Stuff People Say to Women Riders

Found this on BikerChickNews in the Blowing a Gasket category: "Rules for talking to women bikers", as in, Looking for a sure way to make a fool out of yourself? Go ahead, just ask:

"Did you ride that bike here all by yourself?"

"Is that a girl's bike?"

"Do you wear a leather thong?"

"Is that the biggest thing you can get between your legs?" (very snappy comeback in the original article)

"Do you own your own bike?"

"Are you having a mid-life crisis?"

"Wow, that's a big bike for an itty-bitty little girl like you."

Trans Canada Highway - how plans really start

For the trip across Canada, I'm searching through recollections in recesses in my head, trying to figure out what goes into the "include this on the trip" pile. Here are a pair that are on the plan: the Mackinac Bridge and Lake Gitche Gumee.

The Mackinac (pronounced close to mac-in-awe) Bridge is a suspension bridge spanning the Straits of Mackinac that connects the non-contiguous Upper and Lower peninsulas of the U.S. state of Michigan. Although bridge happens to be really long, as in longer than the Golden Gate Bridge as measured between the anchorage points, the big deal is the wind. The engineering design of the bridge makes the road way stable in winds up to 150 miles hour (240 km/h). Learning from the failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Tacoma, WA) in 1940, the bridge designers gave the Mackinac two features to reduce its wind resistance, the stiffening truss is open to reduce wind resistance and the road deck is shaped as an airfoil to provide lift in a cross wind.The center two lanes are open metal grid (not tarmac) to allow vertical air flow which cancels the lift, making the roadway stable. "Stable" is the key word here, stability is all in the mind. I've watched  Cirque du Soleil performs who thought they were stable walking across a high wire.

We'll take a southerly detour to Michigan as we cross into Ontario from the east as Peter is determined to ride across this bridge. The motorcycle blogosphere has several entries from riders who white-knuckled it across the bridge because of the windy conditions.I will decide whether I cross the bridge when we get to St. Ignace. Go ahead, call me a wimp. The fact that the Mackinac Bridge Authority has a Drivers Assistance Program for those who are concerned about driving over the bridge tells me just about everything I need to know.

As we head west from the Mackinac Bridge experience, if I'm understanding correctly, we'll be riding on the south edge of Lake Gitchie Gumee, which is also known as Lake Superior. In the Ojibwe language, the lake is called Gichigami, meaning "big water." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the name as "Gitche Gumee" in his epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha.What's confusing is there is actually a lake in Hanover, Michigan called Lake Gitchegumee, which is about 100 miles southwest of the northern end of the Mackinac Bridge. This would be an easy mistake, one that would be easy to admit and shrug off. I've seen blogs from brave men who admitted that they got confused in Alaska and rode from Fairbanks, AK to Circle, AK instead of riding to the arctic circle at Prudhoe Bay, AK via the Dalton Highway.

The "what could go wrong?" approach to getting to the arctic circle from Fairbanks (a dream still on my list) can cost about 300 miles and a day's delay. Stories about unplanned round trips feed the stubborn nature of spontaneity-challenged riders. Should I be thinking about getting Peter his own GPS?

Trans Canada Highway - the planning begins

Happy New Year to you all!

It is January 1st and my goal for this year is to ride the Trans-Canada Highway through the south-eastern provinces, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia - Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland.

Wikipedia is great place to get your first lesson about the Trans-Canada highway system. I thought that the Trans-Canada Highway was just one r e a l l y long road under federal jurisdiction. I was wrong. If you want to go from Victoria,  British Columbia to St. Johns, Newfoundland, you will traverse a network of highways that are governed by the individual provinces.

I'll be using this extraordinary Trip and Vacation Planner website for the Trans-Canada Highway. You can look at the itinerary segments on Google maps (choice of satellite, map, hybrid or terrain views) for the entire highway system, broken up by province, with elevation details and mileage. You can navigate across maps or by pull-down menu. Itineraries have links to attractions, accommodations.  I was delighted to see a list of "known speed traps" on the Nova Scotia page. The information that any traveler wants is right up front:

1. Overview of the highway, a detailed travel itinerary, and trip planning suggestions.
2. Weather conditions, with "normals" and forecasts along the highway as well as road conditions
3. Information about geography, flora & forests, fauna & wildlife, and agriculture (both plants & animals) that you may see in between the cities & towns along the way.
4. Route itineraries in handy 200-300 km segments to facilitate trip planning (in both miles and kilometres)
5. Getting to & from Toronto, Canada's largest city not on the Trans-Canada Highway

I have just started planning this trip. The primary constraint - there are always constraints - is time, I've got four weeks. I'll be starting this ride in upstate New York. The timing challenge will be to balance the time traveling north-of-the-US border heading west with the time it will take to complete the last leg of the journey heading southwest back to San Francisco. Will I make it to Victoria, BC or will I have to turn south in Regina, Saskatchewan? The route below is just shy of 8,000 miles (no side trips).

This trip will be a combination of tent and credit card camping. I'm particularly interested in open spaces, I love being around wildlife.  If you have traveled on the Trans-Canadian Highway system through the south-central and south-eastern provinces and have suggestions about your favorite routes or places to see or stay at, please let me know.

