A Two-Wheeled Life

That is a pretty arrogant title coming from someone as uninspiring as me. Mostly, my two-wheeled vehicles have been transportation, first, and recreational, second. For 18 years, there was also a vocational aspect to my motorcycling when I was an MSF instructor. I did have a brief, very low level regional (Texas and Nebraska) racing moment (about 10 years) with motocross, cross-country, enduros, and observed trials. That period of my two wheeled life was only partially recreational because to support that habit I ran a repair shop out of my tiny garage for six of those years and even sold Ossa dirt bikes for three of those years. Since I have been riding motorcycles since at least 1963 and the overwhelming majority of miles I’ve put on motorcycles has been commuting to work and school. My brother and I have mixed memories of when we started and which of us got the first motorcycle in the family. (He thinks I was first and I think he was.) We both remember how much our father hated motorcycles and how quickly shit could go badly when something he discovered one of his sons was doing something he disliked. (My “favorite” example was him tossing a loaned electric bass and bass amplifier down the basement stairs when he discovered I’d made more money playing in a band one summer than he made all year as a high school teacher.) Between bicycles and motorcycles, I have lived a lot of my life on two wheels.

Some people get to keep doing this sort of thing a really long time. Some of us die doing the thing we love. Most of us, get shoved off of two wheels due to old age and infirmity. I don’t know if I’m there yet, but the last few years and, especially, this fall have presented a lot of obstacles that seem ominous. In early 2019, I started to have bouts of double-vision that seemed to be untreatable until after I had been diagnosed with myasthenia gravis (MG) in June and medications (I love prednisone!) began to control the symptoms. By then, I’d sold my 2004 V-Strom both due to the vision issues and declining upper body strength that made my wonderful near-400 pound motorcycle impractical and, probably, dangerous. The next spring, at the beginning of the COVID shutdown, I sold my WR250X. At the time, I figured I was finished with motorcycling. I was 72 years old and looking at my father’s history and decline due to MG and fully expected to be in a wheelchair and trying to figure out what was happening on a big screen LCD television from a one-foot viewing-distance.

Did I mention I love Prednisone?

Thanks to terrific medical care from the Mayo Clinic’s Neurology Department and the perseverance of my doctor there, I got most of my function back by late 2020. My grandson had donated a beat-to-snot Rad Rover eBike in 2019 and I’d revived it and started riding it that winter, quickly discovering that me and ice still don’t mix. By the spring of 2020, I was on that bike for practically every local errand or half-assed-excuse to go somewhere by myself. As of this past summer, thanks to the incredibly generosity of an old friend, I have a Specialized electric mountain bike that has a suspension rivaling my WR250X. A collection of physical setbacks made riding a lot this past summer difficult, but I managed to put more than 1,000 miles on the old Rover and just short of 400 miles on the Specialized bike. That’s not impressive by any standard, I know. But it is what I managed this year.

I had some big, hopelessly optimistic goals for this past summer and I managed to achieve exactly none of them, except the bare minimum 1,000 mile goal for the Rad. Back in March of 2023, I weighed somewhere between 234 and 238 pounds. I only barely remember seeing those startling numbers on my bathroom scale and at the doc’s office, but those hefty values stuck with me. I gave myself a target to shoot for and a reward: under 200 pounds by the end of summer and a long motorcycle trip to . . . somewhere. Obviously, I didn’t make it. I’ve been stuck between 198 and 202 pounds since the end of September, which means no tour this year. My poor, setup to travel, barely-and-rarely-used 2012 Suzuki TU250X sits in the garage with far fewer miles than either of my bicycles on the odometer.

Mrs. Day is fond of saying, “It could always be worse.” Which is almost always undeniably true. About the middle of October, I woke up one morning to discover my right knee was almost useless. I couldn’t support myself on that leg at all. I think it would be safe to say this is the worst (and the first) “injury” I’ve ever experienced that wasn’t preceded by . . . something: a fall from a bike, stumbling down a cliff, landing wrong from a jump or a ladder, or some event that I could tie to why the hell my leg isn’t working. A month and a half later, it still isn’t wholly functioning, but it has cost me a good bit of the physical conditioning I’d built up during the summer. This is how old people end up in wheelchairs, they wake up after a good night’s sleep crippled. WTF!

