A Partial Gearhead

All Rights Reserved © 2009 Thomas W. Day

Most of my friends think of me as a gearhead. It's true that I like almost all kinds of gear; motorcycles, guitars and other musical instruments, recording studio equipment, computers, manufacturing and machining tools, almost everything mechanical or electrical. It's not true that :I like all things mechanical, though. I particularly dislike gear that has passed into obsolescence and continues to waste human resources and energy; like cars. I don't like driving them, riding in them, thinking about them, and, especially, I hate owning them.

My wife ruined her knees walking on concrete, while working for one of the big box hardware stores. So, riding a motorcycle is no longer a pleasant pastime for her. For our anniversary this year we took a cage trip south along the Mississippi into Iowa. She gets carsick, so traveling by cage, plane, boat, or bus isn't all that pleasant for either of us. She usually drives and that's fine with me. Other than the knee issues and the motion sickness, she's a fine traveling companion.

I hate driving cages. There are two too many wheels and the damn things give me an unpleasant feeling of instability and cumbersome awkwardness that is mind-numbing and a little scary. For three to four months every winter, I'm stuck in my Ford Escort wagon wishing bus service was even close to practical where I live. No, having a "better car" wouldn't help. I've driven Beemers, Porsches, stockcars, dune-buggies (my favorite cage), and a collection of staid Eurotrash luxury sedans and unpronounceable Italian "sports" cages and they all leave me bored. Convertibles are almost tolerable. If I could poke out the windshield, they'd be better. If I could legally drive a dune-buggy wearing a heated suit and helmet, I'd be about as happy in a cage as I'm likely to get. However, if I have to be in a cage I'd rather be a passenger than a driver. Being a passenger in a cage is at least productive, since I can write stuff like this as I ride along isolated from the wind, weather, and all sensations of speed and motion. If I'm going to be caged, I prefer the biggest cage I can get into: buses, trains, and such.

Floating past my favorite letter roads along WI35 was particularly frustrating. My GPS is littered with routes I would be taking along the river, if I were on a vehicle that well-tolerated dirt roads and twisty two-lanes. That kind of path is a perfect formula for agitating my wife's nausea. And her getting sick doesn't do my traveling Jones much good. I can hang upside down in a moving box while reading a technical journal without a lick of stomach instability, but if someone else gets sick near me I'm following their path like a cow heading to the barn. Barfing is something else that never happens to me on a motorcycle.

I keep hearing about "man's love affair with the automobile," while talking heads try to explain why we're pouring money into the black hole of cage manufacturing. I don't get it. What's to love about a cage? To me, that's like loving a chair or a wheelbarrow. At best, a cage is another utilitarian device that has outlived its usefulness; like horse-drawn plows or buggy whips or cell phones. We only cling to the damn things in the US because we haven't been bright enough to maintain our mass transit infrastructure. We're going to pay for that within a few years.

In San Francisco or New York, I could rent or borrow a cage on the rare occasion I need one. Where I live, the bus stops running anywhere near my home at 6PM. A decade ago my route ran till midnight, but that schedule ended after the current administration took office. I don't expect to live long enough to see real mass transit in the Cities. We're way too conservative and oblivious to reality to put rail or any other alternative on the burner until the last pump drips its final drop of gas. Then, in true conservative fashion, we'll shriek "the sky is falling" and it will.

We made the Wisconsin-and-back trip safely. She didn't get sick. I didn't throw a boredom-inspired tantrum. That's as good as cage traveling gets for us.

The next day I mounted up and headed back to Wisconsin. Almost immediately, I got stuck behind a gaggle of doddering cheese-burners on WI35, but at the first county road (which happened to be gravel), I split off and got back on my pace. Within a couple of hours, I had almost forgotten the torture of being trapped and strapped behind a windshield, listening to poorly selected radio music or talking head babble. On a real vehicle of transportation (physical and mental), I was swinging through the countryside with my own music in my head, pacing my own rhythms, thinking my own thoughts, enjoying the ride and the place. I hate cages and love motorcycling.

