Dear... Journal. The motorcycles are gone, the scooters are on the way out

It's been several years since I wrote anything here.  If you're reading this, think of it as a new beginning.  A fresh start.

Was there some sort of accident which led me to quit riding?  No.

Was there a scare?  No.   I choose to live my life a little differently than I had up until somewhat recently.

Did something replace riding?  A different hobby?  Yes.  I'm retracing my steps to the first two wheels of a kid's freedom; the bicycle.

Sometimes there are convergences in a person's life which form what we call crossroads.  Instances which make us reevaluate our trajectories in life.  None of that happened.  It was very much like when I quit smoking.  One day I finished a cigarette in my garage and thought, ok, I'm done.  And that was it.  Cravings never overwhelmed me and the smell of a burning cigarette doesn't bother me one way or the other.  You can smoke around me and I won't want one or feel nauseous smelling it.  And being a practicing sax player longer than I was a smoker also meant I never experienced that deeper breathing people talk about after having been away from inhaling smoke for a while.

Riding bicycles is fun.  That's it really.  There will be health benefits in the longer run.  They aren't the reason I ride.  They'll likely be the reason I'll ride further in the future.  But I'm not interested in competition whether in distance or equipment.  In fact the old mid eighties Trek suits me just fine.

So if the guy on the old red Trek inadvertently forgets what he's riding and gives you the biker wave, it's probably just me.

Safe travels,
Harv

Merry Christmas part II

Fog.  The bane of the rider.  A thick, wet, clammy-to-the-skin sensation.  In warm seasons it can be refreshing.  Somewhere in the forties though, fog can be debilitating.   When it's in the valleys of country roads in the summer, passing through it can make one a feel rush like flying on two wheels.  During the colder nights or after the "traditional" riding season has come to a close, it finds bare skin and teams up with it's evile brother Wind Chill.  Think of frozen snakes crawling up your arms and around your neck but you can't do anything about them until you stop the bike. 

There is no bad weather. Only bad clothing.

It's been warm here in Minnesota thus far this December.  Enough so that I hear riders discussing whether to dig their machines out of the corners of garages and sheds.

"Ya know, the gravel to the pole barn is almost dry.  If we get some sun it could clear enough lane to get the bike out of the yard..." 

This is Minnesota.  Normally, ice doesn't form and melt away after a day or two.  It becomes thick and craggy after brief melting periods followed by heavy equipment tracks jamming it into ankle spraining immovable seasonal stone.  Up here we chip away at it with hardened steel.  We pressure steam it out of our gutters and buy special electrical line to heat our roofs so the stuff doesn't build up under shingles and slowly tear them from the wood underneath.   Then we go snowmobiling.

This year has been warmer.  I think I recall having heard a solitary snowmobile go by after the snow event we had which dumped a little over a foot of the white stuff on us.  But that was a solid month past.  Steady warmth since has given way to clearing roads.  Now all we have to contend with is fog.

A young man inside me keeps asking the older guy if he still wants to ride,  You know, like you used to.  The other one, the one actually facing the younger one in the mirror reminds himself of the grey in his beard.  The pictures of his wife and children reflected from the wall behind him.  

These then are the questions:  Can you enjoy the ride without mentally abandoning attentiveness?  Will you forget to ride to the conditions?  Will you prepare by dressing appropriately for those conditions?  Is your bike, fresh out of dormancy, ready for a winter ride?

Lots to think about and an itch to scratch.



Harv

Merry Christmas!

The season of riding this last year felt short.  Incomplete.  As my children grow, decisions are made regarding how my time gets spent.   So in one sense, you lose one thing but gain another.  Trade offs are natural.  They're part of life.  In another sense, you can't help but miss a little of the time when you could be a bit more selfish.   When you could slip awayt on the bike for a ride without someone wondering when you'd be back. 

You don't get the time raising your kids back, so you better think about their future (and how it affects their world tomorrow) in the present.   My son likes to ride on the back of the Genuine but the Vespa doesn't have a backrest.  He also rides the scooter I rebuilt some years back, out on the country land my wife's parents own. 

I recently discovered my daughter likes vintage cars.  I mean, I finally realized just how much she likes them as we sat together watching Fast and Loud.   I told her to do well in school so she can own the ones she wants.  "I can do that..." came with a sidelong grin at me. 

Despite the riding season being low on miles added to the odometer, I had some fun and learned some things.

I learned to keep the feet in board when going down. On a scooter, my belief is that the rider is safer by staying on the scooter with the feet on the floor board.  Stay on that thing until it stops unless it's absolutely safer to dismount and get as far from the scooter as possible. 

I rode sopping wet gravel after a torrent and found myself on a dirt road.   Everything was going smoothly and I got cocky.  I picked up a little speed and the front end of the bike simply washed out.  I rode it into the mud because there wasn't anything else I could do at that point.  The truth is, I put myself into that situation with overconfidence.  My prize was to ride thirty miles home with the handlebar at the ten and four o'clock position.   A half blue, half brown Vespa scooter and half brown rider with the strangest hold on the bars.  Why isn't he turning right??

You get some strange stares when people see you ride by that way.

