The Ride Report

I had my final check-up on my ankle today and the doc has cleared me for … well, everything. I dumped the cane about a month ago and for about the last two weeks I’ve only been wearing my “cam walker boot” to work (mostly to avoid getting side-eye from folks when I park in a handicapped spot), while on weekends I’ve been hobbling around in motorcycle boots and riding my bike. I told the doc that and he said to keep doing what I’m doing and to call for an appointment if I feel like I need to see him again — which I don’t. He took a cursory look at my ankle, didn’t have the slightest interest in looking at my xrays, and seemed puzzled as to why I was there when I was obviously doing so well. Frankly, I felt a little puzzled too.

So I’m going to consider this the last waypoint on my road back to recovery from my crash. It’s been just under four months and I’m feeling pretty good. The shoulder-blade feels just fine (and never really did give me much of a problem); the ribs still feel a little creaky right around where they put in the chest tubes, but it’s more an ache than a pain; the mangina has healed up nicely; and my friends and family are enjoying the kinder, gentler Chuck since the surgeons apparently took out my mean along with my spleen. The ankle has been the last vestige of injury, and while it’s still achy and I limp when I walk on it, I can walk on it. And of course, I can ride. So clearly I must be recovered.

I’m still planning to write up the gory details of the hospital experience one of these days, but from this point on I’m considering the accident and my recovery to be old business and I’m putting it behind me.

Of course, I do still have another month left on my handicap parking placard. No sense in letting that go to waste…

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.

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.

I’ve been pretty busy with a career change and assorted generalized fucking off, so I haven’t posted an entry in awhile. Oops. I’ve been riding back and forth to Fontana (about 60 miles each way) during the week for truck driving school and riding for fun on the weekends. Two of the longer rides I’ve done lately are:

First off, I’ve been kicking around an idea for a poker run for my club, so I decided to pre-run the route to make sure it’s a good one. It’s about 100 miles from the start point at Glendale Harley to where it ends at a VFW in Canyon Country, and it has stops at three popular local biker destinations along the way: the Hidden Springs Cafe on Angeles Forest Highway, the Rock Inn in Lake Hughes, and the Big Oaks Lodge in Bouquet Canyon. I got together with a few of the prospects from my club last weekend and we gave it a shot.

It was a fugly day at the start: overcast and threatening rain, and the clouds were so low that we were riding through them as we climbed Angeles Forest Highway. We stopped about a mile into it to don raingear, and as we continued visibility got so bad that you could hardly see 20 yards in front of you. It got so bad that I started considering canceling the ride for safety, but then we broke through into the sun and it was clear and beautiful for the rest of the day.

The final assessment: this will make a great route for a poker run — if the weather is clear. Here’s the route:

View Larger Map

…and then yesterday I did one of my favorite local rides: take the 5 North to the 14 North, exit Sand Canyon and turn left, over the hill to Sierra Highway and turn right, turn left on Vasquez Canyon, then right on Bouquet Canyon (my favorite local road). Up Bouquet to Spunky Canyon to Lake Elizabeth, stop for lunch at the Rock Inn, then down Lake Hughes Road to get to the 5 to head for home. Check out the good non-freeway parts:

View Larger Map

In maintenance news, my right footboard is starting to get ground down to nothing in the turns, so I recently bolted some steel brackets to the bottom so I’d grind down a 25-cent bracket instead of the $50 footboard. It worked — sort of. I was definitely grinding the brackets — until I ground them completely off. It’s a good solution, but it looks like I’m going to have to use thicker steel next time.

What’s really cool is that the guy riding behind me said I was throwing up showers of sparks as I scraped through the turns. Ya gotta love that…

As promised, I’ve recorded some more video, this time with a better camera and at higher resolution. I fabbed a camera mount out of PVC pipe and a galvanized steel corner brace and used this to mount my miniDV camcorder on the bike. The mount came out really well; I even managed to set it up so I can look down along the fork through my fairing and see the camera’s LCD screen to confirm that it’s on and recording (or that I forgot to turn it on in the first place). I’ll post pix of the mount later.

I took it out for a trial run last Thursday. I met up with a couple guys from my club and we rode that favorite route I keep talking about — Bouquet Canyon. It was a beautiful day for riding and I recorded the whole run and posted it to YouTube. It’s posted below, split into five parts due to YouTube’s 10 minute video length.

