Category: Words

Just a quick note: I’m still here. I’ve just been too busy riding and visiting old friends and making new ones to write much of late. But I have several posts rattling around in my head, so there will be more coming in the near future.

So. I’m in Europe now. I guess this thing is really happening.

I left Toronto in the wee hours of Thursday morning, several hours later than anticipated. This is due to the fact that some unnamed vehicle ran into the wing of our designated plane. Of course we weren’t informed of this until all the passengers were on board and settled in for departure. After unloading and waiting for all the checked bags (and motorcycles!) to be moved to the new plane, which was luckily present and available, we finally departed. Then, there was much sleep to be had. I woke on the approach to Frankfurt, had an unsatisfying airline breakfast, and then it was time to land.

Whereupon I discovered that my I’d arrived in Germany on a national day. This meant I was unable to get insurance, and therefore my motorcycle stayed in storage for a day. Luckily, my friends Paul and Silke were happy to put me up for the night, so I headed to their home. They were making the most of the day off by hosting a garden party – there were about 15 people present when I arrived, evenly split between adults and young kids. It was a great way to relieve the stress of the flight change and disappointment of not being able to extract my bike.

Paul had taken the next day off, and generously offered to offer taxi and translation services to assist me with the tasks of insurance, customs and import clearance. His help was very much needed and most appreciated!

After regaining custody, I headed off to visit Sanmi, another dear friend whom I hadn’t seen in far too long. She lives on a shared communal-style property in the woods about an hour’s ride away, through rolling pastoral hills and forests with lovely narrow winding roads. The place is so wonderful and peaceful that even though she had weekend plans away from home, I ended up staying another day, just to soak up the calm.

This morning, after breakfast and conversation with Sanmi’s sister Florence (who also lives on the property), I headed off with one goal in mind: Drink Belgian beer, in Belgium, destination Liege. Having arranged a place to stay for a couple nights through couchsurfing.org, I plotted a course and set off. I have to say, my first border crossing in the EU was rather anticlimactic: I saw a sign stating ‘Belgie 1000m’. And then I noticed that the road signs had changed. Ah, the benefits of EU integration!

Speaking of signs, it has taken me a few days of riding to start to make sense of them. For one thing, plotting a route on backroads is much easier – at least in Germany – by paying attention to the towns you want to go through rather than the road numbers. Not all signs are numbered, nor are all roads – at least not in a fashion obvious to me after multiple hours of investigation. And in Belgium I was initially confused by the snowflake-looking signs, until I realized they indicated upcoming roundabouts – which are both awesome and quite prevalent in both DE and BE.

I’m expecting my host to arrive home soon – she met me in town with a key to her place on her way to work! – and so more when it comes to me.

Tonight I make the Big Leap, after six weeks crossing the United States and two days in Canada. Tomorrow I’ll wake up on the approach to Frankfurt, and the start of Phase Two.

I’ve spent the last week working my way up the East Coast, with lots of visits along the way (seeing friends along my route has been a big theme of the trip so far, and will hopefully continue while I’m in Europe).

I left my parents’ house last Monday and spent the afternoon and evening visiting friends in Chapel Hill / Carrboro. The next day I rode from Chapel Hill north through the Piedmont to Danville, then west towards the Appalachians. I rode into a brief but torrential rain squall as I approached a little town, where I saw a road sign proclaiming ‘STUART EXIT LEFT 1 MILE’. With directions like that, how could I refuse? So I stopped in Stuart (named after JEB Stuart, famed Confederate Army General during the Civil War) to dry off and caffeinate, then proceeded west along VA-8, a beautiful twisty-windy climb up into and through the mountains to Radford, VA, where I spent the night in the home of old friends from Seattle who I hadn’t seen in close to ten years.

The next day took me back across the mountains to the east – including a brief, lovely stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway – and into Maryland for the night. From there, a long heavy traffic push to NYC with an unfortunate detour into Philadelphia – and an additional hour or two of traffic – as a result of one missed turn.

I spent three nights in NYC, catching up with my friends there. I went to the theater (twice), ate wonderful food, geeked out on motorcycles and photography, and reconnected with folks I hadn’t seen in too long. All in all, a wonderful way to spend my last weekend in the US for a long time.