Crusin' the Rockies

Wolfe and I are on the 3rd day of our Rocky Mountain Adventure. We've had a few glitches. Got cooked in the Black Hills yesterday, but had an amazing day and night at Rushmore and in Keystone. The picture, at left, is Wolfe being held up by the wind at the top of Morton Pass on Wyoming Highway 34. We must have fought a 50mph cross wind all the way over the pass. Kansas has nothing on Wyoming winds.

Today, we got out early (about 3 hours too early for Wolfe) and were making great time until about 1PM, when we stopped for a moment in Laramie, WY and I discovered my right fork was pulsing oil. We'd covered about 250 miles or so and I was hoping to add at least another 150 before stopping. Instead, we're in Laramie for a while.

Suzuki's dealer here, Frontier Cycles, seems to be on it. I carry a pile of tools, but nothing near what it would take to replace a fork seal. I thought about pulling the fork, flushing it with diesel, filling it with ATF, and making a run for a friend's house in Denver where there might be more tools and a shop I could use, but the guys at Frontier think they have the necessary parts and I'm taking a gamble on them. Where this goes from here is anyone's guess.

Into the Farm

Going into southern North Dakota is nothing like going into the wild. ND is wilder than, say, Kansas, but pretty tame compared to Montana, Wyoming, the Yukon, or Alaska. There are farms everywhere, trucks most places, and little towns in good shape or not all over the southeast corner of North Dakota.


Selfishly, I'm disappointed that ND appears to be doing pretty well. I had a collection of ND "ghost towns" on my route sheet that I'd collected from the web. I don't know where they found their information, but most of the towns appear to be doing ok to pretty well. My first stop, for example, was Dwight; a town that appears to have weathered the worst of its losses and is rebulding. I did, however, find that Garmin's road information (especially the dirt roads) could use a little updating. Trying to get to a couple of these towns via dirt road taught me some useful lessons about turning around in a nasty spot. A lesson I never seem to get enough of.

This mediocre photo is of the third dead end I ran into on my first day. There was a very nice jacuzzi next to the river, but I didn't feel like heating 200 gallons of water with my camp stove, so I didn't take advantage of it.

This was a spot where the 250 would have been really fun, but most of the ride has been better suited for the 650. Even the 100+ miles of dirt roads were mostly better suited to the big bike because of the strong side winds and the generally decent condition of the roads.

4 Easy Days in Nova Scotia

After the exciting ride to the Marquis of Dufferin Seaside Inn (http://www.marquisofdufferinmotel.com/) the bike was mostly parked for a day. We walked around the resort areas to work up an appetite, taking extra time to relax on the Inn’s pier. The resort has a collection of gardens and Robbye took special enjoyment out of pointing out plants that won’t grow in Minnesota. We spotted several loons in the bay and even more gulls and a variety of ducks and other water fowl.

The inn has one telephone, stuck to the outside of the restaurant office building. I’m still wrestling with the identify theft residue and I spent about an hour on that phone sorting out charges that did and did not belong to me with my bank’s fraud representative. Otherwise, if the world ended we’d never know. The room does have a small television with the usual 60 uninteresting channels, but we’ve chosen to avoid that opportunity. I called Holly and left a message that Robbye had arrived and we were alive and safe. Otherwise, this will be 4 days without contact with our usual world. I'll miss hearing from you all. Right.

After a superb breakfast at the Inn’s restaurant and a lazy morning, we took a ride to Sheet Harbor to hike and enjoy the scenery. It was an overcast but otherwise clear day and we discovered several spectacular views and local hiding places. We even stumbled on a local parade. When we got back, we hiked to a nearby waterfall, accidentally discovering some wonderful local gardening on the way.

The resort loaned us a canoe and we paddled out into the bay, experiencing some wave action and working up an appetite for dinner. We found a fairly isolated beach on the east side of the bay and waded around looking for seashells and enjoying the solitude. Even during the day, much of the time spent is spent in dead quiet, outside of natural sounds.