I also included music in the video. In parts one and two I tried to approximate the music I was actually listening to as I rode, but then I felt guilty about copyright infringement, so in the last parts I used music from the Podsafe Music Network (which features music shared by the artists via a Creative Commons license). I leaned pretty heavily on a band I really like called Point22.

Enjoy:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

I made my first foray into Youtube-land today with the below video. It’s only about about two minutes long. I leave my back driveway and ride a few blocks up the road, then for some reason I thought I should stop the recording before the filesize got too large, so I leave you hanging with me sitting in the left turn lane. Don’t worry, the story had a happy ending: I completed the turn successfully.

I don’t think it’s too bad for a first effort. Next time around I’ll record at a higher resolution — and for longer, but this’ll do for a start.

High art, it isn’t.

I spent some time in the garage today, wrenching away on my bike. My wife gave me a WarmGear heated vest for Christmas and I needed to run power from the bike’s accessory plug for it, so of course I had to make the wiring job more complicated than it needed to be.

The vest came with coax connectors and a battery wiring harness, but that wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted to use the accessory harness I installed a few months ago when I got my Zumo GPS device. I had “improved” it by cutting off one of the plugs and soldering on a quick-disconnect plug so I could easily take the GPS rig off the bike when necessary, and I wanted to do the same thing for the vest. Let’s ignore the fact that the plug I had replaced was already a quick-disconnect plug — it just wasn’t the type I wanted to use on the GPS rig. And let’s also ignore the fact that since I installed it, I have never taken the GPS mount off the bike and I probably never will. The point here is that the accessory wiring harness had different connectors than the vest had, just like the Zumo. Clearly, I had to do more cutting and soldering.

Fortunately, I’m lazy. As I got out the soldering iron and tin and connectors and all the other crap that goes with it, I remembered how much work (and cursing) it was wiring up the harness for the Zumo and I said Screw it, I’m using the harness that came with the vest. That right there saved me at least a day and a half and five trips to RadioShack. I just popped the seat off, connected the harness, and rigged the plug under one of the side covers where it’s easily accessible when needed. In, out, done in about 15 minutes. Nice.

With all the time I saved, I decided to knock out a few more things I’ve been putting off:

• I repositioned the Zumo on my handlebars so I can put gas in without fear of dousing it and changed the angle to eliminate the noontime glare I’ve been getting off the screen.
• I pumped up the rear shocks so my fat ass would stop bottoming them out on potholes.
• I reinstalled my left muffler again to take care of a pain-in-the-ass exhaust leak that I still haven’t been able to completely eliminate.
• And perhaps most importantly, I adjusted my Kruzer Kaddy bracket so my coffee cup sits level when I’m riding. It was tilted a bit, leading to sloshing and unfortunate waste of delicious drops of my beloved Sulawesi.

I told my buddy Dave about all these mods — heated vest, mp3-playing GPS, drink-holder, adjustable shocks… He laughed at me. He said I ought to just trade the bike in on a GoldWing. He called me yuppie scum. He said I’m not a real biker.

I have to admit, that GoldWing comment hurt.

I took my daughter out for a ride with my club this weekend. One of the guys has a connection with the organizers of A Day in the Dirt and could get us in for free (which is exactly how much I think everything should cost), so he was speaking my language. We met up at Bob’s Big Boy in Toluca Lake and then rode the twisties through Angeles National Forest to get to the racetrack in Palmdale.

My club as a group tends to ride pretty fast, especially in the twisties. One guy said once, on one of his first rides with us over this same route, “Jesus Christ, are we riding or racing?” We were just riding, but he’s from Texas where I guess you mostly go straight, so I suppose his confusion was understandable. Another guy earned the road name Slider when he, uh, slid on a ride through the twisties with us. He couldn’t hold his line through a tight right-hander and slid off the road and across a driveway until he finally hit a mailbox that stopped him. Amazingly enough, he walked away unscathed and his bike’s $3,000 paint job didn’t get a scratch — he just bent back his crashbar.