After a late start out of NYC on Sunday, I rode across northern NJ (where I saw a black bear along the side of the road!) and PA (through lots of the beautiful Susquehanna River valley), then north to Horseheads, NY for the night. Shortly after I settled in, I was lucky to witness one of the most impressive displays of lightning I’ve seen in years as a severe thunderstorm rolled through the region for an hour or so. The next morning I headed north along the west shore of Seneca Lake, one of the larger Finger Lakes, and then onto the highway for Toronto, where I dropped off my motorcycle at the airport for shipping. After being inseparable from my bike for the last six weeks, it feels very strange to be without it, despite it being for only a few days.

Once shipping was arranged, I cabbed into Toronto to catch up with another old friend I know through the Burning Man community, who I haven’t managed to see for three years despite several efforts along the way on both our parts. She’s taken me on a mostly food-focused walking tour of the extended area around where she lives, which has been delightful.

And so I find myself on the cusp of Phase Two. As I was riding towards Canada on Monday I felt for the first time a sense of nervousness, a trepidation about this grand crazy adventure I’ve laid out, as if somehow the first border crossing – or perhaps the act of delivering my bike for shipping – somehow made my plans more vital than they had been to that point. It didn’t last long, thankfully, but there was certainly a momentary glimpse. I don’t have time or need for trepidation at this point – I’m sure the time will come when it becomes an appropriate response, but today is not that day.

Air can hurt you too /
Some people say not to worry ’bout the air /
Some people never had experience with air

– Talking Heads, “Air”, Fear of Music, 1979

I have lots of time to think about things while I ride. Of course. I have nobody to talk to other than myself, and I can only sing to myself so much. I find that I spend a lot of time thinking about air, specifically the ways it interacts with me on my motorcycle.

I first remember thinking about this in 2005, during my first extended motorcycle trip. I was riding south on Hwy 97 in Eastern Oregon and, after being buffeted about by yet another semi, I started thinking about turbulence – specifically that of large blocky vehicles such as semis, RVs and trucks with big trailers. I want to see video of a semi riding through a cloud – of fog, smoke, whatever. This would a) be very cool to see and b) help me understand exactly what’s going on.

Interacting with the air off of large vehicles can be wild. It feels to me that there’s a wall of laminar flow – like the clean wave off the bow of a boat – immediately off the cab of a big rig, which gets turbulent pretty quickly as it passes down the side of the vehicle. Behind one of these large vehicles, the air is even more turbulent as the two streams of already-turbulent air collide.

Of course, this makes for interesting riding no matter how you’re experiencing it. Hitting it head-on (when passing a truck in the opposite direction, for example) tends to push the bike away as you go through the laminar, then buffets as you travel through the turbulence. Passing when in the same direction of travel is the reverse – there’s an odd shift toward the centerline as you pass through that laminar wave. And then there’s riding behind, which is a lot like hell.

As I crossed the Southwest and the prairie, I got a lot of experience with air of a different sort: wind. There’s that old traveler’s prayer:

May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face …

So far, not so much wind at my back. In my face, broadside, 45° to my front or back? Plenty of those.

Other than riding directly into a strong wind, it turns out that it’s not so tough to handle. I learned a long time ago to just lean into it (crossing the 520 bridge on days of high wind on the lake), but that wasn’t working so well for extended distances. Finally, after several days in a row of strong winds, what I finally came to realize is that only the bike needs to lean, not me. As the wind ebbs and flows, shifts directions, whatever, I can just relax into it and allow my motorcycle to move underneath me, as I remain essentially upright. The alternative – being uptight, I guess – results in me fighting the wind. Which is pointless. If you fight the wind, it will eventually win.

And that doesn’t sound like an appealing option to me.

One of the things I’m learning in this trip is that flexibility in plans is key to happiness. To wit: I intended to make it to Lancaster PA or thereabouts tonight, which would have left me with about 150 miles into New York City, my destination for tomorrow. However, two things happened to thwart this plan.

First, I woke up in the happy home of my old friends Rick & Renee, and it was just darn hard to leave. I ended up leaving Radford VA about 1.5 hours after I intended.

Second, and more dramatically (this is where the reflex part comes in) I nearly got splattered against the side of a 14′ truck. I was cruising north on Hwy 29 towards Charlottesville on a divided highway, two lanes each direction. At an intersection, I noticed a car that looked like they were about to enter from the right, so I started to move into the left lane. As I did so, I noticed this big truck entering from the opposite side. I figured they were pulling into the median turn area, which prompted me to correct and stay in the right lane.

