Well, my bike is officially battle tested. I was riding home from work today and made a left onto my street. Just as I came out of the turn, a parked car pulled out. I'm happy to say that the instincts did what they were supposed to: emergency brake, slight swerve. Didn't go into the opposing lane, since that could have been really ugly, but managed to scrub enough speed to bring me down to less than 10 mph and make the collision a glancing one. I wonder if I could have avoided it entirely by swerving a bit more, but given the potential for oncoming traffic, I don't think my reaction was bad.
Meanwhile, I had time for two thoughts before collision. Thought 1: "Huh. I'm gonna hit this guy." Thought 2: "I hope my bike stays up."
Crunch.
Kept the bike upright and brought it to a near stop. Looked around and did a U-turn to park on the other side of the road. Quick self-check tells me that my right leg bumped the car, but no damage to myself.
The guy in the car gets out and is very apologetic. Very nice guy, fortunately. We exchange information and check for damage. His left-view mirror broke off and is lying in the center of the road, and there is a dent in the driver's door. My bike ... is fine. Not a hairline scratch. Some of the paint from his car rubbed off onto the bike, but I later scraped it off with my fingernail and a scrubber sponge. Given the total lack of damage to my bike, we agree there's no need to report it.
Man I love my bike. That thing is a tank. I'm a little shaken, of course, but happy that everything is OK.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Monday, April 16, 2007
How NOT to do it
Here's a tale from the Dalton Highway, the haul road that parallels the Alaska pipeline from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay. What he lacked in preparation, he made up for in spirit:
http://www.bmwmoa.org/features/haulroad.htm
Parental types: I'll be far, far more prepared than this guy, in just about every possible way.
http://www.bmwmoa.org/features/haulroad.htm
Parental types: I'll be far, far more prepared than this guy, in just about every possible way.
Friday, April 6, 2007
Thoughts on motorcycling
Wow! T-minus 97 days and counting, according to the timer here. In 98 days I'll be on the road, if all goes according to plan. I've been working like a dog this past week, trying to get things done so that I can be on the road by then. Right now, I'm finishing up a paper that's taken much of the past year to develop. But it's friday afternoon, so I'm going to slack a bit. And think about motorcycles. Which generally means that I'm going to hang out at ADVrider.com and read some threads and maybe contribute a post or two.
Today I read one that really struck me: a eulogy for Fred Tausch, who rode his 1970 BMW R60/5 for some 600,000 miles before passing away a couple years ago.
If you click on the image, you can see that it's been edited, probably more than a few times, to update the number of miles it shows!
Anyhow, Fred Tausch sounded like a truly inspiring guy, and his eulogy struck a chord with me, so I'm copying it here for others to read.
——
Tauschs: Mildred, Karen, Fred Jr., friends, Romans, countrymen.... I'm Jeff Stein, a motorcycling Friend of Fred. For the next minute or two I am going to try to give voice to some thoughts brought here today by so many more of Fred's friends.
In the last few weeks we have lost several people who brightened our lives:
Johnny Carson; the playwright Arthur Miller; Philip Johnson — America's most famous architect; and now Dr. Fred Tausch. All four of these men were entertainers, storytellers, public figures, and they all lived full and interesting lives....
But none of us ever camped with Johnny. And we never rode to breakfast with Arthur Miller, even when he was married to Marilyn Monroe (maybe we shoulda...). We didn't hang out around the coffee pot with Philip Johnson, even though we could have — he did a lot of work in Boston. So, the loss of Fred, someone we shared our days with, is a bit more personal, and frankly a little harder to take.
So my question is this: HOW DID THIS HAPPEN!? And I don't mean, "How did Fred Tausch die?", a perfectly good, 70-year-old Father, Scientist, Student of Foreign Affairs, Conversationalist, Friend, Motorcyclist. What I mean to ask is, "How did all of us, men and women from all over New England, from all walks of life, come together as a community to find ourselves HERE, on a Saturday in February — the day before Fred's 71st Birthday — at a Unitarian Church in Lexington, Massachusetts, celebrating the life of our friend, whom we now miss so much.
The answer is pretty simple really.
Some 30-odd years ago, in 1973, Fred Tausch bought a motorcycle; and re-invented himself in a way that was startling to some and wonderful to us.