Since I retired in 2013, I’ve had a few “this is it” scares. Sooner or later, one of ‘em will be the one that puts me into a cage for the rest of my life—maybe an ambulance, maybe a hearse, or just our Honda CRV—but a cage nonetheless. I used to tell my motorcycle safety students, “Always worry about people who are so incompetent they need 4-wheels to stay upright.” From where I wobble now, I think that was amazingly good advice.

Grand Assumptions

When I was a kid, growing up in western Kansas, I assumed that everybody knew how to ride a horse. I did, after all, and I was a “city kid” and most of the people I knew were city kids and all of them rode a horse at some time or another, I assumed. I had an uncle who had a large eastern Kansas ranch and who kept horses, a lot of horses. I started riding horses when I was about five and kept at it until I was in my mid-twenties. When I moved to Dallas, Texas in the late-60’s, I discovered practically no one in that city had ever seen a horse outside of television. I was practically considered a “cowboy” because of my hometown and the fact that I knew how to saddle and ride a horse.

Now, I take more than a little crap from the fact that I own a manual transmission pickup, one of the last made and sold in the US: a Nissan Frontier. “Nobody” drives a manual anymore.” It’s almost true. Fewer than 3% of cars and trucks sold in the US have manual transmissions. Ten years ago, half of the vehicles sold had manual transmissions, especially trucks. It won’t be long before the only people who know anything about shifting gears will be motorcyclists and even that could change quickly. Scooters have always been “automatic” shifters and some motorcycles are going that way, too. My wife tolerates our pickup, but she has decided she wants a mini-van with an automatic transmission and all of the extras. My driving days are numbered and I’m not complaining. Part of the deal we made with the pickup was that I’d keep driving as long as we had it. When we go back to an automatic transmission vehicle, I’m moving to passenger-only status. It’s not a punishment for her, but a reward for me after driving more than a million miles in my lifetime, I’m opting out.

Some people believe that possessing a driver’s license is an important thing. A rapidly increasing number of Americans disagree. “Among young adults, the declines are smaller but still significant—16.4 percent fewer 20-to-24-year-olds had licenses in 2014 than in 1983, 11 percent fewer 25-to-29-year-olds, 10.3 percent fewer 30-to-34-year-olds, and 7.4 percent fewer 35-to-39-year-olds. For people between 40 and 54, the declines were small, less than 5 percent.” Owning a car and driving are less important in urban areas and are becoming less important in small-to-mid-sized cities. Red Wing, for example, has a terrific bus service that will pick me up at my driveway. It’s only 3 miles to downtown from my near-edge-of-the-city home, so walking or bicycling makes a lot more sense than driving about 90% of the time to go downtown. Getting to the Cities is more complicated, but not impossible. Amtrak has a daily “shuttle run” to the Cities, even though the times are weirdly inconvenient. There is talk of a “Red Rock Corridor” rail that would connect Red Wing and other Mississippi Valley cities to the Twin Cities. If that happens, even these rural areas¹ could see a drop in car ownership.

In 2017, it might seem impossible to imagine a future where most people don’t drive their own cars. In 1900 it was pretty impractical to imagine a future where most people didn’t own a horse. In 1960, it was difficult to imagine a future where most Americans didn’t own an American-made car. In 2030, it could be hard to believe that people once drove cars, rather than simply instructed their autonomous vehicle to take them to a destination while they relaxed, read, did homework or work-work, or yakked on the phone. By 2050, it is entirely possible that the only people who will “drive” their own vehicle will be the ultra-rich, since they will be the only people who can afford the liability insurance. Imagine that.


¹ An unanticipated effect of this shift would likely be even more abandonment of the rural areas, fewer resources for small towns and disconnected areas of even high population states like California, and more electoral catestrophes like the 2016 election unless the Electoral College idiocy is addressed. Not all Future Shock stresses are desireable or healthy. They just happen and we react as if “nobody knew it would be this complicated.”