The bike survived, although cosmetically, I plan a little tlc.  Next year will bring what it brings. 

Ride safe,
Harv

Riding Safely in Critterville

Have you ever thought about where the majority of those critters come from when you see them about to dart into the road ahead of you?

I'm not talking about suburban rides versus country rides.  Or rides past or through woods versus fields either.  This is the moment of truth.  The last chance you get to scan the road before you to catch that reflective flash, that outline of fur standing at the edge of the tarmac.

I've spoken about this phenomenon with a few friends and the observation seems to be universal.  Here in the northern Midwest U.S., road crossing animals are on the right side of the road more often than I ever see them trying to cut in front of me from my left.  I have no idea why this is, but it's been a consistent piece of data for me.  They almost always come from the right.

Which doesn't seem to make sense because an animal could be on either side of the road at any given moment, right?

Oddly, out here in the country I've seen critters cross the other way, from their own "right" side when no traffic was present yet risk their lives by attempting to cross from their "left".  I can't put a reason to it but realized long ago that I ride prepared for this as yet unexplained observation.

I ride as close to the middle of the road as I can whenever possible.  More reaction time is what I'm after and so far this system has worked for me.  The critters almost always try to cross from my right.

I can see someone looking to contradict me and that's fine.  My experiences won't mirror everyone else's riding experiences.  I just thought it would be worth writing about why I ride toward the middle of the road whenever I can.  Especially from dawn to dusk.  I also slow way down during those hours. 

Harv   

Satisfaction

Over the long winter I thought about what I might want to do this season.  Places I'd like to go.  Places which were a bit of a ride from here.

Of course a man can rationalize any number of reasons to get the bigger Vespa in order to get to those great riding roads in the first place.  But eventually he needs to be honest with himself.  The roads nearest him are just as good as the roads people from other places people have talked about.  They're out there.  You can find em.  It's a matter of exploring in your own back yard.

I've had a bit of opportunity to ride some roads I didn't know existed.  Roads right off the main drags.  Little used by everyday traffic because they really don't go anywhere in particular.

One such road is a numbered highway.  It's a loop, more or less, off another main artery heading out of St Cloud.  A good portion of this road is pretty straight.  And then it gets fun.  And there are roads it intersects which might be just as plausible to a guy on a little one fifty scooter.

Forty miles seems to be about the right distance to clear my thoughts.  To get into that better frame of mind.  More is better but forty seems to put me where I feel refreshed after the ride. 

Yesterday's ride took me onto a gravel washboarded road for a couple miles.  Fifteen to twenty mph is all I could go.  It was a matter of striking the balance between a loose controlled sliding sensation and keeping the pace up enough to lessen the bounce of the taxed suspension.   I really don't understand why everyone wants stiffer suspension on their bikes for a number of reasons and this is certainly one of them. 

Harv

City Rides, Country Rides and Smiles

Have you been out riding over the summer?  Busy but still able to fit in a few of those really good rides you were hoping for?  Good.  No one wants to look back on summer and feel like none of the fun stuff ever got its due.

Some of us really get a kick out of the city rides.  Boulevards and cruising down quiet neighborhood streets.  Seeing families out walking, biking.  Smelling a charcoal grill and trying to locate the source.  Little kids waving to us and us waving back.  Smiles all around.

In the evenings the lines of street lamps are glowing guides, leading us alongside a river or through a long parkway.  People spinning Frisbees to the dark silhouettes of happy dogs racing to intercept them.  Trees lush with summer, growing over some of those lamps, creating interesting shadows across streets and lawns.

There's the smell of night.  Things cool down as the sun sets and the humidity increases ever so slightly.  Dew on your windscreen and seat, fog in the low lying areas and near waterways.  A familiar pungency. The first few hours of the evening bring out the bugs and they slap your helmet and windscreen as you ride.

Out in the country riding is best when the sun is still shining.  You can see for miles.  Your peripheral vision is as clear and bright as your focus.  Lakes far off in the distance beg you to find out which roads might take you to them.  Climbs and drop-offs become the tang to the taste of the ride.  Vast crop fields bow and wave to you in the breeze.  Golden stalks of wheat and tasseled corn, the deep green of soy and alfalfa.  Hardly a stop sign in sight, you just cruise along at comfortable speeds while new horizons open up to you with each new crest of a hill.

City and country rides.  They're certainly different.  If you live in a big enough city, just getting out of it could be a ride in itself to some folks.  Others are drawn to the downtowns and suburban motorways.   The choices and reasons for individual preferences are as diverse as we are.  So long as the places we ride evoke in us the smiles we're after, it really doesn't matter where we choose to ride.


Harv

Weather Patterns

Sometimes a person has a thought which ruminates in the background of a certain subject matter.  Some idea which doesn't really come to light until a certain moment.  And then that person says something like, "You know, I've had this idea for a while now and..."

I've had one of those thoughts work its way to the surface lately.  Something I was putting aside since the spring.  Maybe longer.

I find myself not wanting to ride at night anymore.   Having to keep a keen eye on the shoulders for critters for example.  Because they don't get noticed unless you see their eyes.  A greyish brown furry thing wanders into the roadway ahead and you have to avoid it one way or another.  Yourheadlight beam bores a tunnel into the darkness and even when it's bright and wide, you're still riding down that tunnel.  What's to see besides what that headlight illuminates?