That's it, by the way, just outside, that very one, a 1970 BMW R60/5.
The first modern BMW; the first to be made in Berlin; THE one, according to Dr. Helmut Bonsch, who in the 1970's headed the BMW Motorcycle Engineering Department, and a man whom Fred later met — just like everyone else connected to BMW motorcycling, Fred met them all....
According to Bonsch, this model, the R60 600cc, had the most reliable of all BMW engines, the one that had the possibility of lasting longest. Because of the low mass/weight of the pistons, the engine is under-stressed... so it runs really easily. The job of this motorcycle was, and I'm quoting BMW literature here, "to carry people over mixed roads at Maximum efficiency with minimum effort." That was BMW's primary goal, and Fred's too, turns out. And this particular one, the one just outside — Fred's — seems to have done this better than any other. 632,978 miles later, we can say this with certainty.
But I digress.
On Fred's first day on a BMW Motorcycle, that one, he picked it up early in the day from the private seller. (You thought he bought it new? No way!) He climbed aboard, checked out the controls, and rode out of Boston, headed north, up route 1, onto 127, through Gloucester; and then a little further, getting the feel of it now, up through the lower tip of New Hampshire and on into Maine, riding along the coast in the salt air. About sunset, Fred pulled into a little motel on the Maine Coast and called his wife from the front desk.
"Honey? I'm up here in Maine. Yeah. 300 miles. Uh-huh. Mm-hmm. Well, I'm going to be late for dinner...." (How many of us have made that call!?) 300 miles the first day he owned a BMW motorcycle! Fred was hooked! And he was not afraid.
He stayed in Maine that night, and next morning Dr. Fred Tausch did not look back, he did not check his 6 — he woke up with the sun, and he was a motorcyclist, and he saw that that was good!
He went up through the rest of Maine on that first trip on a BMW, and on into Canada, back down through New York, across Pennsylvania. When he finally did arrive home, and return to work — Fred was fully employed at the time — he had put several thousand miles on the bike, and he knew how he was going to live the rest of his life: it was going to be a life lived in perfect balance, beyond the grasp of the ordinary, a life that he alone would direct. That's what he did, too.
Fred never had much to do with cars after that, after 1973. He rode his motorcycle — to work, to the grocery store, to church, in the rain, to public events and family vacations — he even had a sidecar for that, and for riding in snow and ice.
Fred liked to tell a story of a sidecar incident involving his son Fred, when young Fred was around 11 or 12 years old. The two Freds were motorcycling with sidecar up Whiteface Mountain out by Lake Placid, New York. The road winds around hairpins, in and out, and it is quite steep, too. At one point it was too much for the little engine, and the clutch began to slip, someone had to get off the bike.
Fred the father, educated in the ways of Scientific Method, knew at once what had to be done: the kid had to get out and walk! While Fred drove the motorcycle. Even that wasn't good enough, though, and Fred jr. was called back to PUSH.
So there they were, running uphill on an inside hairpin curve, just — if you've ever been there yourself — just around the corner from where visitors to the top park their cars, in full view of those folks, and within earshot, too.
I mention this last to you, because Fred was worried the bike wouldn't make it, so he was yelling at young Fred, "Faster, Faster!" Loud enough to be heard above the engine noise. "Faster, Faster!" echoing across the mountain. They did make it to the parking lot, where a bunch of frowning people were standing around waiting to see just who this evil madman was, making a young boy push him up the mountain.
"Boy did I get a lot of dirty looks!" said Fred.
Fred wasn't an evil guy, though. He wasn't even MEAN. And he never had a bad word for anyone, ever — even if they deserved it!
In the years that most of us have known him, the last decade of his life, it turns out, when Fred was a full-time motorcyclist, criss-crossing the US, attending all the BMW rallies, there was never a time that he had anything but good cheer for anyone that he met. And he met everyone! He counted among his friends University Presidents, groundskeepers, heads of state, truck drivers, German ambassadors, geologists, waiters, booksellers, BMW designers and mechanics, magazine writers and network news correspondents... and all of us in this room. He was often critical of the work these folks did, I must say, but he always had good words for them personally. And he had their respect, too.
