The Ride Report

I went for a ride this afternoon along the coast with one of my club brothers and it turned into a LEO kind of day. Everywhere we turned we ran across cops, until finally we couldn’t turn anymore.

Our first encounter took place as we were riding through Camarillo on the way to Pacific Coast Highway. We’d been poking along behind a pair of slower cars boxing us in until they turned off, then we got on the gas a little bit and made some noise. Next thing I know, I look in my mirror and there’s a Highway Patrol unit pacing us in the right hand lane. I don’t know where the hell he came from, but he was there, and we were riding like he wasn’t. Oops. And then to compound the oops, my registration tags are expired. Double oops.

We proceeded to ride like citizens for the next couple of miles, and that cop held his position at my 4 o’clock in the next lane the whole way. Even at stoplights, he’d stop short and sit back there with a good view of my plates. I thought for sure he was going to pull us over, but eventually he turned right where we turned left and everyone went their separate ways. Go figure.

We opened it up again and hauled ass the rest of the way to PCH, and about a mile up the coast we came upon another CHP unit parked on the road up ahead with his lights flashing. As we pulled up he stepped out in front of us and waved us down. I half-wondered if the other car had radioed ahead and he was there for us, but I figured it more likely he was closing the road down due to the fires we’ve been having out here lately. Instead, it turns out he was stopping traffic for a BMW commercial shooting just up the road and he’d let us go through in five minutes or so.

We put our kickstands down there in the roadway next to his car and proceeded to bullshit with the officer for awhile. He was pretty cool and didn’t have the anti-biker attitude a lot of cops have and we cracked a few jokes and shared a few laughs with him. But the main thing we were doing was trying to keep him entertained to keep him from going behind us, seeing my expired tags, and maybe giving the ticket we’d dodged a few miles back.

A few minutes later our efforts were wasted when a Sheriffs unit pulled up and parked next to us. The CHP walked over and started talking to the deputy, and now I had not one but two cops on the verge of looking at my license plate. Then a minute later another Sheriff unit pulled up to our left and now we had a law enforcement party going on all around us.

At that point I figured it was inevitable that someone was eventually going to notice my tags, so I decided to just roll with it and have fun and document the situation, so I jumped off my bike and took a picture of the scene.

In the end, none of them noticed my tags, or if they did they let it go. I feel like I dodged not one, not two, not three, but four bullets today. Plan for tomorrow? DMV first to get new tags, then … Vegas, baby! I’m on a roll!

I think it might be time to break out my “winter” helmet. I was up in the mountains over the weekend and it was shirt-sleeve weather on the way up, but by the time I came home around midnight it had gotten pretty damn cold. (Well, cold by SoCal standards: 45 degrees or so). That made it not only not shirt-sleeve weather, but also not open-face helmet weather. I couldn’t feel my face!

All summer long I’ve been wearing a Fulmer V2 helmet (the flat black model) which is a 3/4 helmet with an open face. It’s very light, comfortable, looks retro-cool, and I like it a lot — but not at 45 degrees. During our rainy season here in SoCal (like the song says: “It never rains in California … it pours, man, it pours”) I wear a flip-face helmet because A) raindrops hurt at 85 mph, and B) when it rains out here, it’s cold. That helmet would be a KBC FFR, which I highly recommend. It’s lightweight, comfortable, it flips up and locks open solidly with one hand, and it does a fine job of keeping the cold and rain off my delicate face. I wish I’d been wearing it Saturday night.

It’s warmed up again so the Fulmer’s still up to the task, but I’m watching the forecast. If it gets cold again I’m breaking out the FFR. I’m too pretty to be that cold.

I was asked not-so-recently by a publicist to review a book.  I have no idea why she asked me, I have to assume it was because this is a blog about motorcycling and the book is about a guy riding a motorcycle, so…  Well, here’s my review, such as it is.  I think the publicist may regret having asked me.

