Fathers Day Ride

This morning I took my wife for a long motorcycle ride on LSD.

And by LSD I mean Lake Shore Drive. And I mean the LSD in Springfield, IL, not the one in Chicago. Springfield, too, has a lake . It's called Lake Springfield. This is an example of how creative Springfieldians are.

Anyway, the ride was very nice and so were the stops at Starbucks and the Lincoln Garden, which is really just a small oasis of woods in the endless desert of corn.

While walking the mulch and mud covered trails of the garden we saw a fearless deer, several mooching squirrels, an army of geese who were big chickens and a baby toad that I coaxed off of the trail so that he/she would not become part of the mulch.

The woods were hot and humid and we were soaked by the time we left. The first mile was pretty cool after that.

We rode until our butts were sore and had a great time.

The Triumph doesn't seem to pull differently with two passengers than with one. Braking and handling are a little sluggish with two but the motor just doesn't care. I'm not used to an OHC engine with so much low-end torque. I still feel like I should wait until high revs to shift, but I don't need to.

My Hondas didn't have any real pull until about 5000 rpm. This Triumph starts pulling at about 3000! And it doesn't rev as fast as the Hondas did so I have to teach myself to shift sooner and take advantage of the torque in higher gears. Instead of wrapping 1st out to redline before shifting, I can get in a higher gear sooner and accelerate using a faster gear ratio.

I'm not really sure which technique is faster but I'm having fun experimenting. Either way, this Triumph goes from 0 to 60 in about one gasp.

I'm one happy daddy.

Road Canoe

If a big car is a boat, then a motorcycle is a road canoe.

I coined "road canoe" about ten years ago and didn't think it was very original. I figured that many people must have referred to motorcycles as road canoes, since it seemed such an obvious thing.

But I just googled the term and can't find "road canoe" as a euphemism for a motorcycle.

Can I actually be the first to think of this? Golly.


I came up with the term because at one point I thought it would be nice to have a canoe with a trolling motor. I would ride it quietly, solo, here and there, exploring little-traveled backwaters, away from the speedboats and revelers. It took little thought to realize that is precisely how I enjoy motorcycling.

I don't like to ride in traffic and I don't like to ride in the company of a bunch of other guys on bikes. I like to explore the backroads, alone. And I prefer a quiet and unobtrusive motorcycle with which I can slip in and out of peaceful lanes without disturbing the peace. Road canoeing.

Obviously a non-motorized canoe and a bicycle are equally homologous. But I like a motor. I like to relax and pay attention to what I'm riding through instead of huffing and puffing my way through it. Float trips are nice but you have to keep going downstream. I like to go whichever way the mood swings me.

And yes, I enjoy the exhilaration of quick acceleration and high velocity, sometimes. But the greatest pleasure I get from motorcycling comes from just cruising around, exploring. And exploring is not a thing to be done quickly. Moving fast through new territory is dangerous, and you miss all the finer details of your surroundings.

So the only thing I have in common with the guy riding wheelies down the interstate is that our vehicles each have two wheels.

And the helmetless guys on the big cruisers? They can't go where I go. Those big bikes aren't designed for surprises.

There are many kinds of motorcycling. My kind is road canoeing.