Catching Up

Sometime this next year, 2017, I’m going to catch up with my own past. A few years back, I closed a website and moved all of my Geezer with a Grudge history to this blog, one article per week at a time. The next week’s article was published in MMM on July 2015, which means by sometime in 2017 I’ll be putting my current MMM article on this webpage about the time MMM puts it on their own webpage. At that point, it’s possible that my “output” will slow down considerably. The other possibility is that I’ll get a new burst of inspiration and start cranking out stuff way faster than MMM can choke it down and I'll end up posting it on the blog to keep from swamping my editor. Or Victor will fire me for pissing on loud pipes and oversized motorcycles and lousy riders and everything I do will end up here first.

Or some combination of the above.

Call Me "Doubting Thomas"

My MMM editor, Sev, is convinced that I hold grudges for too long. I hadn't thought about this much, but after our conversation and a recent event I realized that he's right about the first half. Regarding the second part of that assumption, I think I hold my grudges for exactly the right amount of time. The conversation began when I doubted the validity of the surface-skimming review we recently published on the Hyosung GT250. The two page love-fest-without-a-fault puff piece seemed to be more of a marketing blurb than an MMM review. Even the loud exhaust system was given a PR polishing ("I had to repeatedly look behind me to see what big bike was coming up on me. The exhaust sounding so powerful, I was sure I was going to get lapped."). The oversized picture of the vintage-looking GT showed too much detail because the marginal quality welds were obvious even in black-and-white. The positive side of the review was that it appeared to be, mostly, promoting a good local dealer; Mill City Motors. The negative side was that it appeared to be more of an apology to Hyosung than an actual critical review.

My history with Hyosung has to get in my way, though. That's where this discussion began. The fact is, I am a firm believer in "Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice, shame on me." I don't forgive and forget easily. In my studio service business, I have an unbending policy that says if you don't pay me 60 day after I invoice you, the next time you need me I'll ask for a retainer before I leave home. If I don't get it, I don't do the work. If you manage to find a way to stiff me for any amount of money, I'll block your telephone number from my business and any email will go directly to the Junk folder and be automatically trashed. I'm old. I have more work than I want. I don't need new customers and people who don't pay their bills don't even qualify as "customers." They're just freeloaders.

I was reminded of my habit, again, this past week. I did some audio work for MPR and the school where I work with students from one of my classes. We've done this project a half-dozen times with some pretty substantial local bands in the past. The most recent event was with a very local band with a minimal following and who drew a couple dozen people to the show we recorded. Afterwards, the band went prima donna on us and inserted themselves into an "approval" process of the show that will probably result in the the show's cancellation. Honestly, that works for me. And from here out, if I'm asked to do anything with that group or the group's members, I'll find somewhere else to be. Burn me once . . . you know the story.

I've applied the same logic to my vendors for decades. In the motorcycle world, I've been burned twice on motorcycles: once on a brand new 1974 Suzuki RL250 and once on a barely used 1986 Kawasaki KLR600. Both bikes were unreliable crap and the Suzuki actually cost me a bit of money when I had next-to-none. It was the second new motorcycle (and the last) I've owned. I bought it in 1974 for $1,100 and a year later Suzuki dropped the price on the RL to $700 to unload their 1974 inventory and bail out of trials forever. Obviously, I took a beating; value-wise. I didn't consider owning another Suzuki until the SV650 had been well shaken out and I bought a nearly new 1999 in 2000 for about 1/2 of Blue Book. I bought my 2nd Suzuki in 2006, when I bought my barely used DL-650 for 2/3 of Blue Book. The Kawasaki was a POS from the day I bought it and the longer I owned it, the more disappointing it was. Even selling that bike was a problem. I didn't own another Kawasaki until I bought my 2000 KL250, used and cheap, in 2005. That bike was also a disappointment and I don't expect to own that brand again. Compare those experiences with my Honda, Yamaha, and, even, Rickman/Zundapp bikes and I'm uninspired to experiment again.