My wife, Emilie, understood Fred from the moment they met. "He's an inventor!" she said. And they spent some interesting times together talking about that over the past few years. Fred Tausch invented a life for himself that allowed him balance: travel, a way to constantly meet new people and make new friends. He invented a way out of the materialistic dead-end we have created for ourselves in this culture — he beat the system! — and instead he lived on ideas, thrived on them. His datebook, found after his death last week, where he wrote down where he would be, who he was seeing, what event he was going to next, was filled-up right to today.
A lot of us thought Fred was FRUGAL, to put it mildly. But what he WAS went far beyond that: Fred Tausch was a rebel. He was fully conscious of what he was doing outside the mainstream of American life. He was the embodiment of freedom, a term that I would say has been somewhat devalued of late. He lived his life as an experiment, and each day was a new test to see just how far he could go on brains and heart alone. Not on somebody else's money, not on government largesse, not on the newest thing. He was focused, self-contained, and even though, in the end, his heart let him down, his experiment was a huge success.
I have some notes here, 35 pages of them, comments and pictures posted this past week on the Yankee Beemers' website by some of the people who knew Fred. In these notes are remembrances of first meetings, of Fred talking people through fixing their bikes, how famous Fred was among people all over US, of Fred winning the "Most Free Advice" award a couple years ago at the Charter Oak Rally in Connecticut. There's also a lovely story from the MotoLit site, and the first look at a remembrance of Fred that Victor Cruz has written about "Fred the Storyteller" that will appear later this month in the Yankee Beemers' Boxer Shorts, and in the national BMW Owners magazine. I'd like to give these to Fred's children, now. And just say to them, "Fred was our friend, he was so much fun, thank you for letting us have him all these years."
Long Live Fred Tausch!
Jeff Stein, Yankee Beemers
Today I read one that really struck me: a eulogy for Fred Tausch, who rode his 1970 BMW R60/5 for some 600,000 miles before passing away a couple years ago.
If you click on the image, you can see that it's been edited, probably more than a few times, to update the number of miles it shows!
Anyhow, Fred Tausch sounded like a truly inspiring guy, and his eulogy struck a chord with me, so I'm copying it here for others to read.
——
Tauschs: Mildred, Karen, Fred Jr., friends, Romans, countrymen.... I'm Jeff Stein, a motorcycling Friend of Fred. For the next minute or two I am going to try to give voice to some thoughts brought here today by so many more of Fred's friends.
In the last few weeks we have lost several people who brightened our lives:
Johnny Carson; the playwright Arthur Miller; Philip Johnson — America's most famous architect; and now Dr. Fred Tausch. All four of these men were entertainers, storytellers, public figures, and they all lived full and interesting lives....
But none of us ever camped with Johnny. And we never rode to breakfast with Arthur Miller, even when he was married to Marilyn Monroe (maybe we shoulda...). We didn't hang out around the coffee pot with Philip Johnson, even though we could have — he did a lot of work in Boston. So, the loss of Fred, someone we shared our days with, is a bit more personal, and frankly a little harder to take.
So my question is this: HOW DID THIS HAPPEN!? And I don't mean, "How did Fred Tausch die?", a perfectly good, 70-year-old Father, Scientist, Student of Foreign Affairs, Conversationalist, Friend, Motorcyclist. What I mean to ask is, "How did all of us, men and women from all over New England, from all walks of life, come together as a community to find ourselves HERE, on a Saturday in February — the day before Fred's 71st Birthday — at a Unitarian Church in Lexington, Massachusetts, celebrating the life of our friend, whom we now miss so much.
The answer is pretty simple really.
Some 30-odd years ago, in 1973, Fred Tausch bought a motorcycle; and re-invented himself in a way that was startling to some and wonderful to us.
That's it, by the way, just outside, that very one, a 1970 BMW R60/5.
The first modern BMW; the first to be made in Berlin; THE one, according to Dr. Helmut Bonsch, who in the 1970's headed the BMW Motorcycle Engineering Department, and a man whom Fred later met — just like everyone else connected to BMW motorcycling, Fred met them all....