Back in 1973 a guy in his 40’s named Ted Simon rode a motorcycle around the world.  It took him four years to do it, and when he was finished he wrote a book about it: Jupiter’s Travels.  The book has become a cult classic and has inspired hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people to go on similar journeys.  Ewan MacGregor and Charley Boorman of Long Way Round and Long Way Down fame cite Simon as an influence, for example.  Nearly thirty years on, at the age of 73, Ted decided to do it again, and he wrote a book about the second journey: Dreaming of Jupiter.  This is the book I was asked to review.

Let me say first of all that I am fascinated by the idea of riding a motorcycle around the world.  I’ve said before here how much I’d like to ride through Mexico; doing the same thing around the world could only be bigger and better.  So I love the idea of what Ted has done and I have all kinds of respect for him for having done it not once, but twice.  But oh my god, I hated this book.  It started out slow, never got better, and the overall impression I came away with was that it is an unending stream of complaints.

Here’s the review in a one-line nutshell for you:  Ted Simon traveled the world by motorcycle, went back and did it again thirty years later, and found that everything had changed — and he didn’t like it.

Time and time again in this book he’d talk about his fond memories for a place he’d traveled through on his first trip in the 70’s, painting a rosy picture of unspoiled beauty and warm-hearted locals welcoming him with open arms, and then he’d complain bitterly that it was ruined when he came through again the second time around.  Landscapes were spoiled, buildings were torn down or decrepit or had been remodeled, people had died or moved or didn’t remember him — every place he went was a disappointment.  400-plus pages of this got to be a bit much.   And the roads…  Good lord, don’t get him started on the roads.  I don’t think Ted has ever met a road he couldn’t find something wrong with, and there are only a few of them he hasn’t managed to drop his bike on.

I hate to come down as hard on this book as I am, but I found it to be unpleasant to read and a great disappointment in terms of its glossing over of sharing the experience.  It’s not that he doesn’t describe what he sees and experiences, it’s more the disconnected and negative way he does it.  I was hoping to live the journey vicariously through the book, but there’s something about the way it’s written that keeps any sharing of the experience at arm’s length.  The only thing you really feel of his experiences are his bitterness and disappointment at how much everything has changed.

On the other hand, maybe it’s just me.  Positive reviews of this book abound, so it may just be that I don’t “get” it.  That’s possible, it’s not the first time I’ve missed the popular bandwagon (I’m looking at you, Dane Cook, Angelina Jolie, the Harley-Davidson Rocker), but Dreaming of Jupiter just put me to sleep.  Your mileage may vary.

Yesterday, I made my last and final payment on my Harley. She’s mine now, free and clear. I’ll be watching my mailbox for the pink slip…

Me and the family were talking over dinner about a party my M/C is throwing next weekend and my wife asked if she was getting in free. I said she could if she worked the event and that I’d probably have her work the gate, collecting the entry fee from attendants. But then I remembered her recently injured thumb (she cut herself in a musical/food preparation activity gone horribly wrong) and joked about how she’d probably contract some flesh-rotting disease from the money with her open wound.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “We don’t know where that money’s been.”

“Oh, I think I do,” I said, picturing bills inserted in various orifices at seedy stripper bars, but I stopped myself before going on because my 12-year old daughter was at the table. “I’d say where, but we have young ears listening.”

“I know exactly what you’re thinking, Dad,” my daughter interjected.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I really, really don’t.”

“You’re thinking of strippers.”

Holy shit. My kid’s a mind-reader — and she knows I’m a pervert.

Aaaaaaaaaaand…. I’m back. Actually, I’m still here — I never left, I just got lazy. I got busy with the club, busy with the bike, busy with the wife (pun intended), busy with work… You’ve seen it before: Blogger blogs, blogger falls off the face of the earth, blogger comes back and resumes posting fitfully until he gives up and quits. So consider this the middle part of that. Onward.

In new news on the motorcycling front… I got a new rear tire. I should say a new new rear tire. I only seem to be getting about 5,000 miles out of a rear tire lately. Maybe it’s the cheap Chinese tires I’m using (Kenda), or maybe it’s the fact that I’m not exactly svelte and the tire is carrying a heavy load, or maybe it’s that I ride it hard — I dunno. I like to think it’s options 1 and 3. Anyway, I’m on Kenda #3 and I’m happy enough with it — now.