There is a restaurant rule that says something like, "It takes $5,000 in advertising to get a customer to try a new restaurant and 5 seconds of poor service to push that customer back out the door. It will take 5 years of marketing to get that customer to try it again." Choose your numbers, but the fact is in a world with lots of options, you don't get a lot of chances to satisfy your customers. There are no do-overs in life or business. I may be a "moto-journalist," but that doesn't make me a sucker or a shill. I'm too old and too cranky to kiss up to a half-assed Korean manufacturer of questionable quality or character. I'll give them a decade and we'll see if they are still around to review after they've settled in a bit.

There are a collection of manufacturers that I won't buy from, based on past experience and an overwhelming number of acceptable alternatives: Tascam, Sony, Presonus, Adobe, MOTU, Toshiba (Toughbooks aren't), and ProCo are among the list. The list of companies I look for when buying is probably a lot longer. I'd bet you have your biases, too. I bet even Sev has a few. Why should I pretend to be different than I am? Why would I want to?

Puttin' Off Order

Last winter, too many things happened at once and I missed the moment; the garage cleaning moment. Since then, nothing has gone right in my favorite room of the house. Work stuff, personal stuff, family stuff, hoarding tendencies, and general laziness kept me from performing a ritual that has kept my life semi-ordered for decades; scrubbing the garage before winter. Once I missed that window, everything has gone downhill. Finally, this weekend, I have no MSF classes to teach (looks like the rest of the summer's schedule might cancel out on me) and no freelance deadlines to meet. So, I'm out of excuses.

The problem is I've lived here too long. My natural hoarding instincts are overwhelming my disciplined mid-tech transient practicality. All of my life, I've moved every 2-5 years. Before moving into my current home, the longest I'd ever lived anywhere was the 7 years my family lived in a dinky Huntington Beach apartment. Since I was working 80-90 hour weeks, going to school nights and weekends, and managing two small businesses during that period, it's hard for me to consider the actual time spent in that California beach apartment as being more than a blip in my life. But I've lived in my current home for 14 years and the collected crap is starting to become overwhelming. My wife collects girl-stuff and most of the house is crammed with that crap. I collect guy stuff and the garage and my basement shop and the attic studio are stuffed with that crap. In the garage, I have squirreled away parts for all of the cars and motorcycles I've owned in the last decade, service manuals for the same vehicles, tools for a wood shop, toys and kid-projects that my grandson started and gave up on, acetylene welding stuff, bicycles and assorted maintenance bits for bikes, an idiotic collection of electronic components for audio products I will probably never design, mountains of acoustic treatment materials for recording studios I will probably never build, construction materials that may (or may not) end up being used on the house, and dozens of yard and gardening tools for a yard that could suck up my whole life.

It's a really big garage, but it can shrink up dramatically if I can't find the guts to toss out the stuff I will never get around to using. When I bought the house, the previous owner had stuffed the garage front-to-back and eight feet high with all sorts of crap. He had a tunnel carved in the junk to allow access to his huge television dish antenna. Most of the residue of his existence is gone from the garage now.

I used to love moving because moving forced me to make those kinds of decisions. I don't mess around when I move, either. In the last four decades, I've moved from Kansas to south Texas to Kansas to west Texas (again) to Nebraska to California to Indiana to Colorado to Minnesota. My moving motto is "when in doubt, throw it out." I don't, however, apply that philosophy to cleaning up my crap-filled garage. I use more of a "when in doubt, stuff it in the rafters" policy. The rafters are about to collapse and crush me flat. Some decisions will have to be made.

The first things to go are the kid stuff. My grandson has progressed from a sweet, energetic, fun little guy who used to direct me in building everything from robots to rockets to the usual sort of sullen teenager who is pissed off at everything I do. That makes emptying out the unfinished kid projects an easy assignment. I set the kid stuff on the curb with a "FREE!" sign and it all vanished in a few hours. It's not like I'd ever mess with model rockets or stop-motion animation on my own time and having that rocket stuff in the garage is a fire hazard.

Next goes the unfinished construction project materials. I will probably never roof a house, so all the scrap roofing materials hits the curb and instantly vanishes. I'm not adding a door to another room in this house, so the interior door that's been sitting in the rafters since we bought this house hits the curb and disappears. Likewise, the louvered closet doors, the baseboard electric heating elements, and the unused wall-to-wall carpeting left by the previous owner. All set out on the curb and all claimed in less than an hour. I'm on a roll.

