Lonely Mountain

After putting "Who wants to go" posts on both beginnerbikers.org and the Superhawk forum, I got zero responses for my 1st Mt Lemmon ride of the year. "Fine. So be it. I'll go by myself." Amanda wasn't in the mood to get up at 0600 just to go ride up some mountain, so I went completely solo.

Other than the old woman in a Cadillac who unexplicably floated over halfway into my lane (from the oncoming side) just north of Sonoita, the ride to Tucson was uneventful. I figured it would be a good day to try out / break in my new back protector, since I'll definitely be wearing it for the trackday next month. Wasn't too bad, but I'd prefer to wear it for 20-minute sessions as opposed for the entire 5 hour up-and-back trip. Since I took my camera to BestBuy for warranty service...

Them-"What happened to it?"
Me- "Iraq"
Them- "Um... ok. We'll put 'dust' down in the reason block..."

I had to grab the communal point and shoot since I didn't want to lug her RebelXt up the mountain in my tankbag. Completely forgot my PCCs with the camera, and left the thing on 'small' (640x480) resolution. D'oh! At least the panorama I stitched together of the Huachucas at dawn turned out okay:


Made it to the top okay, but about 7/8 of the way up I ran onto some damp pavement, as the shadows were allowing some of the road to stay wet. Ratchet the right hand back a couple notches, and all is well. Being solo, I had to use the camera timer and whatever reasonable height flat spot was around to perch the camera on for pictures. Kinda glad I was by myself, because I probably looked pretty funny running back and forth across a parking lot in my leathers:


On the way back down, I thought I would stop and take some shots of the other 'wet stuff' the shadows were hiding waaaay up on the mountain:


Got passed by a Ducati 848 and a GSXR-600 who were headed up when I pulled over for that shot... Man that Duc sounded sweet! They both slowed and did the obligatory "You okay?" shrug, but rolled back in the gas when I held up the camera and gave them a thumbs-up. Bikers are cool like that.

One more shot, this time from the main overlook on the way back down. I pulled into the spot, got my helmet off, and one of the elderly gentlemen standing at the walkway rail looked over and said "Guess you took the easy way up!" as he smiled and nodded at some passing bicyclists. Yep, guess I did. Maybe one day, before I leave here, I'll try and ride my bicycle up the mountain. Maybe.


Lessons from the ride:
-I need a ram-mount for my camera instead of the gas-tank-top solution. I took the camera mount off, and was able to move the tankbag forward such that it didn't interfere with hanging off the side of the bike in the 'slow' corners. Camera mount is NOT going back on, for that reason.
-Check the camera. Check the camera. Check the camera. I did think to bring spare batteries, which went in right after the first 4 shots for the panorama, as the old ones were toast. Didn't bother to check the camera settings though...
-I don't care if anybody else comes. Screw 'em. I had fun, and even stayed at 'reasonable' speeds.
-I need a trackday. And I need to ride the Ducati more, since 'reasonable' on the Superhawk is a lot harder to maintain than with the 3/5 scale motor in the Duc. (996 vs 620).

Mover madness.

First, a volume of paper:

Yeah, they kinda went nuts with the packing materials. As in, they wrapped individual pieces of tupperware in paper. Yet they took all the knives out of the knife block from the kitchen and wrapped them in a paper wad all jumbled together. Not exactly safe.

Next, what's wrong with this picture?




... they had been told to NOT pack the coffee maker to boot!

Chaos...

The movers have come and gone. The doggies were pretty good out back, but a bit whiny once we kenneled them up in the laundry room while the movers were here. Kaiser is starting to not bark at all the neighboring dogs, and joggers, and cars going by, and well... everything. Finally caught him just sitting down earlier:


We had the internet hooked up, and we've got SPEED!!!! I'm still stuck on Iraqi satellite speed in my head, so this stuff is blowing my mind.


As a comparison, the best I ever saw in country was 1024Kbps download and 96Kbps upload... and that was at 4am when no-one else was on our system at O'Ryan. Average was more like 256Kb down/64Kb up. When we moved south and we switched to Sniperhill net I didn't even bother testing. It was better than dialup, but my wireless hookup through my t-mobile phone before deploying was faster. Of course the house is still in boxes, which means I'm posting from here in my de-facto office on the kitchen counter. Hopefully we can make a good sized dent tomorrow and Sunday.


