Short Day
3/29/15
I spent Friday night and Saturday with my good friends from law school Gary and Stephanie in Eugene Oregon. If I had no family ties in Kentucky, I’d move to Eugene in a half-heartbeat. It has a vibe that just feels right, with care for the environment, the future of our species, people on bicycles everywhere, the Saturday Market, a seemingly endless supply of truly astounding bakeries (that alone would be enough for me to move there), microbreweries and pubs, and the University adding the spice of constantly changing young people bringing new ideas and attracting new business to cater to them. I’d like to stay here longer, but I have a long ways to go and a (relatively) short time to get there.
I head out at about 11 on Sunday, after consuming the wonderful breakfast they prepared for me, going south pick up some roads over to the coast. Gary has tipped me to Smith River Road which winds up through some mountains, currently in the process of being logged for timber. It is a wonderfully curvy road, with some broken pavement and would be a fast exciting ride on a two-wheel motorcycle. I must take things quite a bit slower and wrestle this rig around each corner, some of which are 180 degree switchbacks as the road ascends the peaks. It is worth it though for the view from the top out over the pine-forested valleys. One can see at times the dark gray drizzle of asphalt that I’ve just come up, looking like someone with flair had decorated the mountain with a randomly distributed stream of chocolate syrup.
It takes me about 3 hours to make the 38 miles to Reedsport. I follow the coast road, beside the Oregon Dunes National Recreation area, down to Coos Bay, where both the clock and my fatigue catch up with me. I find a room within walking distance of a German restaurant, where I order Tafelspitzen and Pilsner Urquell. Life is most definitely not hard. I like this.
Only 146 miles today….but it felt like much more. It’s not the quantity, it’s the quality.
The Excursion Begins
3/27/15
“It’s a quarter til three, there’s no one in the place, except you and me …” except actually, you aren’t here either. With apologies to Frank Sinatra, those old lyrics came to mind when my eyes opened here in my room at the Cedars Inn in Enumclaw, Washington at what would be 5:45 AM back home in Kentucky. My usual awakening hour is more like 4:30, but yesterday wasn’t a typical day. I left home at 4 AM headed for the airport in Lexington, spent about 7 hours on two different airplanes, 3 1/2 hours in an airport, then another 90 minutes in a car to get about 2,500 miles from home. I’m now in the northwestern corner of the US, nearly as far away as one can get from Winchester KY and still stay in the lower 48 states.
Out at sunrise, I see the outfit sitting there in the parking lot and feel that little frisson of pleasure that it always seems to inspire. It is still not soaking in that I’m here and I have it, and that the trip begins today.
I’ve packed the rig for travel, but it is an odd ritual, after having done the same thing for so many years with two saddlebags on the two-wheeler. Now I have to figure out where I’m going to put things in the car or in the trunk, so that I can get to what I need when I need it without moving a bunch of other stuff. First thing, I drove it back over to DMC to have a RotoPax mount added to the car to carry a spare gallon of gas, since I don’t know what sort of mileage this rig will get and how far apart the stations might be.
With the installation, and a perusal of the owner’s collection of foreign cars, I don’t get on the road until about 10 AM. Within a few minutes after leaving the shop, I get on WA 410, heading south. then quickly (well, on a sidecar, that’s a relative term) turn down the side road I’d been advised to take to head south without much traffic to concern me. I made one wrong turn (note to self and others… when giving directions that involve “heading toward ” a town, it helps if one goes on to say “but don’t actually go there to the town, turn down another road before then”) but the backtrack was short.
My first impressions driving the rig were of the strangeness, the feeling of sitting on a motorcycle, which I’ve done for more than 50 years, but really nothing like a motorcycle. As soon as I pull away from a stop, the machine wants to go somewhere else from where all my muscle memory and instincts think it will go. There’s this other thing, this third wheel, that is, like the parent of a teenager, providing both support and unwanted guidance.
So far it’s all been two lane roads through a forest, with occasional glimpses of Mt. Ranier off to my left. Turns are interesting, with lefts requiring a lot of input and rights terrifying me for fear of the car coming up and over. I’m getting used to the undulations of the rig as the third wheel follows every deviation in the road and the motorcycle tries to go with it. Soon I settle down into a pattern of corrections that become routine and the rig proceeds on in a relatively straight line. For a while, all corners are intimidating at first, but in short order, I learn what to expect. I’m not a proficient driver yet, but I can see it from here.
These Washington roads would have been marvelous to explore on a two-wheeler and I briefly envied the ones I’d see banking into the switchbacks and undulating curves up and over and down the mountains (we in Kentucky would call these mountains….out here they are hills), but I decided that I’m on a more contemplative machine, something that allows me to actually see what the mountain looks like instead of just concentrating on the line and the apex and then the next curve. Oh, I’m concentrating on the line, alright, it’s just a very different one and much slower. I must constantly remind myself that I can’t go to the inside of a right curve, that the third wheel is over there waiting to drop off the edge if I do, and that this rig doesn’t steer like a motorcycle. Once or twice I scare myself when I think I’ve gone in too hot, but I know compared to an experienced operator I’m not doing much. Still, the hard sustained press on the “wrong” side of the bars takes a lot of getting used to, and it’s becoming a workout. Best to just let it flow, much slower, and enjoy being in the moment. I pull over when I can to let the occasional truck go by, but even that is different. Where one can park a motorcycle on any shoulder a couple feet wide, this rig requires the same general space as a car.
I stop for a late breakfast at Cruiser’s Diner in Eatonville Washington, where I can enjoy my eggs while looking out at Mt. Rainier dominating the view. I’m listening to two old men (older even than me) who are having one of those old men conversations in which they seem to be talking around each other, not hearing what the other said, but each responding to what he thought the other said. The Bob & Ray comedy team couldn’t have done it better.
