6 posts tagged “motorcycles”

I rolled up to work this morning to find the alley next to the office blocked off and some trucks doing some sort of construction or destruction or some such crap that made it so I couldn't park in my usual spot. It's bad when stuff like this happens, as any upset to the delicate equilibrium of parking in this neighborhood causes the displaced cars to turn to liquid immediately and squeeze in to every last inch of available space. Those inches, or spaces that are usually too small to fit a car, are what makes being a motorcyclist in this town great. You can almost always find a space within a block of wherever you're going. 

Car tires: 

Last night, I played trivia with Harold, Jenny, Lisa, and Anil. After that, we went to Anil's and had us a little Wii Partii. We rolled that until around 11:30 and I headed home. At around midnight, Susie and I realized that the season finale of Amazing Race was on the DVR, and I would not allow sleeping until it was watched (I was not displeased at the outcome of the race), so we went to bed around 1:30. I didn't sleep well last night at all, but I got up on time and faced the day today.

After work, I come home and chilled for a few minutes, but then headed back out for karaoke at Annie's with Steve, Kate, and others... As I left the house, I decided I didn't want to be lugging a heavy motorcycle jacket around the bar, so I switched to my Dickies gas station attendant jacket. That was dumb. I drank just enough Jack 'n' Cokes and sang just enough songs and enjoyed just enough merriment. I left the bar at 1:30, looking forward to a nice quiet ride home. The streets of this town are so peaceful and fun to ride on late at night.

I stepped out of the bar in to pouring pissing biblical rain. It's fucking DUMPING. I stood around for a few minutes to see if it would let up, but it didn't, and the crackhead in front of the bar was annoying me, so I decided to just suck it up. My trusty packable rain pants were in the top case, so I put them on, knowing that sometime in the last year or so, the seal on the crotch has given up the ghost, so I'd be enjoying a damp willy soon enough. I knew that my jacket was going to offer little to no protection, so i stuffed the garage door opener in my jeans pocket, hoping I'd be able to reach it later. Stupidly, I ventured out of the house in Vans. Why do I ride motorcycles in skateboard shoes? Meh.

Within a few blocks I was soaked to the core. After the first mile, I felt like I'd been swimming. The rain was so hard that it somehow bullocksed up the inside of my helmet visor, rendering it useless. I'd taken off my glasses, as they're also useless in the rain, and was now riding home with my visor open and little rain drops stinging my eyeballs at 35 mph.

The roads were insane. There were quite a few of what my Moto Melee friends would refer to as "water crossings", a couple of which were at least an inch or two deep. I learned that the wheel of the V-Strom directs water directly at the toes of my shoes with an accuracy I could not match with a laser-sighted garden hose nozzle. Ever time I shifted, I could feel the water in my left shoe sloshing back and forth.

Every part of me was dripping with cold water under my clothes. I could feel the water running through my beard like it does in the shower. My wiener retreated in to my pancreas, or perhaps as far as one of my lungs.

I fought through it and made it home alive. I stripped off a lot of my clothes in the garage, and the rest in the bathroom, occupying just about every inch of drying rod space. I gasped at the cold water and rushed to put on dry clothes.

You know what, though? It was super fun. I actually love riding in the pouring rain at night, and getting my ass soaked through to the creamy center. I love that feeling of the cold water trickling down my back, or running in to my glove from my sleeve when I lower my hand. I like the tapping of the rain on my helmet. I like blinking my eyes really hard and feeling all the water run out of them and down my face, like I was just crying really hard. I don't know why, but for as horrendous an experience, I really enjoy it. Someone should make me an underwater scooter.

It's 2:30 now, and the dude's got a shit ton of test cases to write starting tomorrow. I should get some sleep. Also: little sleep + alcohol + karaoke mike used by at least 3 sick people + cold, wet ride home... Patti, give me the over/under on whether I'm gonna get sick or not. I'm gonna eat like 4 vitamin C pills before I go to bed.

I sang: Don't Stop Me Now (Queen), Punk Rock Girl (Dead Milkmen), Mayor of Simpleton (XTC), Here Comes Your Man (Pixies), and maybe one more that I can't think of.

When departing for a motorcycle ride, note that it gets rather dark and RATHER cold at like 5pm or so, and that none of those awesome twisty back highways around here have any lights on them. Further, neither Alice's nor the gas station across the street have restrooms, unless you could the sick looking port-a-potties in the dark gas station parking lot that have no lights in them. 

So, we survived the weekend. Hooray! My bike was incredible. Nary a sputter, although now the tank seems to be a little loose. I'll work on that. I learned that my seat becomes pretty uncomfortable after a few hours, and that having my bars that far forward is hard on my hands. I also learned that I can be something of a badass on the curvy roads when I push out the fear of sliding off the side of the road and down a cliff. There were many foot draggings on hard curves, and even some points where I played around with hanging off the side of the motorcycle to be able to haul through them faster without dragging something. But, there were also a few mistakes, one or two of which could have been really gnarly if the timing had been off. At one point, I almost went face to grill in to a rather large pickup on a forest service road. My back tired was about at the end of its life (5000 miles since I bought it) going in to this rally, so by the end of the first day, it was starting to break loose going in and out of some of the turns. This made me a little squirrely and not so graceful. I also noticed that at the end of the first day, I was so fatigued that I was just plain misreading a lot of the turns and either going at them way too hot and having to panic brake, or slowing up too much before them which must have irritated the shit out of the people behind me. All in all, I'd say I came out of it a better rider than I went in as. Here's a quick play by play of the weekend:

On the way to Sonora

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Friday: As I mentioned, we didn't get a hold of a trailer, so we decided to ride out to Sonora. It was 130 miles and not bad at all. We got to our hotel around 4pm and settled in. We saw a couple of other vintage bikes in the parking lot, but nobody we recognized. Around 6 or 7, we headed out to an awesome steakhouse called Gus' that Paul had been told about. It was really incredible. 70s swank throughout, with lots of dark vinyl high back booths. The food was out-fucking-standing. A super awesome bonus was that at every table they had a little cheese fondue going (ok.. it was basically Velveeta melted in a little bowl with a candle under it, but it was GOOD) and some really good fresh baked bread to dip in it. We dipped pretty much everything else we could find in there as well.

