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pecuniumI am in Ottawa now. I meant to arrive on Thursday... I got here yesterday afternoon.
As I said before, the weather looked bad (and my Thursday was better spent being in town, as it meantladymondegreen didn't have to worry about having her passport, etc.). It's also the day I took the photos of the hydrant and muffler. I spotted them on the way to discover the bike didn't need oil; which I'd thought it did. But a cup or so low isn't a big deal, and having an opened bottle of oil in my bag, when the need wasn't absolute seemed a less than ideal thing.
Friday dawned clear and pleasant, and for all that I have the art of packing the bike down to a pretty smooth drill, I'd not factored what being in one place for a week, and one in which I was being tolerably distracted, had done to my sense of where things were. I got started late on the final details, and then I had to move the bike (no way I was moving all my gear a half mile, and then loading up the bike).
Ottawa, however, is only a six hour distance from Jersey City, were it not for one small thing... New Jersey is hell on earth to get out of. The first hour on the road, I managed about 19 miles. Not only was the traffic unbelievably bad, the roads are laid out so that only someone who has driven them for years has any hope of making the right turns.
Signs are poorly timed, if present at all. Street names change, on the roads, but not the map. Must turn lanes appear, without warning, or apparent need. In short I was making bad time, and in ill-humor by the time I got to Mt. Olive, NY, and ordered my supper.
I had also... only made 50 miles in the previous 2 hours; I had not less than five hours of road time, once I had food in me, and was ready to move again (I eat a bit more, at a sitting, then I do at home, which means I spend about an hour at table... some to eat, some to let it settle. With the need to ease the frame some from the constraints of the bike that's a pretty good balance). So it was looking as if it was going to be close on 5 o'clock before I was once again on the road in a serious way... because this meal break had taken a bit longer; what with calling Marna to bitch and moan, and Merav to do some of the same (did you know ice cream trucks in NJ have pop-out stop signs which are binding to all lanes of traffic... even the one left turn lane? I was, pretty politely, informed of this by a Jersey City cop... I was, it seems supposed to... about 70 feet short of the light, make a special point to stop, before proceeding. I presume this since he also talked to the car two in front of me... I guess I was supposed to make a second stop... even though I was a good 30 feet to the left of the truck, and any child who wanted to have me slam into them would have needed to make a mad dash across to lanes of the street to get in front of me, but I digress).
At best I was going to be coming in the early dark (and so miss the scenery of the St. Lawrence), and arrive well into the dark. I don't like riding at night much. The curves are harder to see, the road conditions harder to read, the traffic less likely to see you (and more likely to fail to estimate where one is; how quickly one is moving etc.). Since I don't know the ways of the signage in Canada (and New York State hadn't impressed me much), I was leery of pressing all the way on.
So Marna looked up a Motel Six in Binghamton, made a reservation and I figured to be parking the bike about dark.
Which I did, after discovering that something is strange in the road construction from the Penn. border to about Syracuse. It's humped, or better yet, ridged. With no real rhyme nor reason, there are sudden lines, which run across the entire roadbed. They run from little bits of bounce, to straight up kidney thumpers. They are randomly spaced, though I never had them (quite) so dense as to be washboard, but neither did I ever have much more than a mile go by without one of them. It was irritating in a, mostly mild way.
Slept well, woke slowly, packed stupidly. I'd meant to check the tires before I left. I forgot. Since the pressure gauge lives in the seat... I decided four more hours wouldn't be such a problem as to be worth unloading the entire ass end of the bike. The last time I checked them (before I left Tenn) they were fine. Since they'd gone some 3,000 miles and kept pressure... another 300 didn't seem life threatening (I'm not waxing hyperbolic... underinflated tires don't last as long. Catastrophic failure on a car is bad (I saw, what I think was the result of that on a flatbed tow-truck yesterday. Other than bare wheel, pointing some 90° from the direction of the other, and no other visible damage), on a bike... it's something else altogether.
One of the real flaws of the K-series bikes is the valves stems. They are either behind a paid of brake disks (front), or behind either a brake disk, or the final-drive. In any case, a "pencil" gauge won't fit the space, even if one spends the money to get one which is accurate, so checking the air isn't a trivial thing.
The various bit's of local chatter were interesting. The hostess had a decidedly germanic accent. I don't know if that is a regional quirk, or she wasn't born in the US. Others were nattering about gardens, drinks (and the acidulation of water), how to be a good neighbor when one owns a motorcycle (which I think was occasioned by my bike being visible through the window). It was all the sort of conversation which did more to secure a sense of social order, and that people are aware of each other; as people, not just objects to spend money.