Dinner at the resort was the same kind of rare experience as was breakfast. Robbye had Scallops Dufferin and I had Beef Burgandy. If presentation is an important part of a dining experience, the inn’s chef is an artist. The owner, Pat,s does every job at her inn. She is, clearly, a marketing wizard, but she is a management and customer service wonder also. I don't know if I have ever felt more at home away from home. This is a terrific place and if you only came here and stayed for a whole vacation you would come away rested and satisfied.

Saturday was no more than a 10 mile biking day. I didn’t even show the motivation to cover up the bike when we crashed for the evening. I’m writing this at 7AM on Sunday, our 41st Anniversary. Robbye is gently snoring, working on 10 hours of sleep for the night. I woke up to the sound of loons calling at about 6AM. The place is so quiet that you can hear gulls across the bay. The highway wraps around the bay, so every car that passes is audible and visible. In the last hour, I’ve seen and heard two cars. Our neighbors are waking up and I can hear every word they say. They can probably hear me typing. It’s that quiet.

Again, it’s a little overcast, but the air is clear and I can see miles of the shoreline. Robbye had hoped to see a lot of Nova Scotia on the trip and I thought she might be over estimating her traveling capability. The flight and airport hassles and the 90 mile trip to the inn was about all her knees were able to tolerate. She was stiff and in pain Saturday morning. She’s tough and really wanted to experience more than a motel room, so we walked (slowly) around the resort and took a short ride to Sheet Harbor to check out the town, river and bay.

It was worth the effort. The old industrial area had reverted to most of its natural state at the nature walk around the river was a vacation in itself. It’s easy to forget that traveling isn’t a means in itself. The point is to go places and experience them.

I could, easily, spend a week on the deck of this motel room. It’s dead quiet, except for nature sounds, the view is spectacular, and the air is as clean as anywhere on earth. We took a long canoe trip around the bay, finding an isolated shoreline to look for sea shells and animal life. This was the first time either of us had canoed on an ocean and the waves were mildly exciting. At first Robbye tended to panic and seize up on the larger waves but, after I offered to whack her on the head with my paddle, she settled down. Crossing the bole at the mouth of the Salmon River was a lot of work and we’d generated a reason to eat another terrific dinner at the Inn’s restaurant.

Sunday, I sort of hoped we’d make a run for the north shore. We rode into Sheet Harbor to check out the galleries; all closed. We headed out toward the north shore, but when we stopped at about 50 miles to check out a historic city, Sherbrooke, Robbye complained that her knees were already giving out. She could barely get off of the bike. We spent a couple of hours walking around Sherbrooke, a town that was once a booming logging, gold mining, and ship building city and is now nearly a ghost town.

We’d spotted a wild looking river on the way out that we’d planned on checking out. I was so focused on watching for animals on the road and she was so focused on looking for a moose in the swamps that we ended up at the inn and missed seeing the river altogether. We stopped at a roadside stand and had the best mussels ever prepared by human hands and ice cream.

Robbye was hurting pretty badly after that 100 mile ride, so we took a short walk on the beach and called it a night. Monday is our last day here. Woke to the sound of a loon touring the bay, calling for attention. The gulls chimed in and drowned out the musical sound of the loon with their screeching. The bay is flat as a Kansas plains in the morning. Totally waveless.

If the Fed-X guy doesn’t arrive with my replacement bank card by noon, we’re going to leave without it. I’ll survive with the backup card Robbye brought and my cash.

It’s another overcast, high visibility morning. The view from the deck is awesome. The cabin next door is stuffed with a family of small children. They are breaking my concentration but cracking me up. Kids are such doofuses.

If I can get Robbye out of bed, I’d like to take the canoe out before breakfast. She woke up about 7:30 and we did a several mile, cross-bay canoe trip.

My money and credit card didn’t arrive on time. We’re on the road to Halifax. Robbye is having a terrible time on the bike, especially with the luggage loaded. 25 miles at a time are about the most she can stand. We made it to the hotel. Unloaded. Rode into downtown and saw some of the Busker Festival and bought tourist junk. Watched a guy lie down on a bed of nails and have another guy stand on him, for a crowd’s pocket change. Talk about a tough job. Tomorrow, early, Robbye is going home. I’m going back east to see the rest of Nova Scotia before I head back to the US.