I don't know if headlights have gotten so bright that it's an either/or propsition or something else is going on but within your beam, you see things very well.  Look outside that beam and the darkness uttterly envelopes everything else.  There is no transition.  On the old machines I rode, and maybe even some that weren't so old, the old sealed beams were enough to give a rider what the rider needed in order to ride while the sun was down.  And yet not so bright that looking outside the artifical illumination leaves you dark-struck, your vision unable to recuperate between the two diametric light conditions.

In the spring I could point out that sand and salt, not yet washed from the roads meant steering corrections weren't guaranteed to unfold as  intended.  You want all the available natural light to see where that gravel and winter residue was so that you could slow to a safe speed to negotiate through it.

In the summer I rode at night but I promised myself this night riding thing would come to an end one way or another.  I just don't feel safe riding at night lately.

Then the autumn.  Or late summer, really.  I've been riding new roads.  Places I meant to go but haven't due to all sorts of reasons.  Mostly because I just haven't had the time until recently.  But opportunities have come during daylight hours, strangely enough.  And because of this I've been able to follow some of the chains of lakes here in central Minnesota.  And they aren't just beautiful roads to traverse, the secenery of this region is worth seeing.   Something you won't experience by riding at night. 

It's alright when the world you live in sometimes influences your decisions.  A sailboat needs to tack with the wind.  Its crew succeeds best when they work with rather than against weather patterns.


Harv

Size Matters

When you ride a bigger bike, you might see smaller displacement bikes as only slight variations on each other.  You might say, for example, that not enough power is not enough power.  That it takes X to be truly satisfied.  And you'd be right.  From your perspective.

But if you came from the smallest of motorcycles and moved up through the displacement ranks to mid sized motorcycles, you might see each increase as sizeable.  And from that perspective, you would feel justified in your view.

So is one view more correct than the other?  I think it depends upon the individual.  Some people insist on the leading edge of performance based upon their pocketbooks.  They'll get the most they can afford and upgrade for improvements over stock.  No matter what level they start at, these folks enjoy getting the most out of a given design.  I can appreciate that.

Others will ride the next model up which offers stock performance comparable to the lower model with upgrades.  I would tend in that direction myself.  

The old saying, "There's no replacement for displacement" still rings true.  In cars, it's about the edge of performance.  In small displacement motorcycles and scooters, it seems to be an effort to create similar performance as larger machines at a much decreased overal cost.  The cost for the improvements sometimes seems too high to me.  You get the increase, but you also risk a less reliable engine.  I couldn't explain all the reasons why except to say that we can't have it all when it comes to upgrades.  You still lack the torque most of us really are after even though the horsepower has been increased.

I'm a back roads, country lanes kind of guy.  55mph is the usual speed limit and people often travel a bit past that.  So a 150cc Vespa, running on reformulated crud (ethanol) won't have as much juice as it could running on straight gasoline, but that's another story.  Still, it is just a 150cc.  In the greater scheme it probably means naught to most.  Unless you ride a machine on the edge of the place where that minute performance difference would actually make a hill of beans' difference.  Say, climbing some of these back roads hills where dropping ten miles per would become dropping just a few miles per hour on clean gasoline. 

See the problem?  Counting the small ways to get close to the solution doesn't mean I've achieved the solution.  And I've got a pretty good idea what the solution really is.  Even Vespa solved it.  It took them a complete redesign to their thinking and began a whole new line of machines which are still ever growing in displacement. 

Kit a 150cc and lose money (and reliability if I do it wrong) or save and buy a 200cc or greater large-frame modern Vespa.  The second choice is factory built to do exactly what I want it to be able to do.  It doesn't seem like much; a matter of 50 or so odd cubic centimeters of displacement.  But it is.  Size really does matter.

Harv

AreYou Satisfied?

It wasn't that long ago (or was it) that 55mph was a national speed limit.  One that's been increasing since before I was a rider.  I can't tell you if this is a good or bad thing.  The few minutes shaved by "allowing" travellers to kick it up a notch really doesn't seem all that advantageous.  Maybe it's just me.

It takes a little disipline to leave early.  To get there before you need to be there.  It even takes a little discipline to just get there on time. 

Now here's the weird thing.  At least to me anyway.

When we had slower vehicles and lower speed limits, we didn't blame the NHTSA.  We just left for the destination earlier.  I'm pretty sure our wanting more powerful cars and two wheelers had nothing to do with getting there on time.  It was always more about style and having the available horsies under the hood or below the tank as insurance you could blast off when you wanted to show off a little. 

Beating someone else seems an inherent characteristic of the human condition.  People are always beating me in my 14 year old Camry.  Even when I'm trying not to be beaten.  So badly.

For a while I was into trying to race cars off the line on my LX.  Well I got taken pretty well a few times so that cured that.  Eleven horsepower.  Eleven. 

Overall the bike satisfies me.  There are some niggles, like a struggle to get up medium to large hills.  I kind of have to adjust my riding to accomodate what the bike can and can't do.  Sixty mph on the back roads might be the norm for a while yet or it may not. 