Santa does too know when you're driving while on your cell phone

From the Roadshow column in the San Jose Mercury News: Gary Richards is the ombudsperson for all things related to Silicon Valley traffic.

"I pulled up to turn at a stoplight. Young lady next to me was talking on the phone. Light turns green. My lane moves. Young lady does not. I turn into a shopping center. So does young lady. What's the difference? A motorcycle officer is behind her with his red and blues on. Just made my day. I am so happy that I will give up my Grinch attitude and be happy for the holidays".
- David Giroux

A big "Thank You!" to the moto cop. 

Motorcycling for Women: Beginner Bikes, by Carla King

Carla King of Motorcycle Misadventures has a new book out, Motorcycling for Women: Beginner Bikes.

I started riding on a Suzuki GZ 250cc cruiser for exactly the reasons that Carla identifies. Because of the low seat I could get both feet flat on the ground - a crucial point for building my confidence. Since there was no body work other than the fenders I didn't worry (too much) about dropping it. I rode that little fellow for six months, then graduated to a BMW 650 CS. I'm on my fifth bike, a BMW 1200 GS now. That wonderful little GZ250 was the perfect starter bike for me - realizing I had outgrown the bike was a tremendous step forward. Too many people buy a bike that's too big to learn on. They either get into trouble or the bike never leaves the garage. Finding a beginner bike that fits you is an important first step.

I hope every woman who is thinking about riding her own down loads a copy! [This recommendation goes out to guys with pant leg inseams less than 29", too!]

Carla has made the book free - if you want to read it online you can. If you want you can go to Scribd and grab the code to display the book on your site and blog.


Motorcycling for Women Beginner Bikes

How to make any pair of gloves work with a touchscreen

Here's an interesting idea (read: I haven't tried it yet) - boosting your touch screen device's responsiveness to input from your glove-covered fingers by making the material in your glove more conductive. I've noticed that when my fingers are cold, the address input screen of my GPS seems less responsive.

There's a comment on gizmodo that this idea will only work on thin gloves but I speculate that if you only sew the outer layer of the glove material with the conductive thread it should still work and you won't compromise an internal liner that is providing weather-proofing.
 
http://gizmodo.com/5412823/how-to-make-any-pair-of-gloves-work-with-a-touchscreen. Thanks to Mike Werner at motorbiker

Flash Moto Mob on 880

Two weeks ago I was invited to talk to a group of sixth grade boys who were in a robotics competion. Their overall task was to build a robot that took into account consumption of resources. They had wanted to build a motorcycle but figured out fast that they needed something with built-in balance, so they built a trike instead. One of the sub-tasks was to talk to an "expert" related to their design. I had been instructed to talk about safety, both rider safety and bike safety. I was warned ahead of time that the kids had a short attention span so I was surprised that they still had questions after twenty minutes.

I passed around my gear and told them where to poke and prod so they could feel how much armor and padding I'm wearing. We talked about balance, momentum, traction, weight shifting, tires, and, of course, wheelies and stoppies, and falling down. My friend Valarie, their organizer, was happy that they stayed focused for twenty minutes. I was happy to have given my first ever motorcycle safety talk. Valarie told me later that this team of kids, who were not only entering the competition for the first time but also the youngest team, had made it to the finals and finished in third place.

* * *

Fast forward to this afternoon. I was on Highway 880, just north of Whipple, where 880 becomes straight as a pelican dive. About twenty squids merged onto the highway and closed ranks in the lanes to the right of the fast lane.

I was in the fast lane with one car in front of me. A single rider slipped in front of the car. The rider pulled a wheelie, and brought the bike down under control. The car in front me got the hell outa there - shifted lanes and disappeared to the other side of the motorcycle wall that had formed to the right of the guy in the fast lane.

There was a gap between me and the rider now that the car was gone, and I started to accelerate to close the gap. A rider from the posse riding just ahead of me in the lane to my right gave me the "stay back" hand motion. "What the hell is going on?" I wondered.

There was moment of quiet, then the rider pulled the bike into a high wheelie and rode in a standing position at around 75 mph for what felt like about 30 seconds, maybe it was between 10 and 30 seconds. The stunt rider dropped down to two wheels under control, blended into the moto mob and smoothy exited the highway at the intersection with Highway 92.

The whole thing seems to have been planned. The section of highway was straight, with no surface variations in the left lane. By doing the stunt in the left lane, the risk exposure was minimized (assuming the best outcome) to the right side of the lane. They arrived in a flash. The posse quicky and efficiently formed a protective wall around the stunt rider. The rider did a test, then a full-out sustained stunt, then the whole mob executed a clean exit. Well done. Dangerous. Illegal. And well done.

Was it "safe"? No! And, still I think this group thought about safety. The rider posse appeared to be grouped behind the stunt rider, they occupied all the lanes to the right of the stunt rider. Had the rider gone down, the bike would have spun out and hit the moto wall before it hit any cars. Yes, the rider would would have been run over by the posse. Yes there would have been mayhem and collateral damage to the cars and to the people in those cars. Fortunately nothing bad did happen. No horns blared, no car tires screeched as the moto formation whooshed off the exit ramp. Maybe we were all too stunned to react.

There is no question that the stunt was irresponsible and dangerous to everyone on the highway for those few seconds. I don't condone it, and, I understand completely.