Electronic parts and project cases hit the trash. I disassembled my wooden saw horses and chopped them up for materials. I have cool folding metal ones and don't ever use the old style horsies. Flammable construction materials practically fling themselves into the burn box for the wood stove. I can almost see my metal work bench and the wooden bench has been cleared since morning.

As I toss crap, I inventory the non-crap possessions and put them up on Craig's List and eBay while I organize. By 5PM Saturday, I've sold almost $200 worth of idle crap. I also have the Kawasaki Sherpa up on the jack ready to strip down to the frame and rebuild with the original stock parts. By Sunday night, the KL250 will also be on Craig's List. Once, I'd thought Wolfe and I would be doing some off-road riding together this summer, but he's made it clear that isn't in the works so I'm clearing the garage space for something useful (or just for the luxury of free space). I can always find another dirt bike if it turns out I need one. That's another transient motto of mine, "if I ever need it again, I can buy it again." Two spare helmets are on Craig's List and so is the cruise control I never installed on the V-Strom because I couldn't convince myself I could tolerate the control's added clutter under the tank.

While I'm tossing stuff and selling stuff, I'm fixing stuff, too. That's why cleaning the garage takes so long. If I find a repair part I've been looking for, I stop cleaning and do the repair so I won't lose the part again. Tomorrow, I'm installing the throttle for the electric scooter and, if it works, that damn thing hits Craig's List, too. Another dumb idea that got a lot of playtime, initially, and ended up taking up space afterwards.

Ten hours later, the garage is clean and civilized. Both work tables are clear, the work area is wide open, the kid stuff gone, a giant curb-load of stuff has been claimed by the neighborhood collectors, and a bunch of boxes are going to be part of our Fourth of July celebration as starter material in the fire pit.  Mission accomplished. Now I'm afraid to start anything in the garage because I'll mess up my new order.

When Honda Did Marketing

What could this man of god do with a supermoto?

Davida Moto Photo

Interesting photos from motorcycling's history (motly Euro-stuff): Davida MotoPhoto. Thanks, Denny.

Getting Parked and My Opinion

A while back, Andy Goldfine asked me to write a Geezer column about motorcycle parking laws and other irrational human activities. I took a first shot at it and sent it to Andy for his opinion. His opinion was "you get more flies with honey than with . . . " whatever the opposite of honey is. He thought I should tone it down so I might have a chance at changing some official opinions rather than hardening their opinions even further. He might be right. At any rate, I toned it down and the column is sitting out there in the temporary ether waiting for my editor, Victor, to decide the time is right for publication.

My personal opinion is that, at least in the United States, things do not get better. About 40 years ago, a Canadian politician came up with a fable that pretty much sums up the way politics works here. He called it Mouseland. The idea, to put it briefly, is the mice keep electing cats to run their country and the cats (surprise!) keep passing laws that make life easier for cats and much worse for the mice. That's the system we've built and we're #1 at it. Nobody has more cats governing the mice than the US. Something to be proud of.

My grandson , Wolf, and I took a short the-week-before-school-starts motorcycle camping trip to Duluth this week. We wandered from the Cities to Duluth through backroads and had a great 270 mile trip to a place that is only 130 miles from home, by freeway. We spend the afternoon and that night at Jay Cooke State Park, one of Minnesota's great unknown natural wonders and a terrific motorcycle road. We hiked a half-dozen miles of the park's trails and camped there Wednesday evening.

The next morning, I headed us to Duluth for breakfast. My goal was a coffee shop/bakery in Canal Park. My wife and I stumbled on to that place on our 40th wedding aniversary two years ago and I thought Wolf would enjoy the atmosphere and great food. When we rolled into Canal Park, I was surprised to discover the place had been decorated with parking meters. Obviously, Duluth is continuing its recessive decline into oblivion and the City Douchebags are doing everything they can to hurry the city's demise. Big sections of this ghost town are littered with parking meters and downtown is about as close to dead as a once-lively city contaminated by braindead officials can be. All of downtown is now metered and the city's parking mafia has turned the city's empty spaces into empty parking lots manned by politically-connected deadbeats. It has the feel of Chicago without any of the rebellious attitude or the architecture.