According to Bonsch, this model, the R60 600cc, had the most reliable of all BMW engines, the one that had the possibility of lasting longest. Because of the low mass/weight of the pistons, the engine is under-stressed... so it runs really easily. The job of this motorcycle was, and I'm quoting BMW literature here, "to carry people over mixed roads at Maximum efficiency with minimum effort." That was BMW's primary goal, and Fred's too, turns out. And this particular one, the one just outside — Fred's — seems to have done this better than any other. 632,978 miles later, we can say this with certainty.
But I digress.
On Fred's first day on a BMW Motorcycle, that one, he picked it up early in the day from the private seller. (You thought he bought it new? No way!) He climbed aboard, checked out the controls, and rode out of Boston, headed north, up route 1, onto 127, through Gloucester; and then a little further, getting the feel of it now, up through the lower tip of New Hampshire and on into Maine, riding along the coast in the salt air. About sunset, Fred pulled into a little motel on the Maine Coast and called his wife from the front desk.
"Honey? I'm up here in Maine. Yeah. 300 miles. Uh-huh. Mm-hmm. Well, I'm going to be late for dinner...." (How many of us have made that call!?) 300 miles the first day he owned a BMW motorcycle! Fred was hooked! And he was not afraid.
He stayed in Maine that night, and next morning Dr. Fred Tausch did not look back, he did not check his 6 — he woke up with the sun, and he was a motorcyclist, and he saw that that was good!
He went up through the rest of Maine on that first trip on a BMW, and on into Canada, back down through New York, across Pennsylvania. When he finally did arrive home, and return to work — Fred was fully employed at the time — he had put several thousand miles on the bike, and he knew how he was going to live the rest of his life: it was going to be a life lived in perfect balance, beyond the grasp of the ordinary, a life that he alone would direct. That's what he did, too.
Fred never had much to do with cars after that, after 1973. He rode his motorcycle — to work, to the grocery store, to church, in the rain, to public events and family vacations — he even had a sidecar for that, and for riding in snow and ice.
Fred liked to tell a story of a sidecar incident involving his son Fred, when young Fred was around 11 or 12 years old. The two Freds were motorcycling with sidecar up Whiteface Mountain out by Lake Placid, New York. The road winds around hairpins, in and out, and it is quite steep, too. At one point it was too much for the little engine, and the clutch began to slip, someone had to get off the bike.
Fred the father, educated in the ways of Scientific Method, knew at once what had to be done: the kid had to get out and walk! While Fred drove the motorcycle. Even that wasn't good enough, though, and Fred jr. was called back to PUSH.
So there they were, running uphill on an inside hairpin curve, just — if you've ever been there yourself — just around the corner from where visitors to the top park their cars, in full view of those folks, and within earshot, too.
I mention this last to you, because Fred was worried the bike wouldn't make it, so he was yelling at young Fred, "Faster, Faster!" Loud enough to be heard above the engine noise. "Faster, Faster!" echoing across the mountain. They did make it to the parking lot, where a bunch of frowning people were standing around waiting to see just who this evil madman was, making a young boy push him up the mountain.
"Boy did I get a lot of dirty looks!" said Fred.
Fred wasn't an evil guy, though. He wasn't even MEAN. And he never had a bad word for anyone, ever — even if they deserved it!
In the years that most of us have known him, the last decade of his life, it turns out, when Fred was a full-time motorcyclist, criss-crossing the US, attending all the BMW rallies, there was never a time that he had anything but good cheer for anyone that he met. And he met everyone! He counted among his friends University Presidents, groundskeepers, heads of state, truck drivers, German ambassadors, geologists, waiters, booksellers, BMW designers and mechanics, magazine writers and network news correspondents... and all of us in this room. He was often critical of the work these folks did, I must say, but he always had good words for them personally. And he had their respect, too.
My wife, Emilie, understood Fred from the moment they met. "He's an inventor!" she said. And they spent some interesting times together talking about that over the past few years. Fred Tausch invented a life for himself that allowed him balance: travel, a way to constantly meet new people and make new friends. He invented a way out of the materialistic dead-end we have created for ourselves in this culture — he beat the system! — and instead he lived on ideas, thrived on them. His datebook, found after his death last week, where he wrote down where he would be, who he was seeing, what event he was going to next, was filled-up right to today.
