Ryan J. Allen » Motorcycle

Scanning the Intersection

Ryan J. Allen — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 06:43:15 +0000

When you learn to drive from a good teacher they will always advise you to scan an intersection as you approach it. Slow down, look left, look right, proceed with caution. It is a bit of advice we might follow on a driving exam, but is lost through driving experience. Sure, you might observe the intersection as you approach it but if you have the right of way you’re going to assume you’ll get it, not the other way around.

On a motorcycle, scanning the intersection could be one of the best things you can do for your own safety. It is at the very least an equal to the many other defensive driving techniques that must be employed to keep safe. Intersections often present a scenario with more inputs compared to riding down a road, which is why I believe they deserve some special attention.

When I started riding I first though doing the full intersection scan was silly. I felt like a safety square doing all the right things, as ridiculous as they might seem. In a car I wouldn’t generally do the “look left, look right” in particular, and I felt some embarrassment in doing this on the bike where it is even more obvious. But this little head move has removed or relieved stress from more road crossings than I would have imagined.

Tonight while riding home from downtown I crossed the intersection at Gladstone and Bronson. I was travelling westbound on Gladstone. This particular intersection gives good visibility from the north side of Bronson, from which I watched a car blatantly burn through a red light at a pretty good click, only to turn it into a really late, wide right turn. This driver obviously didn’t pay any attention to the traffic coming through the intersection. Fortunately, I was armed with the knowledge of this vehicle’s exception (as well as having an idea of the space I had behind and around me), so I wasn’t quite surprised when I had to brake hard when this driver intercepted my path. That is not to say that my heart didn’t race a bit, but I came out otherwise unscathed.

Safety first.

Altercation

Ryan J. Allen — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 03:10:30 +0000

I was involved in an altercation tonight.

I left school on my motorcycle and was driving along on Laurier. I had decided to take a scenic route home. I pulled up to a light in the right lane and a car entered the lane behind me, then jumped the curb and pulled up beside me! (I was, of course, in the blocking position.) He rolled down his window and asked “what the f*** was that?” Timing was on my side, as the light turned green at just the right moment for me to fill his ear with the roar of my engine and I was off. I heard a squeal of a tire (not mine) and did worry for a block or two that I was being followed by this “cager”, but lucky for me this was not the case.

He may have had a valid complaint. Maybe I spooked him. I’ll take a lesson away from it, but I fault him for encroaching in my space. And, really, what is someone going to say to you if you pull up beside them and say that?

After the altercation I went to Puzzles and met a group of people, including Jeff Howard. Puzzles has been his bar for 30 years, and he is a self-proclaimed dart player. He was quite drunk, but he was still able to throw slightly better than anyone from our group.

Sure it’s cold, but the roads are clean and the sun is shining

Ryan J. Allen — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 05:10:09 +0000

Last weekend Adam and I drove down to Kingston to pickup my motorcycle, which spent a year and a half hibernating in Nana’s workshop. The folks at MotoSport Plus in Kingston did a great job of preparing it for slumber, and then did a great job of brining it back to life this spring. But as much as I trust them, I am much happier to have the bike in my own possession.

In the middle of March we had a couple of months were the weather was ridiculously awesome. I didn’t have my bike at this time but it made me excited to pick it up. But by the time I did pick it up the weather had changed–normalized–and my riding has been limited for this very reason. I did go out for a little ride today in +3 temperature weather and have a couple of things that make this a little better.

First and foremost, I picked up a balaclava from MEC: the CTR Mistral Multi-Tasker Pro. I wear this under my full-face helmet (a Scorpion EXO-700). This helps a lot. Of course, it’s useless if you don’t have a nice warm sweater under a jacket that is done up all the way.

