Rick's Ride A:H

As a result of a Blogger / iPad glitch, this post devoted to Rick's ride self-destructed.

If you've already read this post and have come back, only to find that it's not quite what you saw the first time around, that's because it's not.

Rick Snyder set out on April 22, 2012 on the Scooter Cannonball run.  You will find numerous links to the 2012 Cannonball towards the bottom of the links on the right side of the page.

I exchanged some correspondence with Rick before his great adventure and I told him I'd be sharing the fun vicariously through Rick.

One way I did that was, like hundreds of others, was to compulsively visit the Official Cannonball thread on ModernVespa.com.

Another way was to follow Rick's progress on the followride.com website that tracked the Cannonballers in real time.  I took a number of snapshots of Rick's epic ride which you will find below.

Perhaps Rick will one day provide some context for these screen shots.

In the meantime you can visit the ModernVespa thread and read Rick's posts.  His MV username is Scuterbrau.  There was quite a bit of drama as Rick stuck to Bill Dog like glue as Bill did battle not only with the epic ride, but more importantly with a raging staph infection in his left hand that ultimately led to emergency surgery and intravenous antibiotics on arrival at destination in San Diego.

It's a riveting true real-time story of human resilience in the face of adversity.

So here, without further editorial comment are the snapshots of Rick's ride.  Hopefully there won't be any further Blogger glitches interfering with this post.

A: April 22, 2012 at 10:30 a.m.:

B: April 22, 2012 at 6:45 p.m.:

C: April 23, 2012 at 12:37 p.m.:

D: April 23, 2012 at 6:07 p.m.:

E: April 24, 2012 at 3:57 p.m.:

F: April 25, 2012 at 6:27 p.m.:

G: April 28, 2012 at 4:07 p.m.:

H: April 30, 2012 at 11:03 a.m.:

Montreal landmarks

Canajun was hoping for a glimpse of the Montreal he was familiar with before he moved away.

Here is a ride video I shot the other day that might scratch that itch.

The route is along Cote des Neiges road heading towards downtown.  The video begins on the north side of the mountain on Cote des Neiges, just a block or two south of Queen Mary road.

Once past Queen Mary, if you're familiar with the city, you may remember the following landmarks.

• at the 23 second mark, crossing Queen Mary;
• from the 44 second mark to the 1 minute 22 second mark, the Mount Royal Cemetery.  The gates are at the 1:22 mark.
• at the 2:05 mark you will see the armory right where the Camilien Houde Parkway goes through Mount Royal Park, heading east towards Park avenue, Fletcher's Field and Montreal's SoHo that we call "the Plateau".
• at the 2:17 mark is the high point of Cote des Neiges road.  Everything beyond this point is downhill.
• at 3:10 you see the apartment buildings that are now condos I believe, that sit like an island dividing the north and south bound sections of Cote des Neiges road.
• at 4:30, I branch off Cote des Neiges road and onto Dr. Penfield avenue (formerly McGregor avenue).  Actually it looks like I am going straight, but in fact it's Cote des Neiges road the veers right towards Sherbrooke street.
• from 5:14 on, this is the Golden Square Mile section of downtown, also sometime called Embassy Row.  This is where the wealthiest of Montreal's elite built palatial homes in the late 1800's.  Many of those stately homes are now consulates, hence the name.
• at 5:50 the western edge of the McGill University campus begins.
• the two buildings on the left at 6:00 are the biology department.  The second building has a greenhouse on the roof that glows eerily at night.  It's a grow-op.
• at 6:08 are the two buildings of the law faculty, named Chancellor Day Hall, with the actual Chancellor Day Hall being the second building, also a former robber-baron palace, bequeathed to McGill long ago in a bid for atonement, no doubt.
• at 6:09 I turn right onto Stanley street heading south towards Sherbrooke.
• the building at 6:30 is the new Sofitel hotel that sits at the corner of Sherbrooke and Stanley.  It used to be the Canadian headquarters of Air Liquide, or Canadian Liquid Air.
• at 7:18 the building on the southeast corner is the headquarters of CGI Group Inc., where I work.
• at 8:26 is the end of my commute.