I’m running a Kenda Kruz, my second one, and it’s not a bad tire. But the one I just replaced was a different Kenda model — a Sport Challenger — and it suuuucked. It wasn’t too bad for most of the life of the tire, but it got squirrelly as hell toward the end. It started feeling kind of wobbly in the straights, and it started scaring me in the twisties. I’d lean it over and crank it around a turn, and right at the apex the back end would sort of skip just a little bit. I actually started wondering if something was wrong with my swingarm. I’m not sure what was going on; maybe the sidewall was deforming or it was breaking traction, I dunno. All I know is I couldn’t replace it fast enough. Now there’s new meat on the back and it’s riding right again. So I’m a happy man — at least for another 5000 miles.

I’m off work tomorrow, so the plan is to maybe wash my bike. My prospect looked at it the other day and said to me, “You know, soap and water isn’t that expensive.” I told him he’d just bought himself another 3 months of prospecting, but that I appreciated his honesty. I should have made him wash it himself.

You know your bike is dirty when prospects are making fun of it, so I’m thinking I might get productive and show the scoot some sudsy love tomorrow. Or… it’s supposed to rain this weekend. I may just take it for a ride Saturday and aim for the wet stuff to rinse off the worst of it.

I’ve been riding for about 25 years now and I like to think I’m a good rider – skilled, smart, experienced, safe(ish), etc. But there’s a saying about riders with multiple years of experience under their belt, that those years don’t necessarily mean you’re a better rider. Are you a rider with 25 years of experience spent learning and improving — or are you a rider with the same one year of experience repeated 25 times? I hope I’m the former. I’d like to think I am. But I learned something new recently.

I’ve always taken it as an immutable fact of motorcycling that you don’t use your rear brake in corners. Ever. Braking in a turn is bad in the first place, but braking with the rear brake in a turn is the worst. You’ll low-side yourself right off the road if you lock up the rear tire, so you’re tempting fate if you even think about touching the rear brake pedal while cornering. I’ve always “known” that if you absolutely, positively have to brake in a turn, then you use the front brake. That’s how I ride, and I’ve taken it so far that I intentionally developed the habit of riding the twisties with my right foot on my highway peg to remove the temptation to brake with the rear brake. If I come into a corner too hot, then I counter-steer like I mean it and grab a handful of front brake if that’s not enough.

That’s been working for me so far, but I recently got into a debate about braking with the rear in corners with Steve of Motorcycle Philosophy and Joker of Harley-Davidson “Mystique”. I was adamant that rear-braking is dead wrong, they were equally adamant that I had my head up my ass. (Well, okay, to be honest, they were adamant that rear-braking is a legitimate technique, but I’m sure they were thinking I had my head up my ass.)

This was our second go-round on this topic, so I started considering the impossible: What if I was wrong? (My wife would never believe I’m capable of such introspection.)

So I started out by Googling about it, confident that I would find dozens of articles by motorcycling authorities that I could cite to prove to these guys that they had it wrong. Because, you know, everybody knows you don’t use your rear brake in a turn.

Only… Not so much.

The more I read, the more I found that my head was in fact planted firmly in my colon and that rear-braking was an accepted — even popular — cornering technique. I asked a couple of my riding buddies about it and they said they used it too. One guy even started raving about it, saying he learned it from a motor cop a few years back and that it changed his riding style.

Well, hmmm…

So I’ve been trying it. And you know what? It works. Really well, actually. And now that I’m using the rear brake, I think I prefer it. The rear helps settle the bike into the turn more, rather than trying to twist the handlebars out of your hands and the wheel out of the turn like the front does. It actually feels safer to me, something I argued adamantly against just a few weeks ago.