I got breakfast. Pretty good, french toast, from house-made challah, bacon, two eggs and coffee. Total cost, $5.35. I can't tell if I misread the menu, or they gave me the eggs gratis. Then came the embarrassment. The exit from the parking lot was poor. I made the mistake of thinking I was going to start, and then stopping. That compressed the front, and the wheel was a bit canted... I almost held it up, for about a second it seemed I might just avoid the fall.
Nope. If I'd not had all the extra weight, I think it would have been a non-issue.
Kill the motor, dump the luggage from the high-seat, curse that the hard case (cracked when I got the bike; from just this sort of fall... the guy said he had a parking lot fall because the bike was, "too heavy,") was showing a larger split, and put the kickstand down.
A guy came over to ask if I wanted help... which I did; because the heaviest case was the one pinned to the low-side of the bike. Heaved the bike up, and over to the stand, took off my jacket, and got to work.
Repack the bike... the case needed some duct-tape, because the flexing popped the fiberglass job I did before I left, pull the tire gauge from the seat, put the mirror back on, load the luggage to the high-seat, and head back to the gas station.
Where I pondered the ways of business, and the differences of New York and California.
In California, air and water are free (though the station can insist that one be a customer; in practice, given the self-service nature of fueling in Calif. it's not actually something which anyone enforces). In New York it costs money.
And air... was a buck. That offended me. Breakfast cost me, about 5 bucks. That air for my tires (which were low, I needed to add about 5 lbs to both of them... though I was conservative; the pump worked by telling it how much pressure you wanted. I could have opted for the ideal, and drained down if it overinlfateed... instead it seems I should have set too high; since the actual pressure was about 2 psi below, "calibrated") cost me 20 percent of that.
What chafes wasn't the cost (which was offensive, because that's, even after amortising the cost of the compressor, etc., doesn't seem reasonable), but the destination. The money I spent on brekkie will stay in Binghamton. The money I spent on air... won't. Sunoco is draining the money they charge for air from the local economy.
Back to the road, and those strange humps. Moving north is, in a number of ways, nicer than moving east. I wasn't losing a day to time changes, I was, actually, gaining a few minutes of light from latitude changes. The weather was getting more pleasant and the changes in foliage/landscape were faster in their progression.
I hit the Thousand Island's Bridge and opted to pay the Canadian fare (since the fares were the same, but the sign declared that, should one opt to pay with a card, the bill would be at the exchange rate). Ten miles later, I came to the border.
Nice thing about the border (and the TIB) was that the ground was not slick with oil; which it had been at every other toll-plaza I'd stopped at.
After the initial confusion; she somehow thought I was asking for French when I said hello. It took me a moment to realise she wanted to see my license plate. This was in part because the simple declarative, "numero plaque, s'il vous plai,t" didn't parse, and I pushed forward to show it to her, we had a fine time, talking about where I was going, what I planned to do (and not do, i.e. make any money while I am in Canada), whom I was staying with, my lack of weapons, trade goods, when I was last in Canada, etc., she handed me my passport (which she didn't stamp), and I was in Canada.
I made a quick stop to change some money, and discovered I ought to have paid the toll in USD, because the exchange rate is $1.02USD = $1.00CAN.
Back on the road I discovered Canadians are speed demons. It's not that they were doing a ridiculous rate of speed; in an absolute sense, but rather the amount above the posted limit they were doing was more, as a percentage. The limit was 80kph for the first 10K or so. The going rate was about 120. When the limit rose to 100, the average moved to about 130... so the 80 didn't seem to mean much.
I actually did about 140 the whole way, because I had a couple of cars doing that in front of me. I was doing about 125 when I passed the Ontario Provincial Police at the side of the road, doing a radar check of passing traffic. They didn't seem to care.
Got to the outskirts of Ottawa, and was happy to discover my previous visits were such that I was in no danger of getting lost. Even absent the hard skies, and bare trees of winter, there were known landmarks, streetnames I recognised (in the order I expected them), clear signage, etc. (I will say that my French is still plain enough to my mind's eye that the shorthand on the signs, "Rue "x" Street" looks strange. The redundancy makes me thing the name of the Rue ends in Street. I don't know that it will ever disappear, as the similar construction, though for different reasons of, "volleyball ball/football ball/baseball ball," etc. in Russian).
Got off the freeway in the right place, made the turn to an alternate route (so I was no longer stuck behind a pair of station wagons hauling huge campers), cursed that the side street I wanted (because it points straight into the driveway where the bike is presently parked) is closed because of construction, went long, made two lefts and arrived.
Two days late, a few dollars short, and all things being equal, in pretty good time, and fair order.