For me it would have to be increasing torque.  That would solve much for me.  But can I live with it as it is? 

Yup.


Harv

The Land of Ten Thousand Lakes

And the Roads which Take You Around Them.


  You can try to predict how a riding season here in the north woods might go, but you really can't be sure.    The nation suffered an incredible stretch of heat this summer.  The kind of heat I won't ride in anymore.  But for some evening rides, I had to wait until the heat broke.  

I got to thinking about where I've been riding.  And where I've been meaning to ride.

There's an area I've been meaning to explore.  A motorcycle store is in a town right off the expressway.  You can see the building from the freeway.  The place sells Triumphs and BMWs among other brands.  They also carry a good selection of gear.

So I decided to take the back roads and wend my way to this motorcycle store.  Only I wasn't real attentive to the time.  Apparently I was having too much fun to notice I wasn't getting all that much closer for all the riding I was doing.  I arrived ten minutes after they closed.  And I wasn't the only one.  A few others rolled into the lot during my stretch-and-drink.  I chatted with one fellow restoring his father's KZ650 who'd done pretty much the same thing I had; got lost in the spirit of the ride.  On the way home, I stretched that ride even longer. Once or twice I was completely disoriented as clouds blotted away the sun.  At one point I rode better than two miles on a dirt road.  The lushest, densest, greenest overgrowth on a country lane I can remember.  If anyone saw me they had to know I was lost.  And they could probably tell I didn't care that I was lost either.

These roads around the lakes.  They're the slow way to get somewhere.  Only the locals and other riders seem to enjoy them.  They almost seem like a natural barrier to folks in a hurry.  Which is fine, because they're fantastic to ride at legal speeds.  And it isn't just these roads.  A curve can surprise you with an incredible view.  A lake with sailboats and fisherman for example.  Rolling hills of wheat and tassled corn.  tracts of woods such a dark shade of green they actually appear blue. 

It's a slightly different heading on the compass.  A new angle on the ride, so to speak (sorry-couldn't resist).

To the roads around the lakes.

Harv

Roadbum Returns

Testing, 1, 2, 3..  Testing...

It's been a long time since I was able to post here.  Some type of computer error seems to have been resolved.  Not sure quite what, and possibly even how, but suffice it to say the solutions (s) have induced more than one headache. 

So I'm back.  And I've been riding.  Exploring.  Putting time in the saddle and wishing I could write about it.  Places have been beckoning me.  I've had an itch for a larger Vespa.  But that itch won't be scratched in the forseeable future.  Be thankful for whatcha have, as they say.  Always strive for more but be grateful for that which you have.

This year has seen a host of regular maintenance occuring on Kythera.  I buggered a few things too along the way.  Nothing so bad that it could not be reversed, but as any shade tree "mechanic" (I'm really not worthy of that last word) will tell you, it's the mistakes which tend to teach you how things really work.

I need new riding gloves.  My twenty five year old Hein Gericke gauntlets have a worn finger.  Right through the leather.  Not the stitching, but where your finger pad is.  I'm guessing the wear is from decades of brushing the brake/clutch handle.  I might repair these, but I've got to see what's out there in the world of modern motorcycle gauntlet gloves.

Harv

Riding the Straightest Roads in Central Minnesota


When you need to be somewhere you tend to take the modern highway.   A purpose designed and built concrete runway connecting large cities and states.  There are no intersections crossing this massive path.  No speed limits below fifty five miles per hour.  Outside the metro areas you can set your cruise control at a speed within the range of the general rate of flowing traffic and just roll along.  The Superslab.

In many cases you will find a series of roads running parallel to the superhighways.  Here in the midwest we call them frontage roads.  They have lower speed limits.  They have stop signs and take you to the little towns which the main arteries have been built to bypass.  Towns with family owned businesses slowly being displaced by box stores and convenience style gas stations.  Generally there's a core community you'll recognize by the homes built in earlier eras.  Like a wagon wheel whose spokes are naturally spreading outward, the centers of these town show patches of new homes on the outlying hillsides where farming families took the opportunity of lots of money to give up the family agribusiness.  I've known people who became millionaires with a single signature.

So the other morning, I got the idea in my head to take a succession of these roads to a town a bit of a distance away.  I hopped on the Vespa and took off.  It could not have been a better morning to ride.

I passed through one town and decided to visit a friend whose got a knack for building his own bikes.  He'll take old machines which have been put to pasture and restores them to reliable running condition.  And then he rides the heck out of em.  Sometimes he does a little custom work to suit his interests or chase a direction a particular model seems to have been headed.  Before some corporate accounting dept. told the designers they had to stay within a certain budget.  You know the story.  A concept is built, redesigns happen, things get added, others removed, and you end up with a bland machine which looks not too much different than all the other similar models.  Then an aftermarket company creates bolt-on kits to "customize" these machines.  It's good marketing and most of what aftermarket companies come up with is useful.  Often necessary.  Some is for show and that's alright too.  You probably realized I'm kind of a utility type of person a while ago.