In completely disparate news, I managed to score my post-deployment 'self-reward gun' today. I had my name down on the list at the local eeevil gunshop (Trail Boss Outfitters, the staff of which I cannot speak highly enough of) for whichever came in first, a Ruger LCP or a Kel-Tec P3AT, (the design Ruger copied to create the LCP). I wanted the Ruger more, but given the scarcity of both types, I figured I would settle for whichever came in first. I expected it to be a couple of weeks until I could get my hands on either, which turned out to be a bad assumption. A little under a week after putting my name on the list, I got a call that there was one of each available, to which I responded, "I'll be there in a couple of minutes". We were already out in town, so next stop became the gun shop. About 10 minutes later I walked out with my new deep-conceal gun, an extra mag, and the belt-clip 'holster' installed on the right side of the frame. Having an AZ concealed carry permit does help speed things along, since it counts for my background check here, as I had to take a class, submit fingerprints, and pass a more thorough background check to get it than the '4478 phone-call' check anyway. So without further ado, here she is, sitting on top of a 3 1/2" floppy for perspective

On the road (yet) again..

So Motel 6 has cheap internet. Not free like a lot of the other chains, but when you add the room rate to the internet rate ($2.99/day) and subtract the rate of one of the other places with 'free' internet and still get a negative number, it works out okay.

Iraq sucked. Ft Riley sucked too. At least they had the 3-and-out plan down cold. We arrived, they stuffed us on buses without letting the smokers get a puff in (following our layover in Iceland, which is apparently a non-smoking country...), then didn't have the 'redeployment ceremony' for another 5 hours. (boo!! hiss!!) After that cluster-f*ck, they had all their feces co-linear, and we were able to get outprocessed with little difficulty.

And thus I am here, sitting in a Motel 6, waiting on the delivery guy to show up with dinner, and hoping that I won't have to kill Amanda's dog when he does. We're 3 days in, and while we could technically make it to Huachuca in a single day, we won't be able to get there before the housing office closes, so there's really no point. But they do have a house waiting on us, so that'll be nice. How did we get here?

Well I took some leave in OH so as to just chill out and rest before beginning the moving ordeal. But then the moving truck showed up:


This of course meant that I had already loaded my trailer with all the stuff we're taking for the DITY portion of our move (bikes, tools, etc). Having had some serious heartburn over bike tie-downs in the trailer during previous moves (without a chock, you have to strap the rear down too, which means LOTS of straps in the way), I decided to engineer a better solution:


Voila! Movable wheelchock that can be tied into the e-track already installed in the trailer. In practice, they look a little like this:


All in all, a much more agreable solution. While the packers and movers were there, we had to be as strategic as possible about dog walks, because we had the cats penned up in the front room with them to help minimize escape attempts. Since I have taken to carrying my camera pretty much any time I have a pocket for it, I got a couple of pretty funny shots involving the various animals:

What's going on daddy?


Gracie mostly hid in the cat carrier except when we would take the dogs out. Then she would hide in Resa's crate, which got her stuck more than once when we let them back in:


Heidi pretty much stayed in the litter box the entire 2 days:


We made it out w/o much incident. The drive thus far has been relatively uneventful, but I will say that I'm glad I pulled the trailer through Dallas on a Sunday at lunchtime instead of any time during a weekday. Couldn't quite understand how extra lanes kept getting added on the left, but lane endings were always on the right, meaning I had to move left some 5 times to keep from being in an 'exit only' lane. Having Amanda as a 'blocker' during some of those moves was very helpful, because apparently retards everywhere don't realize that they're called "acceleration lanes" for a reason...

Texas has yielded some highlights, such as the deer herd on the roadside soon after we entered the state (wasn't fast enough on the camera), and Whataburgers, with their wonderful fried cherry pies:


(Had to post that for the motorcycle peeps in GA who have this habit of riding for pie...)

More to follow as events warrant...