I didn't have a pocket full of quarters (also known as "metermaid foodstamps") and the new electronic metering system Duluth is using for much of Canal Park is extremely biker-hostile. Instead of plugging a meter in front of your bike, you have to buy a parking pass at a kiosk and find a place on your bike to put the pass. Obviously, cagers will be inclined to rip off the bike pass and put it on their cages. It's also impossible to bag up your bike with your gear under the cover and leave the bike and gear so that Lovely Richard the Metermaid would see the biker had paid his welfare-tariff. I gave up on the Canal Park restaurant and cruised the downtown area looking for a meter-less place for us to eat. Every restaurant was open, but empty. The meters had done their job. Finally, we ended up at a Perkins on the north end of town that had a parking lot. The place was jammed, unlike all of the metered businesses.

I had a brief conversation with an assistant manager when we paid for our meal. He said the downtown meters had caused a boom in their morning business.

Figures.

While we were waiting for our food, I snagged a Duluth paper and read a really funny-sick article about a dude (check out the Duluth Faux News video, it's hilarious) who got into an argument while partying with another dude. To sum it up, the first dude shot and killed the second dude. Within an hour or so, 60 of Duluth's finest had the neighborhood surrounded with So-Where-Are-They'ers dressed in full Iraq invasion outfits. They looked fierce, just like they do in the movies. However, the guy they were surrounding looked like he'd be about as likely to sneak out and run away as Michael Moore. Look at him. He couldn't hide behind a mountain.

After cutting the phone lines, the Duluth cops hid behind armored cars, barricaded the streets into the neighborhood, posed with their automatic weapons for news camera crews, and had a bunch of huddled meetings with each other for five hours. Apparently, messing with a guy and his gun is a lot cooler than their usual metermaiding duties and they wanted to try out all of their gear before they outgrew it. Finally, the guy came out and they loaded him up and went back to patrolling all those parking meters. Now that I know how much firepower is behind a parking violation, I'm going to be even more inclined to spend my money in the burbs.

After breakfast, we gave up on Duluth and headed for Two Harbors. We stumbled on to a great tour of an old steampowered tugboat and a short history lesson from the curator of the lighthouse and museum. We kept going north for a few miles and had lunch on the way back at Betty's Pies. Yeah, we ate a lot for such a short trip. Get over it. It's a guy thing.

On the way back, I decided to put up with the meter crap and parked in front of Duluth Pack. I used my credit card to buy a $0.75 hour and discovered the meter gouges you for an extra quarter if you use a card. Something not advertised on the &^%$# meter kiosk. Since we couldn't close up the gear, we carried it around with us, which finished off any good feelings I had about Canal Park, since it got hot and carrying all our crap limited what we could do and wanted to do. I guess the good side, if you like parking meters, was that the park area was pretty much empty for a perfect last summer week afternoon before school started the next week. I've never seen that before in 12 years of hanging out in Duluth. The meters were doing their job of draining the city of downtown tourists and locals.

We gave up after 1/2 hour and went back to the bike to get the hell out of Duluth. Another biker was parked in our space, which looked like a bad idea, based on what I know of metermaids and city meter laws. As we were packing up, the other bike owner came over to ask about my luggage badges and the V-Strom. Turned out, he was from northern Minnesota and was making his once-a-year trip to Duluth. He hadn't noticed the new parking meter system and was surprised to learn he was parking illegally. I gave him the last 1/2 hour of our pass and left him looking at the damn thing, wondering where to put it so it wouldn't get stolen if he left the bike to get lunch. I recommended the Perkins north of downtown.

It would be cool to believe that the simple stuff, like parking for motorcycles, is fixable. Obviously, there are logical solutions and all of those solutions provide economic and social benefits to a wide range of citizens. However, we're a mousy "conservative nation," which means we're afraid of our shadows and we're even more afraid of pissing off the cats. Political correctness is just another form of mousy-ness. Burying ourselves in make-work jobs like metermaids and stuffing millions of citizens behind bars and hiring another few million to convict and guard them and all of the useless crap government does instead of providing useful services to working citizens is exactly the tactic every other failed dynasty has taken in the history of humanity. I would freakin' love to believe we're going to be different. But I don't.