No. The driver of the truck barreled across all four lanes, cutting directly in front of me, running at about 65mph. Through the glorious combination of quick reflexes and the ABS on my motorcycle, I avoided clipping the rear bumper of the truck by no more than 3′ – maybe closer to 1′. After I finished cursing the bastard I realized I needed to cool my jets and let the adrenaline seep out of me, so I ended up with an unexpected long pitstop at a Starbucks in Charlottesville.

These two factors contributed to me being several hours behind expected schedule. I rolled into Frederick as dark was falling – about when I expected to hit Lancaster. Ah, well. Tomorrow, I’ll get up early and get a move on to make up the time. And hey, if I don’t make it into NYC until Friday, so be it.

Yesterday I was delighted to have the opportunity to spend an hour with my friend Daniel, talking about our lives, my travel plans, and more. At one point, I made the comment that life is a terminal condition. Daniel replied with the following quote:

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

– James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

I like this. I think I need to find this book, based on this quote alone.

My time in Raleigh has come to an end. It has been great to spend time with my family and friends, but now that my ass has recovered from the cross-country trek*, I need to get moving again.

Today I’ll travel only a short distance – back to Chapel Hill for a little more visiting with friends – then northward come Tuesday, where I will see some old Seattle friends living near Roanoke VA. Thence to NYC from Thursday evening through Saturday, then on to Toronto and a big airplane. Woo!

* On that note: I’ll probably be getting myself a new seat once I get to Germany. :)

After riding motorcycles with some regularity for eight years or so, I feel that I have become a reasonably competent rider – a good balance of cautious and thrill-seeking, with tendencies to avoid super high speeds and freeways. Despite this – and due to lack of experience riding off-road – I decided that some training was in order before getting too deeply into my travels. The experiences I had at RawHyde Adventures’ Intro To Adventure and Journey to Base Camp Alpha from 30-Apr to 03-May showed me just how little I knew about handling a bike, particularly in off-road conditions. In the intervening week I’ve already had several opportunities to put these new skills to use, and have felt far more comfortable and competent than I otherwise would have.

Jim Hyde, the charismatic owner of RawHyde, started the company in 2002 with a Los Angeles to Las Vegas tour, off-road through the Mojave desert. Over the next few years, tours led to a training program designed to instill the skills necessary for off-road novices to participate in such rides. A few years later, BMW Motorrad North America asked Jim to join the limited ranks of official BMW off-road training facilities – there are currently only nine such facilities in the world.

The Intro to Adventure class has a comprehensive, well-designed curriculum, with each new skill building on prior skills learned over the course of the weekend – and each skill is presented verbally then demonstrated by an instructor, after which students have the opportunity to perform the exercise on their own. Over the course of two days of hard work, participants learn how to:

• Stand in a comfortable balanced position on the footpegs while riding off-road
• Control clutch, throttle and both brakes with finesse for given situations
• Use weight and balance to steer the bike including counterbalancing through sharp turns
• Avoid obstacles (key: look where you want to go, not at the thing you want to avoid – if you are looking at it, you’ll hit it)
• Properly use front and rear brakes for skids, trail stops and panic stops
• Climb and descend steep hills, and learn to handle stalling or getting stuck on hills
• Ride on loose slippery surfaces such as sand and gravel
• Ride through quick up-and-down terrain – gullies, rutted roads and the like

I went into the weekend with a fair amount of trepidation – my only previous off-road experience was accidental, when while on my first solo ride through WA and OR, I looked at a map and thought “Hey, that looks like a good way to get to my destination.” Briefly, it wasn’t – particularly on a K75S and without any prior off-road motorcycling experience. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only nervous one, though my nerves were quickly allayed when we got started on Saturday morning, as I found myself in the hands of competent coaches with a solid teaching plan.

In fact, there were a number of times over the two days that I looked at one of the exercises – such as peering down a single-track on a steep hill, preparing for a controlled descent – and thought that there was no way I’d be able to be successful. Not five minutes later, I was going around for my third or fourth try, tweaking it a little bit each time to feel how the bike responded to different inputs. It was fantastic!

I dropped my bike several times of the course of two days, but I expected as much – and I looked at those drops as opportunities to practice picking my bike up, as I’m sure I’ll have more chances to do so on the road.