So, sew

Actually, I am not "so-so", I'm really quite pleased with my progress.

This week I rolled over the personal 10,000th mile in the saddle.

My Vespa's odometer recorded its 10,000th mile last fall.  But I got my Vespa with 1,304 miles already on the clock, I didn't get to my personal 10,000th mile until a few days ago.

So now I get to sew my Modern Vespa 10,000 mile patch onto my Corazzo riding jacket.

Locations, locations!?!?  On the arm, or on the chest?  On the collar maybe? Or is sewing it on the collar too military-dress-uniform-palace-gards-ish?

Maybe I'll do it on the weekend.

Windy ride!

Stiff winds overnight brought warmer weather to Tuesday's commute.

The wind was from the south and came gusting over Lake St-Louis. My Vespa was buffeted by the wind all along the lake and well into the city as well.

The expressway miles I've racked up have gotten me used to wind blast, particularly the intense buffeting and cavitation that 18-wheelers leave in their wake. So the blustery weather wasn't a concern.

The silver lining was the way the weather altered the landscape. It painted the lake a heaving mass of silvery grey, frothy chop, punctuated by angry shots of spray where the waves met the rocky shore.

I was tempted to stop and attempt a photograph a few times, but chose to continue riding.

When I got to the foot of the lake in Lachine, the scene was so captivating I couldn't resist taking a few minutes to share the scene here.

I took the opening photo for this post while waiting for a business associate for an early evening meeting. I rode my Vespa to the meeting. I was pleased to find Costanza parking, as usual, with the added bonus of another Vespa to share the space with.

I believe Vespas don't attract parking citations because they invariably add to the beauty of the urban landscape. At least that's my theory. Maybe I've just been lucky.

Home: Going and coming

This is what you might think of as a sandwich post. 

This is the meat.

The bookends that make it into a sandwich are two separate videos.  One leaving the garage at work and riding to the entrance ramp to the expressway.  The other, from the end of the off-ramp and into the garage at home.

These are the first GoPro ride videos I've posted.  They aren't the first I've recorded on my Vespa though.

A few weeks ago I recorded my commute, end-to-end.  That video is too large to post to YouTube, so you won't see it here.  For that ride I had mounted the camera on a mirror stem using a RAM mount and the head from my SLIK monopod.  When I saw the vibration of the camera with that set up I thought the video would be one massive mess of vibration.

I was amazed when I saw the result.  Certainly not solid by any means, yet, in the circumstances, still very usable video.  The GoPro is one wicked good camera.

For these videos, the camera was mounted using the same RAM mount, without the SLIK head, on a RAM ball mount on the grab rail.

As you can see the video is, well, I hesitate to say it, but rock solid comes to mind.  All I can say is "Wow!!!".  Worth every penny.

Amen.

Now here's the back end of the sandwich. As an added bonus, it's an action flick, thanks to the speeding police cruiser at the 1':40" mark.

Art or science?

I'll be the first to confess that I'm no artist.  At least not when it comes to using my fingers to make pictures.

My iPad and the very useful Penultimate app let me explore my artistic inclinations, such as they are, without much fuss.

It interests me to observe the similarity in each of these scribble-sketches.  There is a satisfaction I got from the exercise.  The satisfaction that the essence of a Vespa seemed to emerge from my scribbling.  The cowl in the lower left sketch, for instance.

I didn't sketch any particular Vespa, and the Vespa was in my mind, I wasn't sketching it while looking at my Vespa, or any other Vespa or image.

Making these images, just as they are, would not have been possible, it seems to me, if my Vespa was not such a presence in my life.  Washing the machine, running my hands over its lines; taking it apart; putting it back together; looking at it from every conceivable angle;  filling the tires; filling the tank;  riding it for 10,000 wondrous miles.  All these experiences flowed from my fingers onto the iPad screen.  Time after time.  Resulting in remarkably similar images.

