YAOGBB

Collecting stuff is a disease for which there is no cure.  Motorcycles are a favorite collectible,  they don't take a lot of room compared to say, military tanks or airplanes , but they do need more space than stamps or buttons .  Whatever, if you have a garage, you have room for a few bikes. If you are going to be serious about collecting, you need a theme.  You can't just randomly collect stuff you come across, you need to apply discipline lest you be confused for a hoarder.  I have pretty much always had a bike collection.  I used to collect British bikes when they were practically giving them away in the late 1970's.   For quite a while I concentrated on 1985 Yamahas, great bikes that had bottomed out resale-wise when I got them.    My first bike I think I paid 50 bucks for.  It had been stripped of most of its parts, but it still ran, but not for long. See the  theme here - they were all cheap cheap cheap. That first b...

What? ~90 unpaved kilometers of mostly unmolested North Saskatchewan River valley. Why? Finding gravel roads near Edmonton is not a problem, but finding interesting gravel roads is nearly as difficult as finding hen’s teeth.  Your typical road here is arrow straight  flat enough to put the horizon  about as distant as tomorrow.  This is OK for a while, but for those who crave variety, it does get tiresome.   One happy exception that does not require many hours droning down  overly crowded highways filled with morons just to get to an interesting road is Victoria Trail.   At this point Edmontonians might be saying What!?....  No, no, not the Victoria Trail lined with strip malls and newly planted suburban neighborhoods between the Yellowhead and 153 Avenue, but the original Victoria Trail between Edmonton and Victoria Settlement, 100 kilometers downriver on the mighty North Saskatchewan . Before railways  and highways p...

Alberta's Forestry Trunk Road (FTR) is the mini golf version of the Bolivian death road, the drops are just meters, not thousands of meters, no macho speeding bus drivers on the FTR,  but watch for the macho speeding pickup truck drivers. The Forestry Trunk Road is nearly as challenging as its (very) distant Bolivian cousin, but the penalty for errors is much lower.  Best of all, a ride on the FTR is only an hour or two from Alberta's major urban centers, not the 15,000 or so kilometers to Bolivia.  Alberta adventurers can ride the FTR and sleep in their own bed.  Or not, from end to end the FTR is over 1,000 kilometers of mostly gravel from Coleman to Grande Prairie, with plenty of campgrounds and nearby motels.   Much of the Forestry Trunk Road is unpaved, some bits are 'unimproved' meaning little if any road maintenance, especially in Winter.  Paved are the 60 km Kananaskis Highway, between Peter Lougheed  Park to Highway 1 (The Trans Canada ...

The dead do come back to life.  Zombies,  vampires  ghosts and Frankenstein monsters are mythical but the dead really do come back to life in the motorcycle industry. The best example of the motorcycle that refused to stay dead is Indian.   Numerous parties have  to revived Indian from the day the final clod of dirt landed on the company casket.  The Indian sold today is a moto  Frankenstein monster, cobbled together with bits of this and that, including a fake Harley Davidson motor made by S&S.  When the real Indian motocycle (not a typo) went under in 1953, its famous name was  bought, sold, stolen, fought over,  by scammers and a few mad financiers who believed they could breathe life into the dead brand.  This past year, Polaris, the maker of the so far semi successful Victory brand of motorcycles have taken over the Indian name, which might be its best chance yet. Norton stopped large scale motorcycle production...

I see it has been a year since my last post.  No big bike trips.  Putting the KTM back together took the rest of the summer of 2010, and finally got it finished in the fall.  I had the engine completely apart and checked everything.  It was surprisingly clean inside considering that it had ground away most of the intake cam follower.  It has two oil filters, which must have cleaned up most of the filings.  However after putting it together and doing some local rides this past summer (2011) it started to make some really nasty noises that sound like the crankshaft-connecting rod.  So I parked it and will be taking the motor apart again this winter.  I did a big road trip in my car instead, going through the US to Ontario to see family and friends and taking in the big Antique Motorcycle Club of America rally in Davenport Iowa on the way back.  More on that in another post. One of the things I resolved to do was to clear out my garage of su...

I actually planned to get lost on this trip, and unlike most plans, this one worked exceptionally well. I know a bit about planning, planning was one of the things I used to have to do for earning my daily crust. One thing I learned is that the more planning you do, the more likely your plan will fail. This appears so obvious now I write it down, but somehow it has totally escaped the notice of Mrs. Gant, Mr. Critical-Path and everybody's favorite, Ms. Microsoft Project. I determined that for this trip I was not going to repeat that failure prone exercise of having a detailed plan. I had goals and objectives. One needs to have goals and objectives before one can plan.  The good thing about goals and objectives, unlike planning, it is possible to come up with goals and objectives in a few minutes, freeing the rest of the afternoon for other things, like beverages. My goal was to have a good time, my objectives, to ride my motorcycle through the entire (Canadian) wint...

On Good Friday I crossed the border from Peru to Bolivia. By now I was familiar with the procedure. First exit Peru, get the passport exit stamp and turn over the temporary import permit for my motorcycle. Now I will be in limbo until I can get my entry stamp from Bolivian immigration and the papers for the bike. Desaguadero is a grubby border town on the shore of Lake Titicaca that reminds me of the border crossings in Central America, a collection of shacks and decaying buildings stretched along the highway, a permanent flea market and country fair midway, jammed full of cars, trucks, buses, taxis and push carts trying to get the hell out or in, and the border entrepreneurs will try get a piece of the travellers before they leave. The immigration officer is courteous and friendly and I have my passport stamped in short order. Unfortunately the Aduana (customs) side of the operation has been waylaid by a dead computer network. It is the Aduana who issue the necessary papers requir...