Anyway, my point is that we go fast. But I had my little girl with me, so I took it easy. I told the guys I’d ride sweep because I didn’t want anyone in my mirrors breathing down my neck, and I rode “safe and sane” for a change. I kept up pretty well at first, but the group slowly started pulling away as they hammered through turns that I eased into after them, and after awhile they were far ahead of us. At one point we were able to look across the canyon and see them flying along on the other side. I took it so easy that a friend who was following us in a car caught up to me.

We finally caught up to the group when they stopped to wait for us, and I asked my daughter how she was doing. I thought she might be a little nervous with the speed or the windy conditions that were making the ride a little squirrely. I wanted to make sure she was having a good time.

She was not having a good time: I was going too slow. She didn’t like that everyone had to wait for us. She especially didn’t like the part when we looked across the canyon and saw the rest of the group far ahead of us. She was very emphatic about what we needed to do:

“Go faster, Dad.”

So for the rest of the day, I did.

It’s pretty sad when your own daughter calls you out in front of your friends. I’m just sayin’…

Being the cheap bastard that I am, I’m loathe the pay the dealer to do any work that I can do myself. I install my own exhausts, I change out my own handlebars, I wired my GPS into my accessory circuit — I like to do it myself. Regular maintenance items are obviously included in that — but that’s where I get in trouble. Changing the oil is my Kryptonite.

I changed my oil yesterday in preparation for a trip to Northern California tomorrow, and as usual it’s taken me multiple passes to get it right. This time around I overfilled it and now I’ve got oil puking out of the air intake, so I spent some time this evening draining some oil out, and then adding some more back in because I drained too much out. I just can’t get it right: too much in, then too much out, and now it’s back to where I think it should be … and I could swear I’ve re-added exactly as much as I drained. But hey, the dipstick’s happy now. I hope. Cross your fingers. But I got off easy this time. The last time I changed my oil I had to do it twice, twice. Yes, that’s two twices. Let me ’splain…

I was changing my oil, see? First I pulled the drain plug and drained it all out. Then I went to remove the filter. But it was stuck. Like, welded-on stuck. The dealer had changed the oil last when I had my cam chain tensioners replaced, and they had obviously put the filter on with an impact wrench and Loc-tite. I ultimately went through not one, not two, and not three, but four different filter wrenches and I still could not get it off. I was leaving for a trip to Hollister the next morning and didn’t have time to deal with it, so I gave up on changing the filter, filled her up with the new oil, and resolved to get it right when I got back.

On returning from Hollister I tried to change the oil again. I drained the old oil, filled up with new oil, then went to work on removing the oil filter. I started the job with the determination that I was getting it off this time no matter what. Well, I’m here to tell you that determination will only take you so far. None of my four oil filter wrenches would budge it. None of my extensive collection of curse words would budge it. That filter was not coming off. Or so it thought. I was determined, remember?

Enter daddy’s little helper: a screwdriver. I stabbed the shit out of that filter, skewering it and then using the screwdriver as a handle, cranking it off an inch at a time. It was a scene straight out of Psycho, if Janet Leigh had been an oil filter and the knife had been a screwdriver and the blood had been oil and the shower had been a Road Glide and I had been Norman Bates. Aside from those minor differences, it was exactly the same. And at the end of the movie I got the filter off and put it in the trash instead of in the trunk of a Ford Falcon.

And that’s the story of how I ended up changing my oil twice twice. It only took me 1.5 tries this time, so I’m getting better at it.

For the first post of a motorcycle blog, where better to start than to tell how I got started riding?

My first time on a bike was when I was 13 years old in Berthoud, Colorado. A friend from school was riding his motorcycle — a little Kawasaki 90, if I recall correctly — in a field on the outskirts of town and he let me take a turn. I don’t remember much about it, just a scary sense of nearly out-of-control speed as I clung to the handlebars for dear life and the bike tried to race away without me. Really scary … but really fun.

Fast-forward to age 18 and I’m living in a suburb of Los Angeles (Reseda, for any Angelenos reading this) and my room mate is selling his Suzuki GS450L and suddenly I own my first motorcycle and I’m on my way.