This is art.  Not good art.  But art.  It certainly isn't science.

Riding is like that too.  Why is it that I can ride full-throttle along a curving expressway ramp and merge into traffic with confidence?  How do I roll at barely a walk, inching my way in traffic with my feet firmly planted on the floorboard?  How do I swoop around a corner and accelerate down a boulevard like a bird in flight?

Clearly science dictates the mechanics.  Centrifugal force; gasoline exploding in the cylinder; friction between the tires and the road; the grip of the disc brake; gravity tugging at the chassis.

But art is what makes riding both possible, and thoroughly enjoyable.

Got to make more room...

Ahhhhh! now that's better!
Nothing like spring renovations to lift the spirit.

Another milestone, belated

Yesterday marked the second anniversary of this blog.

What a difference two years makes in a life.

How a machine can contribute so much remains a little bit of a mystery to me.

Of course it's not the machine.  It's really just me, changing the way I relate to the world around me.  The Vespa is just a new mode, a filter, that alters both reality, and perception.

This blog is also an important part of the change in me.

At first it was just me, sharing my experience to help others like me who were interested, but who knew too little about the reality of riding.

More than a filter, the blog has become a two-way lens.  Letting others see me, has let me see others too.  I know that I have friends and acquaintances in far-flung places.  These are real-life relationships that, like all friendships, add richness  to the life I live.

I'll be in Vancouver in May, staying at one of the downtown Fairmont hotels.  The schedule is a little tight.  I fly in the morning of Thursday, May 24, and leave on Sunday evening, the 27th.  I'll be spending as much time as possible with my son but also want to meet as many of you wet coasters as possible, you know who you are.  Send me an e-mail and let's see how many of us can gather.  Bob has made very gracious arrangements for a 200cc ride for me.  A group ride ending somewhere we could sit down to grab something to eat would be really nice.  Maybe I'll be able to convince my son Andrew to ride pillion.

I'll be sure to bring all my gear, so it could be rain or shine.

It's all about the gear

I knew that I had to pull all the stops for the ride home.

Minus 1 Celsius, warmer than this morning's commute by three degrees, but the wind that was strong this morning, had picked up considerably.

I zipped the liner into my armored pants, threw my Teknic rain jacket on over my armored jacket, and put my thin wool glove liners on under my winter gauntlets.

So many layers is not comfortable. I felt cumbersome.

When I ride, I feel light and weightless, I swoop over the landscape like a bird in flight. With all that gear on I feel more like an astronaut than a pilot.

As soon as I rolled out of the garage I cranked up the juice to the grips to the max.

I decided on the fastest route. Wide open throttle on the expressway all the way home.

The wind gusts were ferocious. Stronger than I've ever experienced. Actually shoving the bike around in the lane. I focused on riding, tense, alert, constantly ready to counteract the gusts.

A couple of eighteen wheelers added their turbulent after-drafts to the challenge. For the latter half of the ride I followed an off-duty fire truck, peeling off the formation at my exit and decelerating down the ramp as the firemen thundered along the expressway headed further west.

So much speed, so much wind-chill. And yet the one thing I didn't experience was cold. Not a bit. My hands? Usually the weak spot. Tonight? Toasty!

My upper body? With the rain jacket blocking all the airflow, also, well, neutral says it best. Not hot, not cool, just normal.

My legs and lower body? Same as the top half.

Same story was playing out in my Icon Patrol boots.

As many have remarked before me, it's all about the gear.

Over all, this kind of experience is not why I ride. Too much gear to feel like I'm flying.

Tomorrow snow's in the forecast, so I'm trading the Vespa for the Civic.

That's more like it

Minus 4 Celsius or 25 Fahrenheit coupled with stiff winds out of the north.  This is the March I remember.  Freaking cold.

The Hot Grips™ were running on the maximum setting this morning.  No half-measures for a day like this.

The visor had to be snapped shut to keep the sharp knife of cold air from freezing my nose.  My Corazzo underhoody did its job of sealing the gap between my Corazzo 5.0 jacket and Nolan N-102 full-face helmet.