Finally I come to Rt. 7 which leads me through some small towns and dumps me out on Rt. 12, one of the major two lane routes east-west across Washington. I’ve been on this road several times in previous motorcycle excursions, though it somehow looks different now from the seat of a sidecar outfit. I stop for gas, my second tank, and the first one where I might get some idea of the mileage. I’m pleasantly surprised when my little calculator comes up with 44 mpg.
I am becoming accustomed to “sidecar delay factor”, something I’d read in the literature about the rigs but hadn’t really experienced until now. Nearly every time I stop, and this gas station is no exception, someone comes up and wants to look at and usually talk about the bike and car. I have to admit to them that my experience so far is in hours, not years, and I’m still learning about it myself. They see the Washington plate and assume I’m local. When they ask where I’m going, they aren’t prepared for the answer. I see some of them struggling to take it in, as if they had asked me the question in English and I’d responded in some other language.
Rt. 12 does intersect with the dreaded I-5 and because it’s now mid afternoon and I’m still a long ways above Portland, I take the interstate headed south. For this one day of the trip I have a schedule in that I’m expected at Gary & Stephanie’s house in Eugene this evening and if I don’t make up some time, it will be well after dark when I get there.
The rig actually handles the highway pretty well. I’m able now to keep it going straight and true, even though it requires constant small corrections to accomplish. It will keep a steady speed of 60 to 65 pretty easily, but I’m more comfortable at the 55 to 60 range. If I stay in the right lane, the rest of the world (including the big trucks, which are supposed to be at the same 60 mph) whiz by me on the left without much notice. I can recall seeing sidecars on the highway, seemingly proceeding serenely down a straight path, with the driver looking calm and relaxed. Now I’m sure the people going by think the same about me, not knowing the constant deviation, the consistent pressure on one bar or the other, that is required to keep it going somewhere other than where the crown of the pavement, the truck tire indentations and the wavy pavement wants to take it. An old theme for success was to “be like a duck….calm and cool on the surface, while paddling like hell underneath”. That is, I think, the Sidecar Way.
It occurs to me again that the only time I am truly comfortable is on a motorcycle. Whatever aches and pains may trouble me, prevent me from sleeping or even thinking, they seem to fade into the background when I seat myself in front of the bars, drop my hands to the grips, with the balls of my feet on the pegs, and start to move.
This has been a long day, ending at Eugene Oregon, the home of Gary and Stephanie, two of the finest people I know.
337 miles today, with about 40% of that on interstate, just so I could make it to Eugene before dark.
One on the Side (aka The Great Sidecar Excursion )
March 26th, 2015 After what seems like years of waiting (actually only a few months) I’m in the Atlanta airport awaiting my flight to Seattle to pick up the sidecar rig. There is the typical sense of unreality, experienced often before, when the long-awaited event finally arrives, as if I have identified myself as “one who waits” and now I’m having to make the switch to “one who does”. There are thousands of people here, all going somewhere, but I doubt many of them are doing exactly what I am. I’m flying to Enumclaw Washington, across the country, to the northwest corner from the southeast, to purchase a motorcycle and sidecar rig that I’ve only seen once, nine months ago and that I’ve never driven. My total sidecar driving experience, on a Ural test drive, is about 25 minutes. My riding gear and clothes are already out there, shipped via UPS two weeks ago, so I’m carrying only an Aerostitch messenger bag. From my original idea of traveling light, the bag seems to have filled itself with odds and ends, becoming much heavier than any definition of “light” should accommodate. There’s the iPad (the one I’m typing this on), the Kindle, the Dopp kit, the camera and a bunch of maps (that I should have shipped…but I forgot) and a California DeLorme book that Jay Smythe thoughtfully gave me just before I left. Though I still have no definite route planned, depending instead on the weather to guide me, it does appear that I’ll be in California for quite a while until I can reach a point where the weather in and on the other side of the mountains will be more fun than ordeal. The problem that a DeLorme always presents is that it shows so many enticing roads that one is like a grade-schooler in a bakery with Dad’s credit card, spoiled for choice. I’d like to sample them all, but then I’d still be in California by next winter.
It’s a long flight out to the west coast, made longer by the fact that airlines have again reduced the size of everything in the passenger compartment to squeeze in more seats. I’m not a small, or even normal sized person. I feel like Gulliver in Lilliput as I try to slot myself down the aisle, barely wider than my hips and wriggle into my seat with my knees pressed firmly against the seat in front and my shoulders against the man in the middle seat. He’s as big as me, and he can’t move away because his shoulders are pressed against the guy in the window seat. So I, as usual, have to lean to the right with my torso out in the aisle to be hit by other passengers and the snack cart as they go by. Well, it’s only six hours, and then I’ll be there, where I’ve been waiting to be.
Tara, one of the owners of DMC, picked my up at the airport and drove me to the shop, pointing out the various sights along the way. She once worked at the massive Boeing plant here, in the aerospace division, which makes me feel even better about the rig. If they can make airplanes that stay up in the air, surely they can make a sidecar that will keep together. Enumclaw is a small town, about the size of Ashland, KY where I grew up, but Ashland didn’t have a specialty motorcycle sidecar shop. The town sits under the presence of Mt. Ranier which dominates everything in the skyline. The base of the mountain is so huge that it can’t really be distinguished and as the sun is setting to the west, the frozen top seems to just hang in the air like an impossibly enormous luminescent celestial being, floating in space.
There she is
The rig was sitting there in the front of the shop as we pulled up. I hadn’t seen it since that day in St. Paul MN back in July when it captured my attention. The paperwork took only a few minutes, the unpacking and repacking of the stuff I’d shipped out ate up a few more and then suddenly I was ready to leave the shop on my own sidecar rig.