Anyway, the latest machine my friend has been running and building is a...'79 I think it is(?) KZ650.  He bought the Kawasaki from my neighbor and had to bring it home on a trailer.  The engine needed minor work but turned out to have good compression.  Other bits were time worn and replaced.  The bike, good as they were in their day, was your basic Universal Japaese Motorcycle (UJM).  They were very good  machines, really.  Mid sized with enough pep and torque to handle the 55mph gas crunch superslabs of their day.  Even now, despite their age and given their deserved concessions, they're still capable mid displacement light tourers.

He was laying fiberglass over a mold for a cafe style seat when I got there. If you remember old Nortons and Guzzis, you'll recall a single seat racing inspired tailpiece. 

He found straight, downturned handlebars and added a bar and mirror to the left side.  The bike, in mid design stage if you will, is still primer grey.  The frame is a deep red which really offsets the polished aluminum of the engine and flat primer grey of the tank. 

He stripped out whatever it was Kawasaki hung beneath the seat, giving the whole machine an all business attitude.  The fenders are long gone.  And the orignal pipes have been replaced by a set donated by a Ninja and gathered into a Jardine cannister.  It's a bike you'd have to see.  One you'd want to ride.

Oh, and this Kaw' is kick start only.

"Lead the way," he told me.  So I did. 

We headed north along the first frontage road and followed it through one small town after another.

I kept thinking, man I didn't realize this road was so straight! 

We stopped for a bite at a Subway in one of those convenience style gas stations. 

"Man, what a perfect day to ride," he said.

" Boy am I glad you showed up this morning.  I would not have taken the time to do this if you didn't ride up," he said.

I felt better.  I was worried he'd be annoyed all the roads we'd been on were arrow stright. 

"Man, I'm just sorry I took us on all these boring straight roads."

"No worries.  We'll find the twisties another time."  He popped the last two or three bites worth into his mouth in one shot, chewed them down into manageable swallows and smiled. 

We got back onto the road and headed toward our lives' responsibilities.

Even though time constraints put us on the same road back, it felt a lot better.

I guess I'd forgotten being on any road on a bike is better than the alternative.


Harv

Sometimes Group Rides, Sometimes Just bombing Around

Tonight was a night for a group ride.  I started a forum to encourage local riders to get together for some of the local rides.  But it's not the first time something like this has been done. 

Some years ago there was a group started by a gentleman who had started the idea here in town.  He did a lot of work to build a community out of scooterists.   A lot of effort goes into these sorts of things.  Unfortunately he got rid of his scooter and over time the group began to fragment.  I hope that someday he gets the itch to get another scooter. 

So I can't lay claim to doing something new in terms of starting a scooter riding group.  But I will try to continue the best of what he'd built in the time he rode and created what he had.

The group did Wednesday night rides throughout the riding season.  There were always a few and often quite a few people who showed up at the coffee house by the mall.  He also had a ride for the local food shelf.  We would get donations and canned goods and then ride out on one of the bigger treks of the season.

One year I think we had eleven scooterists ride for the food shelf run.  And many more showed up to give and support us.  He even managed to get us into the local paper!  That was quite a day. 

A friend and fellow scooterist brought the idea back to me enough times that I finally realized it would be the right thing to do.  To see if we could round up the old crew and invite new people to join us.  Technically we began at the end of last year.  Not the best time to start a riding group.  Most people were thinking about winter by the time we got "rolling".

This year's weather gave the impression that spring would start early and get warm fast.  Well it hasn't but we're still riding.  The Wednesday night rides starting at 6:30 and the Sunday even rides starting at 6:00 have commensed.

Cold?  Yes, it has been.  Wet?  Started out that way tonight.  But you know, the cold wasn't that bad and the rain turned into a dissipating drizzle by the time I got to our start locale, which is the McDonalds across from WalMart on highway fifteen.

Tonight we bombed around east of the Mississippi.  Through the back country of Sauk Rapids.  I'll have to check the maps before the next ride in that general direction because most of where we rode was, um, awfully straight.  Although we found a fun little stretch somewhere behind Mayhew lake.  I'll be calling on the maps to give us more interesting roads with some destinations in mind.

Harv

Group Rides for St Cloud Area Riders


I put up a forum not too long ago. (You'll find it if you look just to the left)  I don't know what this will eventually become, but I wanted to have a site where local scooterists could find each other.  Seems like every day it's above forty five degrees I will see at least one scooterist out riding.  Whether it's in town or on a country lane.  And I always wonder, would this person be interested in finding other scooterists if they could?  Would they be interested in group rides with like minded people?

Rides on Wednesdays (6:30pm) and Sundays (6-ish?)

When and where can be changed if people prefer other times but for now we'll be riding from different start locations but try to make the start times the same.  Provide some variety. 

Distances will be sugggested by me, but aren't set in stone.  Neither are routes.  If people who come out for the rides choose a different route or distance, we'll do it.  Or if ideas come up on the forum we can talk about them and see if we want to change plans.  Or, we can set up new ideas for future rides too.

