overlooking the San Fernando Valley, host to dozens of makeout sites used by thousands of high-schoolers over the years (myself included) — when I came across this:

It had just happened when I went by, and by the time I circled back for pictures the ambulance had arrived. I don’t think anyone was too badly hurt.

I’m posting it because it illustrates perfectly the truth behind my blog’s slogan, “Shiny up, rubber down. It just works better that way.” As you can see, the reverse doesn’t work so well. Remember that the next time you decide to get all agro in the corners in your PT Cruiser.

I went on a couple of runs on Sunday with some friends that had us dipping our toes in both extremes of the biker world.

First up was a charity ride for a sick kid that we went on as a favor to a friend. I’ve been on a lot of rides like this over the years and it’s always an adventure when you get a couple hundred people together who only put a few hundred miles on their bikes each year and have little or no experience riding in a group. You can pretty much bet that someone will get hurt before the day is over (and someone did, I heard — with a kid on the back) and all you can do is hope it isn’t you or one of your friends. “Clusterfuck” is the word some might use to describe these rides, but I don’t use that kind of rough language. They’re a gosh-darned adventure is all I’ll say. This ride was different — it was scarier than most.

I’m not going to take the time to go into detail about all the things that were wrong about how this ride was organized and led, the short version is: we went far too slowly on the freeway, we stopped for some red lights but blew through others, the route took us through a friggin’ residential neighborhood — I can only assume so we could ride past some organizer’s house, and once we finally got into the hills where there was some decent riding the guys up front went through some of the turns so slowly that I swear they put their feet down.

The “adventure” at the intersections was what got to me the most (after the 5 mph twisties, that is). We had a line of around 100 bikes in the column, but the guys up front obviously weren’t thinking about the back of the pack. They stopped for lights that turned red for them, but motored on obliviously through lights that were going to change right after they went through. That led to the riders behind them running the light to keep the pack together, and the riders behind them, and so on and so on, so that you had a long stream of riders riding through red lights with cross-traffic trying to cut through. It was dangerous as hell.

But there was something else about the ride that was just … off. Early on the route had us circling a prison of some kind. It looked like it had been closed, so I didn’t think too much about it. But further on we ended up at another prison, this one in obvious operation. And then we turned and went down a service road leading into the prison. And then we went through some kind of access-controlled entrance. And then we went into and around the prison staff’s parking lot. And then we went down a service road right next to the yard, with inmates stopping their basketball games and weightlifting to turn and watch us go by. Holy crap, what I thought was supposed to be a short ride through the hills had turned into a total “what the fuck am I doing here?” tour of Cell Block Six. It was the weirdest fucking ride I’ve ever been on.

It wasn’t until we finally got to the ride’s conclusion that the full realization of what was up hit me. I don’t know how I’d missed it, considering that the words were printed on the back of every single run T-shirt they were selling, but the ride was sponsored by the Department of Corrections. Prison guards! And I found out later that the fucking warden was the guy leading the ride! Unbelievable. If we had known who was behind it, I don’t think we would have done the ride.

Following that “adventure,” we went to a fundraiser party being thrown by a support club for one of our local power clubs. There was plenty of law enforcement in evidence at this event too, only this time they weren’t being friendly about it. There was a police car stationed just opposite the driveway entrance to the parking lot, with the officer, arms crossed, watching everyone roll in. There were two police cars stationed on the hill overlooking the parking lot, where I think they were filming or taking pictures. There was only one road leading in and out of the roadhouse the party took place at, and both on the way in and the way out we passed several police cars with bikers pulled over. As we passed them on the way in I saw one of the officers scrambling to get out a digital camera and take pictures of us as we rolled by. It was full-press police harassment, the usual for the club we were there to see.

So Sunday was an interesting day, in terms of the contrast of how we were treated at the two different events. On the first one, we were paraded through a prison by the guys who ran the joint, and at the second were harassed by the guys who want to put us all in the first one. Good times, good times…

Oh well, at least I got to ride, about 230 miles on the day. Here’s my GPS track for the day showing how we went to bumfuck and back:

View Larger Map

One of the things I like about my Road Glide is its stereo system, because with it I can listen to music while I’m riding. There’s nothing like carving through the canyons with a dinosaur rock soundtrack to really make a good ride great. Thing is, when you’re blasting your tunes on a motorcycle, everyone around you can hear them too. I think I lost some street cred because of that today.