The heated grips made all the difference.

Nevertheless, it was so cold, particularly with the wind factored in, that more countermeasures were dancing in my head.  Such as:

1. I should have put the liners in my armored pants (Dohhh!).
2. I wonder how nice it would be with heated grips and muffs?
3. A true all-weather jacket with a removable liner would be a really nice touch. 

I didn't see any other motor bikes on the road.

I wonder why?

How to tell when it's unseasonably hot

You can tell it's unseasonably hot when students decide that a $500 tuition fee hike is so fundamentally offensive to their civil rights that they paralyze a metropolis for hours on end.

Sheesh, you'd think that the G8 was in town for a kaffeeklatsch.




You know it could get tough, when the horses think to wear their soccer shin pads and paintball visors to the party!

The men in blue also brought dogs wearing their doggie SWAT suits. No sense in letting the horses have all the fun.

Day three

More freaky weather.

This morning, the heaviest fog yet.  I had to stop three times, remove my helmet, switch my glasses (Ray Bans to regular, back to Ray Bans), switch gloves (summer gloves to gauntlets, back to summer, back to gauntlets).  Started warm, got chilly, back to warm; started out sunny and grey, became pea soup fog, then sunny, back to pea soup, back to sunny.

Things stabilized as soon as my route left the lake shore.

The fog is coming off the lake.  Something to do with warm air, very cold lake water, residual ice banks here and there... at least that's my uneducated non-meteorologist's guess.

It slowed me down, but blew me away.  I love fog.  It proves to be much, much trickier on two wheels.

If this keeps up, I may figure out a strategy.  I'm beginning to think that the right strategy is to button down.  Shut the visor, and then squeegee when the fog pearls up on the visor.  That means sticking with the Icon Patrol gauntlets that have the squeegee built in on the left index finger.

Then again, this is season three of life-on-two-wheels, and these are my first encounters with fog.

There may be no time left to learn.

Any thoughts?

PS: that's Stewart Hall in the background, and no, I don't live there, nor do I own it.

The ride home

I had to pause on the way home yesterday on my first commute of 2012.

The photo says it all: an August blazing fireball sunset in mid-March.   Who would have thought that warm weather like we're enjoying was even remotely possible on the first Monday after St. Patrick's Day?

On the way home tonight, people were dining on the sidewalk terrace at Il Fornetto in Lachine. And there was a crowd scene at the Dairy Queen.

Tomorrow's forecast is even hotter!  HOTTER!?!?  Yes, hotter.

The Creator must be mocking me for installing heated grips on a Vespa LX.

Hey, you don't think that's possible?

It's a mid-summer's March dream here. Hello!

And... we're off!!

The 2012 Vespa scooter commuting season officially kicked off this morning.

The heated grips I installed weren't needed due to the unseasonably balmy weather we've enjoyed since Sunday when the temperature hit 21.5C.

This morning it was cool.  I switched the grips on to a low-ish setting, just because I could.  So there, global warming, take that!

In two years of commuting on my scooter this was my first experience with fog.  The fog was rolling in from Lake St-Louis, and was at times quite heavy.  The main concern with the fog, aside from the obvious challenge of seeing and being seen, was that my visor fogged.  It was so troublesome that I had no other option than to ride with the visor up.

Given the warm temperature, it wasn't a problem.

This morning I am also sporting my new Icon Patrol boots.

This picture was taken yesterday when I went for a brief joyride.  When I commute I wear full gear including lined Tourmaster Caliber pants.  Yesterday I ventured out in jeans.

The season begins with 10,778 miles on the clock.  I mention it just so I can record it here in case I'm wondering later on how many miles I will have logged this season.

It certainly feels good to be back on two wheels.  I'm taking it slowly.  Nice relaxed commuting along the scenic route.  At least until I've got my sea legs back.

A challenge?

This morning, waking up is a challenge.
Thanks to you, Trobairitz, it's one I won't soon forget!