One thing and I'm sticking to this:  Riders without motorcycle endorsments will not be allowed to ride with the group.  At least initially.  (we'll review this policy now and then given circumstances) We definitely encourage riding with others to gain the skills and confidence, but once a group is more than a pair of riders, those newer to riding or unfamiliar to riding in groups can, just by the nature of inexperience, become.. more dangerous both to themselves and others. 

Harv

Rebirth

There's a special feeling when you take that first ride of the season.  Part of you, no matter how many times you check things over before you even fire up the bike, anticipates something catastrophic happening during that first venture out.  You listen so much more closely to every sound, every tick.  You veer back and forth on empty straight roads just to get the senses in touch with how a scooter feels when it leans.  You find yourself squinting at the road ahead, from a carlength to far into the distance.  No one likes to slide out on gravel.  You're watching every driveway, every intersection.  Looking for stray pets and suicidal squirrels.

Then it happens.  You settle down.  Maybe it's by small increments but you begin to enjoy the ride again.  A deep breath brings dry spring air into you.  Another and the smells begin to revive you.  Before long you're in that frame of mind where you're most comfortable.  The dual state of calm cautiousness and content.  You're just happy to be on the road again.

A squirrel pops its head out from a bush next to the road.  Part of you jars into awareness.  Will it dart out ahead of you?  It's doing that... thing.  You know what I'm talking about.  That thing where it bobs its head up and down trying to decided if it can cross the road.  I swear the damn squirrels around here have their own little game of chicken.  Maybe its how they transition from youth to man-squirrels in Squirrel World, I dunno.  The plump little guy (ok, that's an assumption but I'm taking it) decides to just watch me ride by.  We glare at each other.  I've got my eye on you, squirrel.

I leave the neighborhood and pass through farmlands.  Some already tilled by anxious farmers, some still wearing the clipped stalks of last year's corn.  I ride out to my own farm, twenty odd miles from my house in town.  Nature is still not quite awoken.  Everything wears the same light palates of brown it had before and duringf winter.  The roads were almost devoid of gravel and winter salt residue.  A false sense of security. I still slowed down for each bend in the road.

The sun is warm and the sky a beautiful hue of deep blue.  The ground beside the road still looks hard and dry.  We've had little spring rain and even less snow since the Vespa was put away.  Gotta remember to bring something to drink next time I ride.

From a distance of probably just shy of a half mile I can see my land on the top of the hill.  The soil is light brown and hasn't been tilled yet.  But there are signs other tracts have been turned.  Too early to be doing that, I think to myself.  But what do I know...  I'm no farmer.  Just a land owner whose got the property because there isn't much of real value in this world besides the house you live in and the land you own.  It was always understood that one day I would heed my uncles' advice and apply some of my savings toward as much land as I could reasonably afford.  Wise men they are, as Yoda would say.

I swuing back to the T intersection and meandered past where I would normally turn toward home.  Then headed further out and let the little 150 run at speeds it felt most comfortable.  There's something really nice about how a Leader 150cc engine sounds when it's clipping along the country roads.  No stop lights, no stop signs.  Just the even thrum of a single cylinder climbing and descending the minor hills of central Minnesota.

When a particular ride is a good one, there's a sense that you've been on the road for longer than you really were.  That somehow the cobwebs have been cleared away not because of the distance you rode, but because the ride was... good.  There are long vacations and there are short vacations.  Too many variables to anylize it all now.  Different kinds of rides meet different kinds of needs.  That seems to say it well enough.

It is good to have the Vespa.

Harv

A Christmas wish


I originally wrote this as a reply to Scooter in the Sticks.  I can think of no better way to speak to you to share my wishes for whomever might still be reading here.

Merry Christmas to you!


I think back and remember easily how blessed I am. My parents were in Germany during the war. So Christmas was, as they said, what you were able to make of it. Aunts and uncles were seperated from the family and while I've talked to them, not much is really divulged. They look to today, to their children whose childhoods were memorable by those aunts and uncles' efforts. What I have, what my cousins have, is because the spirit of giving and the tenacious obsession to put us first is a gift beyond anything I could ever ask for. Because it is beyond my understanding to have been where they were.

For those who had virtually nothing given to them, know that what you have given of yourself when you could, is the strength which makes your loved ones grateful to have you in their lives.

Christmas is about the tenacity of spirit in spite of conditions. The near obsessive internal will to overcome, in spite of what logic seems to tell us. It is the natural condition of the human spirit which leads us to trust in something which doesn't necessarily make sense to us.

Christmas reminds us to have faith.



Harv

The Does-It-All Motorcycle-ooter



Thirty years ago the average 150cc scooter could run along side cars because the speed limits were lower.  Our highways averaged 55 mph speed limits.  In my home state of Wisconsin the country roads were also 55 mph.   While scooterists generally stayed off expressways, they were perfect for surface streets and country biways.  And we often heard tales of scooter riders cruising lonely state highways far between major metropolitan centers.  Long distance riders who, in our minds back then, were one step away from the two stroke 50cc moped riders who crossed vast tracts of land just to be able to say to themselves that it could be done.  Deep down we were impressed with their daring.  But people who rode scooters more than a hundred miles outside their home bases were considered slightly off.  When the subject of an assumed long distance scooterist came up, we compared their machines to ours.  Mainly for the comfort factor.  How could they do it?  Why would they?  Misunderstood pariahs.