Journey to Base Camp Alpha, which started Monday morning after the course completion the night before, provides an opportunity to immediately apply all the freshly-acquired skills in the real world. It’s a two-day ride through the scenic Mojave desert, half of the time on paved roads, the rest unpaved – hard pack, washboard filled with gravel and sand, rutted rocky hill climbs, you name it. BCA lets riders build confidence through repetition and experience in the real world, with real conditions. For example: it’s one thing to ride through a level sand pit, gravel parking lot or flat packed slalom course, but BCA puts you on roads with rocks and loose gravel in the turns as you climb and descend hills, deeply washboarded whoop-de-dos filled with sand and along a narrow, twisting hogback ridgeline.

For the Intro to Adventure, I removed all the luggage from my bike – other than crash bars and other protective hard parts, I was riding the bike pretty much as it was when I bought it. For BCA, I put everything back on. I wanted to feel what it will be like when I’m off on my own, with no safety net of other riders to help me when needed. Turns out, I needed it! I dropped my bike 3-4 times each day, from getting stuck in a wet sand crossing to descending winding gravel. Riding with the full load in the real world as opposed to the controlled conditions of the RawHyde training facility proved far more challenging. Despite the occasional frustration, I’m very glad I loaded the bike back up.

There were a lot of highlights to the BCA trip: the deepening camaraderie between the riders, the satisfaction felt when riding through squirrelly patches of sand or gravel when I felt sure I was going down. More than these, though, was when it all started to click – when I successfully and repeatedly picked a weaving route up hills and through turns. At one point as I was climbing a hill, I recognized the similarity to mountain biking on a single-track or fire road. After that, I started being able to map those old muscle memories to this new set of equipment.

BCA was a great way to cap the weekend, and to apply and solidify the skills learned over the previous two days. Prior to my arrival, I considered not doing the BCA ride, but am so happy that I decided to do it in the end.

RawHyde is a family business in more ways than one. It’s run by Jim with his wife Stephanie, with across-the-board assistance from Stephanie’s mom Susie. However, the sense of family goes beyond that: the coaches that make up Team RawHyde are definitely part of the greater family, and even the customers are made to feel entirely at home. The at-home feel is enhanced by the shared meals (everyone from students to coaches to Jim and family eating together), everyone sharing their own day’s high and low after dinner, and the bunkhouse housing.

After the four days I spent with Jim and his coaches (and family) I feel much more confident in my ability to handle my motorcycle in both on- and off-road situations. I know, this sounds like an advertisement – and in a way it is. If you ride a GS or other off-road motorcycle and want to build your skills, you really should consider taking a course with RawHyde Adventures. For those of you in Seattle, Jim Hyde will be doing presentations at Ride West BMW (June 7th) and South Sound BMW (~June 10?) on his program and what he calls “the GS lifestyle”, and is following it up with a three day Pacific Northwest Adventure Rally in Leavenworth, June 24th-26th, including an on-site Intro to Adventure offering. I strongly encourage checking out these events if you’re interested in learning how to ride off-road or build on existing skills.

I’m in Raleigh, NC now. I arrived last night, to a wet and sloppy welcome – hard rain for the last 25 miles or so. If it weren’t for operator error, I would’ve been dry head to toe except for hands (I need waterproof gloves). However, I failed to zip my jacket liner and pants together, so ended up with a nice wet ass by the time I arrived at my parents’ house.

I’ll be in NC for a week or ten days, visiting with family and friends and taking care of a few things I hope to tweak on the bike. I probably won’t be firing up the beacon unless I’m doing day trips outside Raleigh, so don’t expect too much activity there until sometime next week.

I’ll be spending a little time editing and posting a few photographs from the trip thus far. I haven’t shot much, though. I need to figure out a way to make the camera a little more easily accessible; right now getting to it involved getting off the bike, opening up a hard case and pulling camera out of a bag inside. Too many steps == not many photographs.

And I have a few topics I’ve been percolating on for here, so there will likely be some fresh content scattered about while I’m on my rest.

Administrative note: I’ve decided to disable the daily Twitter Updates feature. I’m working to find the right voice for this blog, and I don’t think that a regular automated updated fits.

If you’re interested in keeping up with the random little thoughts passing through my brain that aren’t necessary blog-post-worthy, feel free to follow me on twitter.