As I said before, the weather looked bad (and my Thursday was better spent being in town, as it meant
ladymondegreen didn't have to worry about having her passport, etc.). It's also the day I took the photos of the hydrant and muffler. I spotted them on the way to discover the bike didn't need oil; which I'd thought it did. But a cup or so low isn't a big deal, and having an opened bottle of oil in my bag, when the need wasn't absolute seemed a less than ideal thing.Friday dawned clear and pleasant, and for all that I have the art of packing the bike down to a pretty smooth drill, I'd not factored what being in one place for a week, and one in which I was being tolerably distracted, had done to my sense of where things were. I got started late on the final details, and then I had to move the bike (no way I was moving all my gear a half mile, and then loading up the bike).
Ottawa, however, is only a six hour distance from Jersey City, were it not for one small thing... New Jersey is hell on earth to get out of. The first hour on the road, I managed about 19 miles. Not only was the traffic unbelievably bad, the roads are laid out so that only someone who has driven them for years has any hope of making the right turns.
Signs are poorly timed, if present at all. Street names change, on the roads, but not the map. Must turn lanes appear, without warning, or apparent need. In short I was making bad time, and in ill-humor by the time I got to Mt. Olive, NY, and ordered my supper.
I had also... only made 50 miles in the previous 2 hours; I had not less than five hours of road time, once I had food in me, and was ready to move again (I eat a bit more, at a sitting, then I do at home, which means I spend about an hour at table... some to eat, some to let it settle. With the need to ease the frame some from the constraints of the bike that's a pretty good balance). So it was looking as if it was going to be close on 5 o'clock before I was once again on the road in a serious way... because this meal break had taken a bit longer; what with calling Marna to bitch and moan, and Merav to do some of the same (did you know ice cream trucks in NJ have pop-out stop signs which are binding to all lanes of traffic... even the one left turn lane? I was, pretty politely, informed of this by a Jersey City cop... I was, it seems supposed to... about 70 feet short of the light, make a special point to stop, before proceeding. I presume this since he also talked to the car two in front of me... I guess I was supposed to make a second stop... even though I was a good 30 feet to the left of the truck, and any child who wanted to have me slam into them would have needed to make a mad dash across to lanes of the street to get in front of me, but I digress).
At best I was going to be coming in the early dark (and so miss the scenery of the St. Lawrence), and arrive well into the dark. I don't like riding at night much. The curves are harder to see, the road conditions harder to read, the traffic less likely to see you (and more likely to fail to estimate where one is; how quickly one is moving etc.). Since I don't know the ways of the signage in Canada (and New York State hadn't impressed me much), I was leery of pressing all the way on.
So Marna looked up a Motel Six in Binghamton, made a reservation and I figured to be parking the bike about dark.
Which I did, after discovering that something is strange in the road construction from the Penn. border to about Syracuse. It's humped, or better yet, ridged. With no real rhyme nor reason, there are sudden lines, which run across the entire roadbed. They run from little bits of bounce, to straight up kidney thumpers. They are randomly spaced, though I never had them (quite) so dense as to be washboard, but neither did I ever have much more than a mile go by without one of them. It was irritating in a, mostly mild way.
Slept well, woke slowly, packed stupidly. I'd meant to check the tires before I left. I forgot. Since the pressure gauge lives in the seat... I decided four more hours wouldn't be such a problem as to be worth unloading the entire ass end of the bike. The last time I checked them (before I left Tenn) they were fine. Since they'd gone some 3,000 miles and kept pressure... another 300 didn't seem life threatening (I'm not waxing hyperbolic... underinflated tires don't last as long. Catastrophic failure on a car is bad (I saw, what I think was the result of that on a flatbed tow-truck yesterday. Other than bare wheel, pointing some 90° from the direction of the other, and no other visible damage), on a bike... it's something else altogether.
One of the real flaws of the K-series bikes is the valves stems. They are either behind a paid of brake disks (front), or behind either a brake disk, or the final-drive. In any case, a "pencil" gauge won't fit the space, even if one spends the money to get one which is accurate, so checking the air isn't a trivial thing.
The various bit's of local chatter were interesting. The hostess had a decidedly germanic accent. I don't know if that is a regional quirk, or she wasn't born in the US. Others were nattering about gardens, drinks (and the acidulation of water), how to be a good neighbor when one owns a motorcycle (which I think was occasioned by my bike being visible through the window). It was all the sort of conversation which did more to secure a sense of social order, and that people are aware of each other; as people, not just objects to spend money.
I got breakfast. Pretty good, french toast, from house-made challah, bacon, two eggs and coffee. Total cost, $5.35. I can't tell if I misread the menu, or they gave me the eggs gratis. Then came the embarrassment. The exit from the parking lot was poor. I made the mistake of thinking I was going to start, and then stopping. That compressed the front, and the wheel was a bit canted... I almost held it up, for about a second it seemed I might just avoid the fall.
Nope. If I'd not had all the extra weight, I think it would have been a non-issue.
