Month: April 2007

One last trip before returning to work, this time to Island Lake Park in Orangeville. There was a couple light splashes of rain, but now I’m pretty much waterproof and insulated from head-to-toe, so it wasn’t bad at all.

Last year I found a nice stretch of road to practice emergency braking, and I made sure my path to Orangeville went over it this trip. The pavement was cold but dry, so all my stops were uneventful.. though I’m sure I can still get much better with practice. A couple of the stops got the rear wheel off the ground an inch or so, but that was only in the last foot of braking… so I know I can slow down even faster if I squeeze a bit harder a bit sooner. I don’t want to endo… but unless I can _almost_ lift the rear sooner after I begin braking (and without locking the front tire) it means I still have grip I’m not using to slow down.

I should also start practicing slowing down rapidly then swerving to avoid an imaginary object…. but until I get better at the straight-line braking parts I don’t want to think about swerving too much lest I end up in the ditch 🙂

After reading a lot about the hearing damage that can come from riding a motorcycle (especially from the wind noise that you get from highway driving), I started to wear ear plugs last year for my longer trips.

The make a huge difference! I can still hear traffic fine, although people talking at a gas station are hard to make out. I actually get home and feel less “mentally tired”. And once I got used to them if I forget to put them back in after a pitstop at Timmies the bike sounds really loud… irritating enough I’d usually pull over and put the plugs back in rather than put up with the racket the rest of the way home.

The downside is… …I think they make me ride faster. My little SV has a rather loud growl when it gets spun up (mostly due to the Hindle pipe) and to some extent I think my brain associates the engine and wind noise with speed… so I keep a good eye on the speedo. But with the plugs in I can find myself doing a seemingly “moderate” pace down a straight stretch only to realize the throttle is twisted almost as far as it can go. Or on onramps being 500 RPM shy of the rev limiter just getting up to speed with traffic instead of shifting much earlier (but it feels so _good_).

Thankfully my SV650S is considered a “beginners” bike, so it doesn’t go that fast to begin with, and my rear sprocket is up one tooth from stock which slows me down more. Still… something to be aware of as I try to work up to some longer rides this summer…

The spring motorcycle show was today. It wasn’t as large as what I remember from the January show, but I did pick up some warmer gloves, and get to oogle some of the bikes at the Suzuki of Newmarket booth:

Since I wanted to try my new gloves, and since it was another great day for a ride: (well, +4 and no rain)… I threw another dart at Google Maps and decided to visit Belwood and it’s nearby lake.

Things went OK the first 99% of the way… but as I got closer to where I though I should be going the paved roads started to run out, and the dirt parts were potholed, muddy, and rutted (not the terrain for a road bike). I had to stop and eyeball the maps I had printed to find another way around…

After crossing a bridge over Lake Belwood I circled around a bit of highway looking for “downtown”. I stopped and took some pictures… I had arrived, hooray! (only about 100KM from home)

But now that I’m home and have looked at a map, I can see that I had wandered too far and was in the nearby town of Fergus instead. I blinked and missed downtown Belwood. I had driven through it but all I remember were a few houses and a convenience store.. I assumed I was still on the outskirts 🙂

Today was the first day of my holidays where it was above 5 degrees, and didn’t rain all day. So I took a look at Google Maps for a place I had never been before and that wasn’t terribly far away. I found Scugog

Although the temperature was OK in Toronto… by the time I made it to Scugog (about 80km NE of Toronto) it was quite a bit cooler… to the point where the odd snowflake was falling and I needed to stop in a coffee shop to warm my hands before the return trip.

I wish it would warm up. We had an unusually warm winter… but now are paying for it with an unusually cold spring. If this keeps up I’m buying hand warmers for the bike.