We failed to recognize the logical comparison.  It wasn't anything special to hop on our semi restored late sixties to seventies Japanese standards and pull the same stunts.  Loose groups of riding buddies whose RD400s, Harley Sprints, Suzuki singles and twins (we called em Sushi's back then), Yammies and the ever revered small displacement Hondas who went as far as time allowed.  I rode a two stroke Kawi 250 Enduro myself in those days.

Then we stepped into early adulthood.  Larger bikes replaced smaller bikes.  Money could buy alot in those days.  Or so it seemed.  But it never failed to come up in conversation at some wide gravel shoulder.  We always discussed the roads as we'd once ridden them.  Close to full out, little engines working as hard as they could.  Some of them sucking fuel and oil mix through themselves, trying to create enough power to keep up with the bikes ahead of them.  Rpm's high and loud.  The total rush of going fast on a "slow" bike.

Some of my friends graduated to the eight hundred cc and above class.  Mostly cruisers.  Even I opted for the vintage look with modern reliability.  A Sportster which had finally graduated to belt final drive.  Oh, and the wonderful new overdrive gear.  You'd know it simply as fifth gear.  Fast?  No. Comfortable?  Not too bad really.  But to me that machine was the essence of the unadulterated motorcycle.  I could live with its quirks.  I still have it.

In the quest to gain market share, motorcycles have only grown over the years.  To me they've stepped beyond logical to the point of becoming cartoonish.  The backlash is that scooters have followed suit to some degree.  Or so you might think, but bear with me here.  I'm going to show you something.

The world motorcycle market has a share of buyers who are able to choose something we U.S. buyers cannot have new.  The three hundred to five hundred cc class motorcycle.  Last I checked you could still buy a brand new Honda CB 400cc in other countries.  And the worst part?  They are the natural progression of design we would want to see coming out of that historic past.  But we can't have em.  It's either a 250 road bike or a dual sport, as they're now called.  Although the dualies do meet what I still think is the mid sized dispacement catagory we never should have lost here.  But not a legit road bike with decent accessory choices for road use.  I blame the bean counters.

Find a need, fill a need.  It's a quote from a kids' movie called Robots.  The character is a visionary named Big Weld.  The whole premise of the story line is no matter who you are, (or what you're made of, considering this is a world of machines imbued with human characteristics) you can be the one with the solution to a problem.

Enter the return of the scooter.

Even though Honda never really let go of the scooter market, Honda also never created the same interest in their scooters as they had when they created the ubiquitous "You meet the nicest people on a Honda" catch phrase, back in the sixties.  But another company was primed for the market.  All it had to do was get it's product in front of consumers again.

First of all, the return of Vespa to the United States came at a time when gas prices were increasing.  Parent company Piaggio banked on the market responding well to a sharp little machine with fine fuel mileage and whatever-that-French-phrase-is-which-connotes upscale cool...  And they made it automatic.  People who'd never ridden suddenly had a reason to find out what made motorized two wheeling so great.  They could skip the whole learning to shift shenanigans altogether!  It happened slowly, but it caught on.

From the air cooled 150cc ET, evolved the LX.  From there, Vespa begat the liquid cooled GT 200.  A legitimately tourable scooter.  One which could keep up with expressway traffic without being swallowed by SUV's and busses.  Before long the 200cc grew to a 250cc and became fuel injected.  Now we have the The Vespa GTS 300ie.  And with it, parent company Piaggio has added larger wheeled scooters using the same engines carried within the retro Vespa line.  Look at the Aprilia scooters some time.  They're everything good you remember from the seventies era "mid" displacement motorcycles and they include even more.  No bungy cord necessary.  There's storage under the seat.  There are rear luggage racks.  And rack mounted trunks ar available.  Windshields too.  Best of all, these new scooters retain what made the earliest Vespas so right when they were introduced to Italy on their debut.  Legshields and floorboards.  In other words, weather protection.  Something those venerable small to mid displacement motorcycles of our past never had.

I've always been a believer in the idea that you cannot really instill confidence in a new rider if you teach them to ride on something they don't initially feel confident riding.  And I mean before they get some training.  If a person doesn't look down at what they're on and say, out loud, "You sure this thing isn't too small???" then maybe the instinct they need to have in an emergency may not be their first reaction.  I'll go so far as to say the moment of emergency will be overshadowed by hesitation.  One deer or loose dog.  A veering car.    The rider has to be so confident on the machine that he or she acts before thumbing through the mental rolodex for the right response.  From lane position to seating position and hold.  You just can't wrestle a bike which takes you for the ride rather than the other way around.  Your confidence has to be in your ability to throw the bike any way you need to in an oncoming possible emergency.  In other words, you have to prevent the emergency before it becomes one.

Is the scooter the better small to mid displacement motorcycle?

Yup.


Harv

Check, check, check, Uh oh...

The time had come to replace another rear tire.  I'd hit the wear marker.  Part of me wanted to click over another thousand mile marker before the change.  But the better part of me decided against it.