Kill the motor, dump the luggage from the high-seat, curse that the hard case (cracked when I got the bike; from just this sort of fall... the guy said he had a parking lot fall because the bike was, "too heavy,") was showing a larger split, and put the kickstand down.
A guy came over to ask if I wanted help... which I did; because the heaviest case was the one pinned to the low-side of the bike. Heaved the bike up, and over to the stand, took off my jacket, and got to work.
Repack the bike... the case needed some duct-tape, because the flexing popped the fiberglass job I did before I left, pull the tire gauge from the seat, put the mirror back on, load the luggage to the high-seat, and head back to the gas station.
Where I pondered the ways of business, and the differences of New York and California.
In California, air and water are free (though the station can insist that one be a customer; in practice, given the self-service nature of fueling in Calif. it's not actually something which anyone enforces). In New York it costs money.
And air... was a buck. That offended me. Breakfast cost me, about 5 bucks. That air for my tires (which were low, I needed to add about 5 lbs to both of them... though I was conservative; the pump worked by telling it how much pressure you wanted. I could have opted for the ideal, and drained down if it overinlfateed... instead it seems I should have set too high; since the actual pressure was about 2 psi below, "calibrated") cost me 20 percent of that.
What chafes wasn't the cost (which was offensive, because that's, even after amortising the cost of the compressor, etc., doesn't seem reasonable), but the destination. The money I spent on brekkie will stay in Binghamton. The money I spent on air... won't. Sunoco is draining the money they charge for air from the local economy.
Back to the road, and those strange humps. Moving north is, in a number of ways, nicer than moving east. I wasn't losing a day to time changes, I was, actually, gaining a few minutes of light from latitude changes. The weather was getting more pleasant and the changes in foliage/landscape were faster in their progression.
I hit the Thousand Island's Bridge and opted to pay the Canadian fare (since the fares were the same, but the sign declared that, should one opt to pay with a card, the bill would be at the exchange rate). Ten miles later, I came to the border.
Nice thing about the border (and the TIB) was that the ground was not slick with oil; which it had been at every other toll-plaza I'd stopped at.
After the initial confusion; she somehow thought I was asking for French when I said hello. It took me a moment to realise she wanted to see my license plate. This was in part because the simple declarative, "numero plaque, s'il vous plai,t" didn't parse, and I pushed forward to show it to her, we had a fine time, talking about where I was going, what I planned to do (and not do, i.e. make any money while I am in Canada), whom I was staying with, my lack of weapons, trade goods, when I was last in Canada, etc., she handed me my passport (which she didn't stamp), and I was in Canada.
I made a quick stop to change some money, and discovered I ought to have paid the toll in USD, because the exchange rate is $1.02USD = $1.00CAN.
Back on the road I discovered Canadians are speed demons. It's not that they were doing a ridiculous rate of speed; in an absolute sense, but rather the amount above the posted limit they were doing was more, as a percentage. The limit was 80kph for the first 10K or so. The going rate was about 120. When the limit rose to 100, the average moved to about 130... so the 80 didn't seem to mean much.
I actually did about 140 the whole way, because I had a couple of cars doing that in front of me. I was doing about 125 when I passed the Ontario Provincial Police at the side of the road, doing a radar check of passing traffic. They didn't seem to care.
Got to the outskirts of Ottawa, and was happy to discover my previous visits were such that I was in no danger of getting lost. Even absent the hard skies, and bare trees of winter, there were known landmarks, streetnames I recognised (in the order I expected them), clear signage, etc. (I will say that my French is still plain enough to my mind's eye that the shorthand on the signs, "Rue "x" Street" looks strange. The redundancy makes me thing the name of the Rue ends in Street. I don't know that it will ever disappear, as the similar construction, though for different reasons of, "volleyball ball/football ball/baseball ball," etc. in Russian).
Got off the freeway in the right place, made the turn to an alternate route (so I was no longer stuck behind a pair of station wagons hauling huge campers), cursed that the side street I wanted (because it points straight into the driveway where the bike is presently parked) is closed because of construction, went long, made two lefts and arrived.
Two days late, a few dollars short, and all things being equal, in pretty good time, and fair order.
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no subject
Date: 2010-08-01 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-02 04:38 pm (UTC)The thing which was annoying was the randomness of it (though were it so to be a steady thump every 2 minutes, that would have been a different annoyance).
Worse was the variability. Some would be a slight lift, others a solid thump.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-11 01:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-02 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-02 03:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-03 04:51 am (UTC)I don't consider myself a speed demon, but it seems to me Americans drive very slowly on the interstates.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-03 03:57 pm (UTC)In Canada I was doing about the same, but it wasn't 10mph over the limit, it was more like 20. It's not the actual speed I was commenting on, but the difference between the posted, and the traveled.
There were places on 401 where the baseline traffic was doing 120kph, in a posted 80 zone, and the people I was following were still doing 130.