With this my upper body is warm with one exception: my hands. It can get very cold. I went looking for some gloves that might be okay in the cold and ended up with a pair of Alpinestar SR-2 Drystar gloves. They’re a definite improvement over any other pair of gloves I had before. For my other gloves I have been wearing a pair of those stretchy black gloves underneath as a liner, but with these gloves I can get by without them. I can still feel some chill on the hands but it’s bearable (at least, for the short distances I’ve travelled). I should be able to layer these gloves with the little black gloves for added warmth.

Tonight I did a ride wearing these two pieces with the sun down and the temperature sitting at 0. They performed better than any other gloves I had paired with the black gloves. With my upper body taken care of it was my legs that were cold. Also, a motorcycle seat can get pretty cold very quickly at night.

Motorcycle – Back in Ottawa

Ryan J. Allen — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 05:29:48 +0000

It was a bit of a chilly day, but an eagerness to get the bike out in the warmer weather led me to pick my motorcycle up from Kingston. I drove it back to Ottawa where it sits safely in my garage.

Now, I am quite tired after a long day (early wake-up, gym, drive to Kingston, ride to Ottawa, birthday party), so this will be brief. I will say that the bike felt very natural–like I hadn’t ever taken a break from riding. I am thrilled with it, still. I cannot wait for some nicer weather.

Badische Meile

Ryan J. Allen — Sat, 09 May 2009 09:10:44 +0000

Today is the day of the Badische Meile in Karlsruhe. This is an 8.88889 km run throughout the city of Karlsruhe. The distance is quite manageable; I haven’t run in some time but I have been on the bicycle a few times lately so I hope that I will be fit enough to do well enough. My goal is to complete this in under 45 minutes, which I suspect is very attainable.

In the physical shape that I am in now it is very clear to me how unfit I was last year. As great as the motorcycle was, I think it also hindered my self-care in that I was not so anxious to ride my bicycle around the city. And, indeed, when the weather was nice my preference was to be out riding rather than running around. It will be interesting to see what happens next year.

I still have some way to go to reach my peak physical fitness, a mark that I would say I hit two years ago. It was much easier with squash in the lineup (and I’m not playing squash here), but it has never been more important than this summer. In only two months I will be departing for the Alpencross where we will have to endure 6 days of intense demands on our persons: travelling 60 km, 2000 metres of height, and carrying our bike for an hour every single day.

I’m sure I’ve said it a thousand times, but after Alpencross my focus will shift to endurance running with the Einstein marathon in September. As a warm-up I may also participate in a half-marathon in Ettlingen at the end of August, which should be no problem for me if I hope to make it to the end in Ulm.

Time is moving quickly.

Update: The bad news is, my time for the run was not great. I think it was about 46 minutes. There are two factors that I think contributed to this: the weather, and my transport to the beginning of the race. The weather was a beautiful day to sit outside, but not to run. It was/is +25 and sunny, and there were no water stations on route.

The good news is, I went to the race by bicycle, returned from the end of the race to the start by running, and then bicycled back home. So overall I feel like it was a good day of exercise. Now it’s time to relax a little bit with a trip to Vogelbrau.

Update 2: According to results I finished about 500th out of 3300 total runners. Not too bad, I guess, considering that I biked there. Still, I need to do some hot-weather training.

Führerscheinstelle

Ryan J. Allen — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:15:24 +0000

For the past three weeks I have been without a driver’s license.

Three weeks ago I ventured to the Führerscheinstelle to exchange my Ontario driver’s license for a German one. After entering Germany you are allowed to drive using your home country driver’s license for up to six months. A Canadian license to drive the equivalent of an Ontario G-class vehicle can be exchanged directly for a German license of the same class. In my case I also had a license to drive a motorcycle in Ontario and that cannot be exchanged–I would have had to take a test for this.

The process is pretty well documented at various places online: bring your original license, a translation, and a passport photo to the Führerscheinstelle. For a translation I brought the International Driver’s License that I bought in Ontario before I left. I also happened to have a passport photo left from when I got my residence permit.