It's all part of that fear of change and risk avoidance thing we're growing so proud of. One thing we used to know out of our manufacturing experience is that "change happens." You don't have to do a thing and change will happen. Hoping that it won't is stupid. One of the concepts I'd hope people would get from riding motorcycles is that you have to constantly adapt to change; changes in the road, in yourself and your abilities, traffic, weather, and even laws and cops. The cool thing about getting young people into motorcycling is that they might learn this lesson from riding, since they won't learn it in school, from their parents, or from video games. The not-so-cool thing about the Boomers getting into motorcycling is that they are too inflexible to learn anything new. They are constantly surprised when the universe doesn't notice their existence and fails to adapt to their all-important-selves. When they crash and burn, as they will, their reaction is to sue and pass more brainless laws to try to force the world to accommodate them. Like my home state, Kansas, passing laws to require pi to be a nice round 3.

I don't see this getting better. As much as I'd like to believe gentle argument and logical persuasion will convince the cats to allow us mice the right to lane splitting, filtering, multi-bike parking space access, and all of the cool things that motorcycles and motorcycling could bring to culture, I don't believe any of it will happen. Honestly, I think the best I will get is the right (for a while) to be pissed off about the incompetence of city, state, and federal officials and to say something about it. The problem with using sugar to catch flies is . . . who wants to catch a fly? When I see a fly, I always reach for a flyswatter.

I am pissed off. You're right. I used to love visiting Duluth, especially for hanging out around Canal Park. I've spent a small fortune on chocolate penances at Grandma's for my wife, since she often didn't get to go to Duluth with me. The Canal Park Famous Dave's is my 2nd favorite place in that chain. The lift bridge and ship harbor entry are pretty near San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge on my "favorite places" list. But I hate parking meters. I don't care much for metermaids, either (unless they look like these three, Australia knows how to do everything better). From now on, until Duluth meters-up 18th Avenue West in front of Aerostich, I'll probably limit my Duluth sight-seeing to the RiderWearHouse, Jay Cooke Park, and points north of town.

It's a weakness, I know, but human-waste like toll booth operators and metermaids bug me so much that I can't get past that irritation to enjoy the good stuff that's left of the city. There are too many places to be to have to put up with that kind of drivel. If Duluth doesn't want my money, Elie, International Falls, Redwing, and more mid-sized towns than I can count do. (Even some Duluth residents have a clue about what the city's tourist gouging is costing.) Like most Americans, I do as little business as possible in my own downtown, St. Paul, because of the transportation hassle. Between the near total lack of useful public transportation and the miserable parking experience, I'd rather skip downtown and miss out on everything that happens there than risk a $40 parking ticket for some obscure unpublished rule or from being beaten to my car by a metermaid.

Unlucky Thirteen

I gotta hope that title is bogus. But today is my thirteenth day out. After getting drowned yesterday, I can only imagine so many ways today could be worse. However, the sun is shining and the air is warm and humid. It feels like summer again. I am almost inclined to skip out on the Fort Louisbourg trip, but I won’t. I was advised that it is worth the time.

The rebuilt fort is pretty amazing, in fact. Almost every building has a reenactment actor to explain the structure and its historical significance. I was particularly impressed by the engineer’s quarters and the tens of thousands of documents he turned out in his 20 period at the job. His documentation, kept in triplicate at the fort, in Quebec City, and in France, was what allowed the Canadian government to rebuild the fort accurately. The engineer’s house and the many improvements he made to the fort put most of today’s engineers to shame. His auto-barbeque-spit was freakin’ amazing. I need one for my barbeque. His office, home, and kitchen were inspiring. His layout for the city inside the fort should be a standard study for modern city designers.