A lot of us thought Fred was FRUGAL, to put it mildly. But what he WAS went far beyond that: Fred Tausch was a rebel. He was fully conscious of what he was doing outside the mainstream of American life. He was the embodiment of freedom, a term that I would say has been somewhat devalued of late. He lived his life as an experiment, and each day was a new test to see just how far he could go on brains and heart alone. Not on somebody else's money, not on government largesse, not on the newest thing. He was focused, self-contained, and even though, in the end, his heart let him down, his experiment was a huge success.
I have some notes here, 35 pages of them, comments and pictures posted this past week on the Yankee Beemers' website by some of the people who knew Fred. In these notes are remembrances of first meetings, of Fred talking people through fixing their bikes, how famous Fred was among people all over US, of Fred winning the "Most Free Advice" award a couple years ago at the Charter Oak Rally in Connecticut. There's also a lovely story from the MotoLit site, and the first look at a remembrance of Fred that Victor Cruz has written about "Fred the Storyteller" that will appear later this month in the Yankee Beemers' Boxer Shorts, and in the national BMW Owners magazine. I'd like to give these to Fred's children, now. And just say to them, "Fred was our friend, he was so much fun, thank you for letting us have him all these years."
Long Live Fred Tausch!
Jeff Stein, Yankee Beemers
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
First dirt
Last Sunday was the first time I really took the 1150 out on dirt. It was awesome. Great fun. More fun than I've had on my DRZ400S, which is a far better tool for that sort of thing. Yeah, the 1150 is a big and heavy beast, but I love the thing.
First off, the knobbies just about double the coolness. Putting them on was a major pain ...
But like I said, the coolness of my bike definitely went up a notch or two:
Many thanks to my friend Miriam, who helped with the tire change.
The Sunday dirt riding took place around Epping, NH. Here is one of the pictures in which I look like I have some idea what I'm doing:
There are many more pics in this ADVrider thread. It's probably some sort of trick photography, but in a few pics it would appear that I in fact do not know what I'm doing. Like when I wound up in a little puddle:
(Photo credits here go to Beez of ADVrider. Great people to ride with! Good encouragement to keep you going, and ready cameras when you screw up.) That water was cold — those are chunks of ice floating around my bike! Fortunately the knobbies did their job, and I was able to drive right out of the hole, no problem.
First off, the knobbies just about double the coolness. Putting them on was a major pain ...
But like I said, the coolness of my bike definitely went up a notch or two:
Many thanks to my friend Miriam, who helped with the tire change.
The Sunday dirt riding took place around Epping, NH. Here is one of the pictures in which I look like I have some idea what I'm doing:
There are many more pics in this ADVrider thread. It's probably some sort of trick photography, but in a few pics it would appear that I in fact do not know what I'm doing. Like when I wound up in a little puddle:
(Photo credits here go to Beez of ADVrider. Great people to ride with! Good encouragement to keep you going, and ready cameras when you screw up.) That water was cold — those are chunks of ice floating around my bike! Fortunately the knobbies did their job, and I was able to drive right out of the hole, no problem.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Tire swag!
Right now I'm running Anakees on my 1150. Good road tires. I will buy another pair. But with spring (more or less) here, I want to get some practice riding the 1150 off-road, since I'll certainly be on dirt in Alaska and Canada. So I bought some Continental TKC80s, knobby tires capable of both dirt and street. Throw in a tire pressure monitor (hey Mom & Dad — it's safety gear!) and some bling tire irons from Motion Pro, and it's Christmas in, uh, March.
It's pretty funny how the tires were "packaged." The SmarTire pressure monitor and tires were both delivered today by UPS, but by two different trucks. When the first truck gave me the monitor, I asked the UPS guy if there was another package. Maybe a big one? He said: "Yeah, you the guy with the tires?" Yeah, that's me.
Huh. Wonder how he knew they were tires. Must be in a big box that says TiresUnlimited.com in big letters or something.
Nope:
I got a pretty good kick out of that. Installation this weekend, if I'm not too busy with work.
The other pair of tires are Pirelli MT21s for my DRZ400.
It's pretty funny how the tires were "packaged." The SmarTire pressure monitor and tires were both delivered today by UPS, but by two different trucks. When the first truck gave me the monitor, I asked the UPS guy if there was another package. Maybe a big one? He said: "Yeah, you the guy with the tires?" Yeah, that's me.
