Day 3: York Beach, ME to Nova Scotia

Posted on August 7, 2009 by George Burgyan

First, a recap of day 2. It was hopefully my longest day of the trip just putting as much distance between me and Cleveland. I think I succeeded since I camped next to the Atlantic Ocean in Maine.  :-)  I’m camping in a crowded RV park that also allows tents so it’s not the idyllic notion of camping in the woods. The advantage is that Bob next door threw a Miller to me as I was setting up my tent – something that doesn’t happen as much in nature. One bit of the nature een tried to attack me. A mean robin didn’t like where I was camping and it buzzed me every 10 minutes. No worries Mr. Robin, I’m not trying to steal your worms.

I also had my first real lobster (or lobster parts I suppose) in the form of a lobster roll from a restaurant down the street within walking distance. Not bad. I guess that’s the way to start: fresh Maine lobster when you are in Maine.

Today I’m hoping to get most of the way to Sydney, NS and see if I can catch a Saturday or early Sunday ferry to Newfoundland. Let’s see what I can do! I’m planning on following US-1 North until I get to Canada.

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Day 2: Bath, NY to points East

Posted on August 6, 2009 by George Burgyan

All showered, breakfasted and ready to go.

The only thing that the guy working the lobby thought was interesting about Bath, NY is that it has the oldest county fair: The Steuben County Fair. It was started in 1819 and will be going on later this month. If anyone’s passing through it’ll be on August 18-23rd. I’ll have to miss it though.

Today the plan is to punch in “Wilmington, VT” into the GPS and see what happens. From there next on the agenda is Rye Beach, NH. Both locations picked completely arbitrarily.

Be sure to track me!

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Day 1: Cleveland, OH to Bath, NY

Posted on August 6, 2009 by George Burgyan

I left after work today and headed out shortly after I got home. En helped verify that I had everything that needed and off I went. I was on the road by around 6:15 making good time.

A funny realization occurred as I turned onto I-86: this is the same route we take to go to X-Day. This continued a bit when I got off the highway at Salamanca: this was where we had gone camping a bit more than a year ago. I got off the highway to get gas and a room at around 9 PM. I got the gas, but all the rooms were booked.

So I get back on the road… go a bit farther and try again. No rooms the second or third time either!

Finally, after 2 hours after my first attempt I got a room at a Super-8 in Bath, NY.

Tomorrow I hope to see the Atlantic Ocean and camp by it somehow!

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Tracking is live!

Posted on August 5, 2009 by George Burgyan

First track of the trip is out. Bike is packed. Leaving in <30 minutes. Track me at over at Spot: HERE!!

First post in the Ride Report category! 😀

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Done!

Posted on August 5, 2009 by George Burgyan

All ready to go! Packed. Zumo GPS loaded with campgrounds. All that’s left is to strap the bags on and hit the road.

I do have to call the ferry services to see if I have to do anything special for my bike… but I doubt it.

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Packing just about done

Posted on August 4, 2009 by George Burgyan

All the tools are packed… the clothes are laid out… everything is just about ready to go. All I have left is to pick up some freeze-dried food and some water-flavoring. Beyond that I just need to strap everything on the bike and hit the road.

Looking at the pile of stuff in the living room doesn’t even look daunting either. The duffel will be almost empty to start with. No great loss.

The draft of the trip:

View 2009 Bike Trip in a larger map

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Almost done

Posted on July 30, 2009 by George Burgyan

I drove home today with the intent of finally getting the throttle-body balance taken care of. The bike was already running a lot smoother since I did the valves, but I wanted to get one of the last things done.

By the time I got the bike home, it was up to operating temperature and it should be a few minutes to get hook up the TwinMax (to the right) up and fiddle with things to get everything perfect.

Up until I realized the TwinMax wasn’t working – the knob to zero out the reading wasn’t doing anything. Occasionally it would work for a moment or two, but that quickly wore off. I didn’t feel like buying a new one for $100 either.

How to open it up… the underside has four rubber feet. Pulling those off revealed some screws. Unscrewing those got the two halves parted. (If you do this be careful; the pressure sensors is attached to the front half, and the rubber hoses leading to it are on the back half. Ripping it open would rip it apart.

After carefully taking the hoses off I checked out the broken part: a 100K ohm potentiometer.

We were heading to Chipotle anyway and there’s a Radio Shack in the same plaza so I picked up a new resistor from them before the burrito. It was a very different form factor, but I really wanted it to work.

Getting home I realized I have no clue where my desoldering braid is. Back to the Shack.

After a bit of futzing I took off the old part and with the help of some spare Cat5 I attacked for some wire I hooked up the new potentiometer. It worked!

With a bit more finessing I even got it mounted on the case such that it could close.

The upshot of all this is that it works! It just looks really strange.

In the picture above the small part is the old device and the new one supplies the really long shaft that’s coming out the side of the Twinmax.; I made a Frankenstein! At some point I’ll just chop it down and add a better knob. I’m tired now though.