I was riding down a busy street here in the San Fernando Valley, weaving in and out of traffic, music playing, feeling good. A light turned red up ahead and twin columns of cars backed up in front of me, so I just lane-split my way to the front. So I’m sitting there between the two front cars, stereo blaring, singing along with it a little, when I noticed that the BMW to my left had its window rolled down and there was a hot blonde in the passenger seat.

I looked at her. She looked at me. Our eyes met. I give her a little nod — we were sharing a moment. Then she turned to the driver and said something, and they both looked at me and started cracking up. That’s when I realized just what song it was that I was blasting for the whole intersection.

John Mayer. 3X5. Oy.

Apropos of nothing, here’s a self-portrait I shot last week in the wheel of my pal Earthquake’s bike. I kinda like it.

Selling my bike is still high up on my list of possible short-term solutions to my current money crunch, so I didn’t let the rain that was threatening on Sunday keep me off the road. I’m trying to get as many miles in as I can while I have it, because I’m going to miss it like a second child once its gone.

I usually ride up through the hills north of L.A. in Canyon Country or down along Pacific Coast Highway to Neptune’s Net, but I felt like something different today, so I decided to swing by the Rock Store in the hills above Malibu. It’s one of the more famous biker hangouts out here, but I don’t get over there too much. It’s a see-and-be seen place, where half the point of being there is to ooh and aah over the bikes and hope people ooh and aah over yours, not to mention being a tourist destination where the starstruck scope out which celebs showed up that day. In short, not my kind of scene, but like I said: I felt like something different.

It’s usually so crowded there that you have to park your bike down the road and it’s standing room only on the patio, but the crowd today was pretty sparse. There were maybe 20 bikes in the parking lot, the patio was closed, and the lookie-loos and la turistas were nowhere to be seen. I suddenly found myself liking the place a whole lot better — but not enough to eat lunch there or buy a coke — their prices are insane. Instead I filled up a urinal and hung out for a few minutes, then I hit the road again.

The roads near the Rock Store were the real reason I was there in the first place. I hooked a left out of the parking lot and headed up the stretch of Mulholland Highway that I just learned tonight that some people call “The Snake,” and I remembered what I had forgotten: this is a great stretch of road! Really tight switchbacks, off-camber turns, climbing hairpins — I had forgotten how much fun this road is! It’s tight and twisty and challenging and just a ton of fun. It’s become my new favorite.

As I wound my way up into the hills I came around a long sweeper and found a photographer set up snapping pictures of everyone who went by, me included. I was immediately reminded of killboy.com and realized this must be a similar setup. When I got home I did a little googling and found that I was right: check out RockStorePhotos.com. Killboy has The Dragon, RockStorePhotos has The Snake. I went through his pix and sure enough, I was in there. Not a bad picture, either.

I eventually ended up on Pacific Coast Highway and headed south to Topanga Canyon, then took Topanga back into the valley and back towards home. I’ll definitely be riding that loop again in the future — if I still have a bike.

Jesus, I’m a mopey motherfucker. I’m almost embarrassed by that last “poor-widdle-me” entry. I actually would be embarrassed if I didn’t like how I wrote a few passages from it. That “warm, buttery light” line may have been pretty cheesy, but it also strikes me as being just a little bit Hemingway-esque, so I’m perhaps inordinately proud of it, so it stays. Anyway…

I got out and about on the bike again today and it’s got me in a little bit better mood. Went over to my mom’s house and did some chores around the house for her — there’s nothing like sanding varnish off a dining room table to help get your aggressions out — and then I got to play in rush hour traffic on the way home. The traffic was the fun part, the healing part.

I’ve said here before that one of my favorite things to do on two wheels is lane-splitting. It’s razor’s edge riding with no margin for error, but when you get into the rhythm of it it’s like the cars part in front of you like the Red Sea for Moses and you’re following a lighted path through them. That’s how it was for me today.

I only lane-split for about 15 miles, but it was on the 110 and 101 freeways through downtown LA, so every bit of it counted. My GPS says it took me 20 minutes to cover the distance with an average speed of 45 mph, so I guess I made it count. All I know is your problems tend to disappear when you’re flying through a 48″ wide gap with creeping cars on either side and you know one of them could change lanes in front of you at any moment. It really helps clear your head.

It works even when Malibu at night doesn’t.