Huh. Wonder how he knew they were tires. Must be in a big box that says TiresUnlimited.com in big letters or something.
Nope:
I got a pretty good kick out of that. Installation this weekend, if I'm not too busy with work.
The other pair of tires are Pirelli MT21s for my DRZ400.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Itinerary
Well, the first iteration anyhow. It'll surely change. But here's the idea. Times given are rough dates of arrival.
7/15 — OBX
7/21 — Wilmington, NC
7/23 — Sarasota
7/25 — Key West
8/02 — Denver via Texas & New Mexico
8/13 — Seattle
8/17 — Whitehorse
8/18 — Fairbanks
8/19 — Prudhoe Bay
9/11 — Cambridge, MA
7/15 — OBX
7/21 — Wilmington, NC
7/23 — Sarasota
7/25 — Key West
8/02 — Denver via Texas & New Mexico
8/13 — Seattle
8/17 — Whitehorse
8/18 — Fairbanks
8/19 — Prudhoe Bay
9/11 — Cambridge, MA
A bit about me
Hello. Welcome to my blog. I've never done a blog before. But then I haven't really had much of a reason to in the past five years, and before that .... Well, before that I'm not sure the word blog had been coined yet. That's me to the right, looking grumpy and maybe a bit hungover.The reason I haven't had too much to blog about in the past five years is because I've been in grad school. Working my ass off to get a PhD in astrophysics from MIT. At this point it's been so long and grueling that I sometimes forget why I decided to go down this road in the first place. As a snappy comeback when someone questions my credentials? It does sound a bit silly. Of course, the real reason is because I've always been fascinated with space — both the mystery of what's out there and the adventure of human space flight. I certainly wouldn't mind going up there someday myself.
Anyhow, the past five years have been hard. But with only a few months remaining (holy crap! so much to do!), the end is in sight. And I need a vacation. A long and awesome vacation. Hence this trip.
I started riding about three years ago. You see, the MIT physics department has three general exams that you must pass in order to get the PhD: a test of your knowledge of undergraduate physics (5 hours, 20 questions); a test of graduate physics (5 hours, 4 questions); and finally an oral exam on your specialization, in my case astrophysics. Assimilating enough physics to pass one of these exams requires at least a month of doing nothing but studying for 40+ hours a week. That hurts the human brain. A lot. It makes it do crazy things like ... what the hell, sign up for an MSF course and learn to ride. Buy a bike. Have that bike explode on you. Buy another bike. Also, learn to play guitar! It's kind of like a mid-life crisis in fast-forward.
I had the second, non-exploding bike for about a year. A Honda Shadow 750CD, their chromed-out, mid-displacement cruiser. It was a good bike. But I've never been one to take things half-way, so I wanted to ride it all year round. After a trip from Boston to PA and back for Christmas 2005, I started to realize that the Shadow needed to be upgraded. I really needed to install heated grips, or ....
Or, I could buy a new bike. I think it was a craigslist ad in which BMW's awesome R1150GS first caught my attention. An "adventure touring" bike. Upright seating, off-road capabilities, bigger gas tank. And heated grips. And a million other items that are better cataloged elsewhere. Even its purely utilitarian Mars-rover aesthetics captured my astrophysicist's heart.
I've had this bike for a year and a half now, and man, do I love it. And man, does that love cost me the big bucks. It is a farkle magnet. For the non-bikers, a farkle is an extra bit of gear for the bike. Things like aftermarket shocks, a GPS, heavy-duty sidecases, an auxiliary gas tank, tire pressure monitors. All good examples of farkles, and all ones that happen to be on my bike (or will be by the time of the trip). Luckily for my wallet, I think I'm pretty happy with this setup — not much more to put on! Even luckier, this kind of bike is known to last forever. With proper maintenance, Beemers are famous for staying on the road after hundreds of thousands of miles. (Right now it has a mere 40k.)
I bought this bike to ride it! Anywhere and everywhere, may I never again own a car. Motorcycling has rapidly become a defining hobby for me. So I really can't think of anything better than finishing my obligations here at MIT, getting on that bike, and riding it as far as I can across this country. This blog will be the story of that trip, and all the preparations leading up to it.
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Step aside, 