I'd ridden locally for the last several rides. Inching closer to the mileage marker I wanted to reach.  What could it hurt, I thought, to go a little further.  There's tread depth beyond that point.  And I thought about friends who'd literally ride a tire with threads showing.  I also realized they were nuts.  Even back in those days.

It took a discussion with a friend I'd just ridden with the other day to remind me of part of the code of Keith Code.  He told me a story he'd read about how Mr. Code described the one similarity of all the crashed bikes Code had seen in bike junkyards.  They all had severely worn tires.  Well beyond the wear markers.

I thought about a certain safety instructor who would kick my ass if I were to fail to follow the most basic and common sense of rules; Only ride a bike which is safe to ride.

So with the shadow of Irondad beside me I set to the task of tearing Kythera down to replace the rear skin.   I began by taking off the exhaust.    On the Vespa LX150, you don't have a choice.  The can is too close to the tire, even though it's a single sided swing arm.  You have to screw open the little door at the front and below the seat.  Then you spend a little time trying to get the right angle to remove the nuts holding the exhaust in place. Then you move to the side of the bike where the can is and unscrew the two allen head bolts before you can begin with the tire removal itself.  And since the bike was partly apart anyway I took the time to change the fluids and such.  Everything went extremely well.  Transmission fluid, check.  Oil and filter change, check.  New spark plug, check. 

So I started the bike.

In no time at all I remembered the one thing I'd forgotten to do.  Put the damn exhaust back on.

There's moment of bewiderment when you hear the cacophony of blatting.  Followed by the fastest shut-off of the machine you ever accomplished.  And you'll probably hit the kill switch before you'll look for the key as I did.  Then I swore.  I used the appropiate four letter S word.  And the exhaust went back without too much trouble.

A spin around the block and a call to a friend led to a nice evening ride.  The bike really did feel like it functioned better.  Probably the new spark.

That scooter does bring a smile to my face.


Harv

She Told Me To

Virtually the entire United States has been under some weird weather pattern which brought heat and humidity over us all.  For months.  In spades.  This same weather pattern also drenched the upper midwest in rain.  The upside to all this rain is it benfits the region's farmers.  While they've had a late start to their planting season, the strong growth portends high yields come this fall.  Although many farmers have suffered storm damage, those storms seem to have been somewhat localized.  Overall, most of Minnesota has had a good growing season thus far.

How does this matter to the Roadbum, you might wonder. 

A few years ago I bought a chunk of farmland which I rent out to a local farmer.  The property is about twenty odd miles from my house in town.  It's a favorite loop of mine for short scooter jaunts.  Lots of twisty roads to choose from to get there and back.  And a myriad of quiet midwest country roads going nowhere in particular that branch out from there. 

Because I'm sort of invested in how my own crops are doing, I'll notice certain fields on the way.  I'll take account of how well the beans and the corn are growing.    Passing by herds of cattle grazing in the sun and noticing how they and the fields they're in, look.

For the majority of the spring and on through the summer, I haven't been riding as I have in years past.  Family schedules and weather kept me off those rides. 

And about those rains...

It wouldn't be an issue if rain was just rain.  Even hard rain is a kind of challenge to me.  I once rode nearly five hundred miles straight in torrential downpours so hard that my buddy and I decided we would only stop to gas up.  Every overpass on the expressways had cars pulling under them.  Were we to be under one of those overpasses and a driver looking for safety pulled up, they could easily plough right over those bikes without seeing them.  We were on two black Harleys and riding in pitch black storms up I94 from Racine Wisconsin to Long Prairie Minnesota.  Fifty degrees.  My boots were full of water.  It was like putting your feet into two large and really cold mason jars and just keeping them there.  Water had soaked up the back of the inside of my helmet to the point the interior fabric absorbed it over the entire internal circumference.  I had ridden numb from somewhere just east of Madison to the rains letting up a few miles from my future inlaws' home.  So rains don't generally bother me.  And I've learned to prepare much better for them since then.

No, the rains which bear fifty mile an hour winds and sometimes hail were the norm here in the upper midwest this spring and summer.  Broken trees, damaged roofs, that sort of thing.    Always the weather channel warnings.  You get older, you start to take those things seriously.

Yesterday my wife and I talked about what we would be doing today.  She was going to pick up the kids from her parents and mentioned that I hadn't been riding in a long time.  That this would be a great opportunity to make that time.  You know, sometimes you just can't argue with your wife.  She left, I hit the road.  And I got myself a little lost too.

I headed out to see the land.  Then to Joe's to see how he's been.  We spoke of the fields, the yields, and his cattle.  His kids, my kids and our wives.  Then I left and rode up the west river road along the Mississippi.

I don't know how it is in most places, but here in central Minnesota, when you're this far up, the Mississippi is just the biggest local river.  Homes are sparse along this stretch.  A winding road lazily takes you to a small city called Little Falls.  Home of Charles Lindbergh and the state park named after him.  I rode past the park and took an interesting looking but unfamiliar road west.  Once in a while a sign would off some general indication where I was.  My heading from there was south.  More or less.

Somehow I manged to find Holdingford.  And then Avon.  I know a little route back from there which has some good winding roads so I took it.  The Vespa running as well as it ever has. 

It's good to listen to your wife.



TR