I’ll take saving $100 any time!

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T minus 1 week and counting

Posted on July 29, 2009 by George Burgyan

I’m leaving in one week. At this point I have everything on the bike done except for a few small jobs (final drive oil, air filter and throttle-body balance).

Everything I need for the trip has been acquired… except the courage to leave for it.

Self doubt sucks.  🙂

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Printing and packing

Posted on July 22, 2009 by George Burgyan

Another day down, another problem solved.

The biggest issue I was having with my camera gear is I don’t want to bring along my camera backpack since I don’t need all my gear. I don’t want to bring my camera bag sling thingy since it’s not a balanced load.

Both of those solutions have their place. Neither of them have the right solution for this trip.

I was thinking of making a foam camera pouch of sorts that I can sit the camera (Canon 5D mk II) into while it’s sitting in the tank bag to protect it from any jostling and abrasion. I could do that but it would take a lot of time I don’t feel like spending at the moment.

The solution came when I was shopping for some large-format paper from Adorama.

Let’s take a step back. Last week I picked up some sampler packs of paper from a couple of different companies: Moab, Ilford and Hahnemühle. I’ve printed up some stuff on the Hahnemühle (their photo rag), but it’s an expensive paper in general. Nice, but expensive. Ilford is a throw-back to my old B&W printing days; most of the prints I’ve ever made were on Ilford paper (MGIV RC and MGIV Fibre mainly). The Moab was attractive to me from the reviews I was seeing along with the price.

The main problem I had was that they didn’t have profiles for my printer that didn’t use the god-awful “Art” paper settings. The Canon Pixma Pro9500 mk II has these annoying settings that force you to leave a 35mm margin on your output. WTF? Well, turns out they’re doing profiles and they hooked me up! (They asked me not to send out the URL to their new site, so I won’t) The profiles they have are great!

Now if I could only tell you where to find ’em.  😉

Back to the original point now. I was buying a 50-sheet pack of the Kayenta 13×19 paper from Adorama and decided to search for camera cases. I found the LensCoat BodyBag that should do exactly what I want! Only $27.99 from Adorama — with free shipping to boot!  🙂

It’s a neoprene camera-case that holds a camera with a lens attached. It should provide enough padding to keep things safe and prevent stuff from scratching the hell out of my poor camera. This way I can keep the camera in my tank bag and be ready to shoot with only a moment’s notice.

End result, I have some great paper from a US company (with the great as-of-yet-unpublished profile) and my camera issue has been solved!

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Labrador Packing List

Posted on July 21, 2009 by George Burgyan

(Any indenting shows nesting)

Gear – motorcycle

Gear – misc

Gear – electrical & computer

  • ASUS EEE PC computer
  • 12v adapter for EEE PC (for charging while riding)
  • Mains adapter for EEE PC
  • iPhone 3GS
  • Dock cable for iPhone
  • Repair manual for bike (electronic)
  • Small inverter to get 120V
  • Bluetooth mouse (?)

Clothes

  • Jeans
  • Jean shorts
  • Underwear x 3 (Mainly Exoficio)
  • Underarmour shirts, various light x 3
  • Underarmour coldgear shirt
  • Underarmour coldgear leggings
  • Patagonia light cotton leggings
  • Floppy hat that packs small
  • Socks, regular x 2
  • Socks, motorcycle x 3
  • 1 pair of light mesh shoes to wear around camp
  • Bug netting for my head (I hear the black flies are killer)

Camping

Cooking

Food

  • A few meals worth of freeze-dried food
  • Water flavorings like Crystal Light
  • Food picked up during the trip
  • Diner food as I move around
  • Cans of food / bread/ ramen picked up from gas stations and convenience stores
  • Ground coffee to start off the mornings with
  • Flask of Johnny Walker Black to finish off nights with

Tools & Parts

Still TBD

  • What camera(s) and/or lenses to bring

Notes

It seems like a lot, but it’s not more than we took to Alaska last year. On that trip we had gear for two instead of just one. We used most of the gear. The gear we didn’t wind up using is the stuff you don’t want to use anyway – tire plugging, first aid and the like. We even used some of the tools to make a screwed up wheel a bit better. It looks like a lot, but there’s a lot of nesting going on.

Last time all of the tools and cooking stuff went into the (smaller) left pannier. The clothes for both of us mostly went in the right. Any overflow went into a duffel on the back. There’s actually a chance I won’t even need the duffel, but it’s on the list for now. Overall things fit nicely last time and this time should be a lot easier.

We learned that we missed some stuff, like clothes line and clothes pins. We found out how nice it is to have when we had a camp site that had a line that someone left. No pins, but better than nothing. Another thing we found lacking was our ability to make firewood; the Leatherman does not cut it when talking about logs. We managed to make a fire one night, but it was a royal pain. Up in the Yukon the camp had logs ready for splitting, but we couldn’t do it with the tools we had.

If anything’s forgotten, well, that’s what credit cards are for.

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