So has my 25 years of experience been just the same year over and over again? I don’t think so, but you’d think this little trick should have crept into my consciousness at some point before now. Maybe I’ve been repeating the same two years 12.5 times…

Me and two of my club brothers made a run down to San Diego today to do a poker run one of our MC’s chapters was throwing. We’ve made the run down to San Diego together quite a few times before but I don’t think I’ve ever done it faster. It’s 140 miles each way and we hauled ass today — we left Burbank at 7:30 and got to San Diego at 9:30. That’s two hours from start to finish, with a gas stop and cigarette break along the way. We were balls to the wall, boy, lemme tell ya. I don’t know how we didn’t get a speeding ticket.

Traffic was pretty light for the ride down. We left Burbank early enough that we beat a lot of the weekend traffic, so we didn’t have to deal with much lanesplitting. Instead, we just pegged the throttle and slalomed around what little traffic there was and we beat feet. We held it around 90-95 mph for most of the way, but I clocked 105 for a quick minute near Camp Pendleton when I was trying to chase down E.E., who got a wild hair and kicked his up to 120 for a little bit.

E.E. and I left C.T. in San Diego and rode back together in the afternoon, and traffic had gotten heavier by then. It was still light, but there were enough cars clogging the road that we couldn’t ride in our standard side-by-side formation and keep a good speed, so we played follow-the-leader as we split lanes and leapfrogged each other for the lead. We had agreed to keep the speed down before we left because we knew the cops would be out in force for the holiday weekend, but that plan was history five minutes after we hit the freeway because we were running 90-95 again most of the way home. My favorite part of the run was when we were parallel lanesplitting at 95 miles an hour on opposite sides of the same lane, so we were bracketing cars as we blew by them. I think maybe we scared the crap out of a few suburban families out for a Sunday drive that way. It was a blast.

By the time I got home I had ridden about 330 miles on the day, most of it at speeds and in conditions my wife would not want to know about. But hey, what she doesn’t know (and hopefully won’t read) won’t hurt her.

I just can’t seem to ride slow, especially when I’m riding with my brothers. It’s too much fun to go fast.

I happened to glance at my rear tire today and realized I was down to nothing on it. Some tread was left on the chicken strips but the middle of the tire was a slick. Since the forecast calls for possible rain and I’m riding down to San Diego tomorrow to do a poker run with one of my MC’s chapters down there, I figured I’d better get some new meat back there.

I was a little pissed off that this tire had worn down so quickly. It seems like I put it on just a few months ago and that it should have lasted longer. But then I checked my maintenance records and got a surprise: I put this tire on back in September and I’ve put a little over 9,000 miles on it since then. Time and miles fly when you’re having fun, I guess. So I’ve changed my attitude toward this tire: I give the Kenda Kruz two thumbs up. It was cheap, it handled great, and I got a lot of riding out of it. That works for me.

The tire I had on before this one sucked. It was a Pirelli and it was a piece of shit. I hated it from the minute I mounted it — it wanted to track in the rain grooves on the freeway and felt really squirrely in the turns — but I rode it anyway because I’m a cheap bastard. So I rode the snot out of it just to wear it out faster so I could replace it sooner, and it definitely cooperated. I forget the exact numbers on that one, but I’m pretty sure I only got about 6,000 miles out of it, and at least 3,000 of that was interstate highway during my trip to Colorado last summer. So it was a shitty tire, it wasn’t cheap, and it didn’t last long. Buh-bye Pirelli.

Before that I was running a Metzeler Marathon, which I like quite a bit. They’re a soft, sticky tire, so they handle really well, but they don’t last long because they’re a soft, sticky tire. Plus, they’re pretty pricey. Expensive tires + require frequent replacement = Chuck doesn’t buy them anymore.

But Kenda… Kenda is the right formula. Cheap + long life + good handling = Chuck just bought a new one. That’s two in a row from Kenda. I guess I like them.

“Gross” is grabbing your helmet and putting your thumb firmly into a glob of some kind of glue or resin that’s really sticky, licking your thumb so you can wipe the glue off on your jeans, and then looking at the helmet and realizing that the glue is actually the juicy remains of a large insect that literally exploded all across the front of the helmet and all that’s left are the innards that have been drying in the sun long enough to thicken and congeal. Innards that were on your thumb, until you licked them off.

Can you say “gag reflex”?