Originally I went to the Karlsruhe city Führerscheinstelle. I was lucky enough to encounter a few people who spoke enough English to direct me to the right office (they do everything by the first letter of your last name here). When we got to the question “where do you live now?” and I answered I was shuffled out of the office and go to the Landratsamt Karlsruhe, a regional administration office.

I had been to this office building before for my residence permit. I managed to find the Führerscheinstelle all on my own and was helped by a lovely young lady who spoke enough English for us to get by. I am fairly certain that dealing with an English person made her day–she was laughing and telling coworkers in the back as I was left filling out a form.

As part of the process I had to give up my Ontario driver’s license. This meant physically handing it over at the time of my application. What surprised me is that: I got nothing back in return–no temporary license, no letter, no photocopy. I asked “what happens if I get stopped?” The young lady answered “just tell them about this and they’ll call us”. Somehow I doubted someone would answer the call if I was pulled over at 2 a.m. but I didn’t push it.

With my six months rapidly approaching, and a travel schedule that would make it difficult to pick up the license immediately after I returned from France, I was a little nervous. I even started making excuses for myself, like “the six months isn’t from date of landing, but rather date on the residence permit”, or “the six months reset when I was in Canada over Christmas”. And while it is possible that one of those is true it’s not the sort of thing you want to assert to a police officer without knowing for sure.

Luckily the license was made available sometime late last week, and today I went to pick it up. This time I wasn’t lucky enough to be working with anyone who speaks English, but the process was pretty straightforward. I was notified by mail that the license was available via a post card; the post card, my passport (for identification), and 30 Euros was brought to the Führerscheinstelle where the post card and money was exchanged for my new driver’s license.

So I now have an EU driver’s license. It looks pretty similar to the one prominently pictured on Wikipedia’s Driver’s License page. One neat thing, though, is that they misspelled the city of my birth. I guess the “H” I wrote in Halifax looked more like an “M” to them. It doesn’t specify a province or country, though, so I suppose it is possible that there is a Malifax somewhere.

Kingston

Ryan J. Allen — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 14:29:46 +0000

As it turns out, I only had one reason to go to Kingston this weekend so I made it a shotgun trip. There and back on Saturday. I rode the bike down and intended to prepare it for storage. This was very sad. I started reading about the things I would need to buy, and things I would need to do to prepare the bike and started to wonder “how do I remove the spark plugs?” I had forgot the repair manual, which is on my laptop.

When I told Cathie that I would have to go to the Honda motorcycle dealer to get an oil filter and some supplies she asked “why not just have them do it?” I had this idea before but didn’t explore the option because you are not supposed to run the bike after winterizing it. But apparently this isn’t a problem: Billy has a truck that he can use to pick it up.

This summer I have put approximately 10 000 km on my motorcycle. I feel that this is pretty good. It is also pretty consistent with the estimation that a person will drive 20 000 – 24 000 km per year. Pro-rated I would be right at 20 000 km, though realistically I would probably be a little higher as there were a few time when I opted not to ride due to unfavourable riding conditions.

I returned last night and was quite happy to do so. I’ll be using the bus for a few days; I am very excited about this.

1,000

Ryan J. Allen — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 01:22:36 +0000

1,000 km in three days, and it’s just been to facilitate my vacation events.

NASCAR

Ryan J. Allen — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:15:35 +0000

Well, we arrived to Watkins Glen just fine. The ride was about 350 km, which is managable. We stopped in Oswego for some lunch, and actually beat the truck (that was taking the Interstate) to the Glen. (They had stopped longer along the way.)

I finally sorted my data service out with AT&T so I am online while I am here. I’m trying out the WordPress app with this post. I’ve tried to attach a photo.

Pillion

Ryan J. Allen — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 04:32:12 +0000

Katy and I went for a ride through Gatineau Park Saturday evening. It was about 60 km return, which was a bit long for a first ride, but it was lovely. We got a touch of the rain on our way back, just as we were coming over the bridge to Ontario but other than that it was great, sunny riding weather.