I was feeling pretty good about the position of engineering in the past (3rd on the fort’s totem pole) until I arrived at the “accountant’s” home (2nd on the pole). This example of pre-MBA evil managed to screw France out of $80 million during his rein of incompetence. The entire fort cost the government of France less than $4 million. As an early ENRON-style carpetbagger, he probably managed to screw France out of a substantial portion of the New World all by himself. When he was finally “punished,” he received a pat on the hand and was banished to the south of France with only half of his stolen money and property. France put away the guillotine way too soon. So did we. The definition of “treason” ought to include any politician or bureaucrat ripping off the public till and the penalty should be the firing squad.

The fuel and economic damage really shows in outback places like this. Obviously, Canada and Nova Scotia built this as a major tourist trade attraction. It provides lots of employment and significant support for the area, when it is working. The outgoing bus I took from the center to the fort was about 2/3 full. A guy I met at the coffee shop, before heading to the fort, turned out to be my ticket taker. He said the fort attendance was down at least 50% from previous years. I “business” would be laying off, bigtime, now. My return bus, at noon, held only me. I had no trouble taking shots of the fort that weren’t obstructed by other tourists. This can’t be the intended plan.

After that experience, I decided to go back to the road. I headed for the Cabot Trail and the solitude of ocean, road, and mountains. Several bikers told me that if I came all this way and missed the Trail, I missed Nova Scotia. So, I’m on that road and it is kind of a mini-mountain road with occasional great views of ocean from beaches or cliffs. This, of course, is what my wife would have loved to experience. She wouldn’t have liked much of the ride here, though.

Crossing from the main island to the cape, I got a dose of rain. It fell hard enough that I stopped to put on my over-gloves, but it stopped almost immediately. All the way to the top, I had great weather, great scenery, and a wonderful ride. My luck held all the way around Cabot Trail. I saw some clouds, a little mist, even some fog, but no rain. It was, in fact, a nearly perfect day on the road. I could have stopped a lot more. In fact, I could have parked the bike for a week and walked most of the park and it wouldn’t have been enough time.

This is where Nova Scotia gets its name; New Scotland. It would be easy to imagine these hills populated by sheep and herders, denuded of their trees and covered, instead, with grazing. It would be a shame, but not unbelievable or unlikely. As Robbye said about the rest of Nova Scotia, it’s obvious that not much of this forested area is old growth. Most of the pines are well under 20 years old, in fact. I have seen absolutely no large, old trees since I entered Canada. Canada has lots of things going for it, but conservation is not one of them. For such a small population, the place is highly industrialized and the ecology is “farm land” to the inhabitants.

I came out of Cape Breton wanting to cover some miles before I slept. So, I stayed on the gas through a variety of attractive towns and likely campsites. After suffering a long road maintenance wait at Antigonish, I decided to make New Glasgow, at least, before stopping. The stop-and-go traffic after that half-hour wait caught me mentally napping. I spent so much time in 5th, passing slow moving trucks and SUVs that I spaced off shifting back to 6th when I had the chance. I had plenty of fuel when I left Antigonish to make it to New Glasgow, but that assumed I would be using my transmission competently. I didn’t, so I found myself about 20 miles out of town with the fuel gauge flashing at me. I nursed the throttle, coasted down hills, and gasped into town with my tension level at stupid.

That was enough. I needed a place to camp, or plan on riding all night long. I asked the station mechanic for advice and he sent me to Trenton, a town about 5 miles back from where I’d come. His directions involved a lot of well known landmarks, none of which were known to me or visible at night. I made it to Trenton, stopped at a Tim Hortons and asked another local for directions. He used even more landmarks, no street names, and got me within ½ mile of the park. Finally, I hit a dead end in a trailer park. Some kids came out to ask what I was doing making a u-turn in their front yard. I explained my quest and one of them volunteered to put on a helmet and direct me to the park. Turns out, “follow the highway to Park Street, turn right until the street deadends into the park” would have done the job, description-wise.

The Trenton city park was closed, but the caretaker told me to find a spot and I did. Bits of my Lawson hammock are beginning to fail on this trip and one of the poles bit the dust tonight. Duct tape “fixed” it temporarily, but I’ll need a new pole or a new tent sometime soon.

I went to sleep to the sound of partying teenagers and frustrated mosquitoes.