From such humble beginnings I went on to…

• A Honda Hawk 400 that I have almost no memory of.
• A Honda CB750F — this was one of my favorite bikes. I named it “Spend-a-Buck” after the Kentucky Derby winner of the same year because the damned thing was always breaking down and always in the shop, but when it ran it was a beautiful thing. One of my favorite memories on that bike was making a beer and cocaine fueled speed run through Topanga Canyon to the beach at about 5 a.m. one morning, scraping my pegs the whole way. I never rode it better than I did that night — and believe me, I know how lucky I was to have survived it, given my condition.
• A Kawasaki 750 that I eventually crashed on the way home from work one day. Fortunately, I had my helmet with me that day. Unfortunately, I wasn’t wearing it. I was getting on the 101 freeway at Western and I have a vague memory of coming down the on-ramp to the bumper-to-bumper traffic and seeing a Chuck-sized gap in the second lane over and sort of dipping toward a small gap in the first lane to get to it … and then I woke up in the hospital the next day with 15 stitches in my head, road rash all over my back, and a major concussion. Fun.

That pretty much suspended my motorcycling career for awhile. I ended up selling the Kawasaki to my younger brother, who also crashed it and broke his nose and arm. I guess the bike must have been cursed or something.

I went on to become a full-time cager, just driving cars to work and play and thinking “I used to be one of you guys” when motorcycles went by. I went through a few cars, went through a few years, got married and had a little girl, went through a few jobs… And then I landed a pretty well-paying job about 65 miles from my house, down in Aliso Viejo.

If you know Los Angeles, then you know that commuting from Van Nuys to Aliso Viejo is insane. 65 miles through the worst traffic L.A. and Orange County have to offer. Easily a 2-hour trip during the heart of rush hour. You’d have to be stupid to drive that in a car every day. Well, I’m not stupid, I drove it in a Toyota Land Cruiser with manual transmission that only got about 10 miles to the gallon. No fool, me.

A commute like that will get you to thinking about motorcycles again, and within a year I was back in the saddle again with a Honda Shadow ACE 1100. 35 miles to the gallon and about an hour and fifteen minutes to the commute. Nice. But statistics are a bitch. There’s a current trend with riders my age (early 40’s): they rode when they were younger, took a few years off, then they get back in the saddle right about the same time I did. And this particular age group of riders are statistically very likely to crash. And that’s what I did.

On my way home from work one day, heading north on the 5 freeway, I was getting off at El Toro Road to go to a motorcycle shop to buy some new goggles. I was looking over my shoulder to see if the store was still open instead of watching where I was going, and when I looked eyes-front again the off-ramp was turning to the right a lot more sharply than I was. Looking back on it with the experience and skills I have now, it would have been easy to counter-steer to make the turn, but I didn’t have that then. Instead, what I did was target-fixate and drive straight off the pavement and crash the bike. End result: four broken ribs … and I learned to counter-steer.

Another two years down the road I moved up to a Yamaha Road Star, the biggest bike I’d ever ridden at 1600 cc. I put quite a few miles on that bike and really loved it, but everybody thought the damned thing was a Harley, and I kept feeling like I was making excuses when I said that it wasn’t. Because truth be told, I really wanted a Harley. I liked the Road Star, but I wanted the Hog.

So last year I finally bit the bullet and bought a Harley. I had always lusted after the Road King Classic in Vivid Black, so of course I bought a brand new 2006 Road Glide. Go figure. But I loved it; the Road Glide is Harley’s best-kept secret.

With apologies to anyone who doesn’t share my love of H-D, in my mind Harley is the top of the motorcycle food chain. Most Japanese cruisers today (like my Honda Shadow and Yamaha Road Star) are copying Harley’s styling. They’re wanna-be Harleys for guys who don’t have a Harley wallet, and I was settling for an imitation because I didn’t want to pay the price for the real thing. I still like the metrics today and I respect those who ride them — but I ride a Harley now.

I’m on my second Road Glide now, a 2003 with a 95″ motor and 6-speed transmission. (What happened to the first one is a long story involving a bad transmission, multiple failed warranty repairs, and an unheard of dealer buy-back.) I’ve had it for almost a year now and I’ve put just over 10,000 miles on it so far. I love this bike, it’s the best one I’ve ever owned. I’m going to ride this thing until the wheels fall off. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not a Harley snob by any means — hell, I’m lusting after a BMW R1150GS as a second bike right now — but I love this bike.

I’m going to be writing a lot about my experiences on it here. I hope you enjoy them.

Stay tuned…