There's no fucking way...

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After dinner, we stopped by the drug store for some snacks and water, and retired to our room. Paul fell asleep at like 8:30, because he'd partied a little hard the night before. I wasn't far behind him... We had to be at the meeting spot by around the following morning.

Paul's /2, Paul, Bultaco, Honda, BSA

Saturday: We got up and headed over to the meeting spot. There were 8 other bikes and two support trucks. We ate some delicious homemade scones and checked out the oddities: Two Bultacos, a couple of wacky Ducatis, a couple of 70s Hondas, a BSA, a Triumph Tiger, Paul's /2, and my /5. Nice representation! We got our maps and our goodies and a quick briefing on day one and headed out. We had 230 miles ahead of us.

The roads were simply incredible. I love how Northern California is just loaded with highways that seem to have been built specifically for motorcycling. Lots of tight twisty turns, good (for the most part) pavement, incredible scenery, and since most people opt for the convenience of the interstate, not a lot of traffic at all. We rode over some crazy single lane (but two way traffic) highways and service roads, and we did one road called Sheep Ranch that was just busted to hell full of potholes and deterioration, but still twisty. That was my favorite part. It reminded me of being on a dirtbike, kind of. There was also a section towards the end of the day where we rode up and up and up and finally over California's highest bridge. That was spectacular, and a little scary. This was close to the end of day one, and I was excited to be close to a soft place to sit down.

We're going over that

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Over the course of the day, we went through elevations of over 7000 feet, which is an amazing feat for bikes that live at zero. My bike performed like a champ, with nary a sputter. It just goes to show the level of quality that the BMW factory has turned out all these years, when a 33 year old bike with little maintenance (and none of that done by a professional) can still eat up miles like that.

At the end of the day, we all congregated at the hotel hot tub for a while and discussed the day, while a couple of people worked on their bikes. One of the Bultacos had completely seized, but the dude actually got it running again with time to make it to dinner! That's simply incredible.

After dinner, we were going to enjoy karaoke at the restaurant, but we were all pretty beat and nobody really seemed in to it, so we retired back to the hotel and Paul and I hosted an impromptu little party in our room. We drank beers and watched TV and eventually everyone crashed.

Sunday morning

Sunday: Paul and I decided before going to sleep that we'd skip most of the Sunday ride. It was scheduled to be about 275 miles, and at the end of that, we'd still have another 130 to ride to get home. That's way more than I'm comfortable with. It'd also mean doing the last portion back to the city in the dark, on the freeway, and seriously tired. Frightening. Instead, we decided to ride with the group about 30 miles north, and when they turned east, we'd turn west. We headed to Yuba City on highway 20 and stopped in to visit my parents. We had some lunch and planned out a route back to Oakland that would keep us off I-80. We dropped down 113 to Davis, where a cop stopped us in a gas station parking lot to talk about bikes with us. He gave us his card and said if we were ever in Davis and needed anything, to give him a call. While talking to the cop, I got stung by a bee right near the fingernail on my little finger. That hurt really bad for a second, and I said "fuck" in front of the cop. Heh. After we rested up a bit, we headed back to highway 113. As we were accelerating down the ramp to get on, some fucking SHOES fell off the RV in front of us and almost took me out. My cat-like reflexes and ninja skills helped me keep it together though. I'm THAT good.

That's good to have, I guess. After Davis, we continued down 113 for a bit and then eventually got ourselves going west. There was a lot of freeway riding, which I'm not a fan of, and the last stretch in to Oakland was not only incredibly long, but also windy, bumpy, and full of traffic. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when we pulled in to Paul's driveway and ended the trip. I'm a much better freeway rider now, for sure.

Mercifully, my truck was still at Paul's house. Figuring that it'd be easiest to not leave a vehicle there, we loaded up my bike in the back of my truck and I trucked the rest of the way home, in the soft comfortable bucket seat. Ahhhhh.

As a QA person, I hate bugs

I'm dead tired today, and a little sore, but actually looking forward to the next huge ride. I guess I'm kind of a masochist that way. It was really fun hanging out with all the riders and admiring their insane skills. Most of them have some racing experience, and it didn't take long in to the first day before I realized there was no way I'd be keeping up with most of them as they ripped their little bikes through the tight twisties. It was fun to watch.

All my pictures are in this collection:

NorCal TT 2006

And there are more here.

I'm about to leave work extremely early to begin a crazy weekend adventure known as the NorCal TT. It's an all-vintage motorcycle ride from Sonora, CA to Reno/Tahoe area and back via some crazy ass twisty highway roads. It's gonna be awesome and as always, I'm crossing my fingers that my bike holds up. There's an extra 260 miles added on to the trip, because someone named Paul insisted that no reservation shall ever be needed to rent a U-Haul trailer. Now we must ride to and from Sonora instead of towing. It won't be so bad today, but riding home Sunday after already doing 250 miles will suck ass. But, no use cryin' over it now. I've got a great weekend ahead of me. See you all Monday, I hope!