Vegas Prep - Endurance Riding Click here to comment

Well it was a beautiful day, for the most part. I woke up about 7:30AM, puttered around my apartment for a little while, then decided to equip my bike with the new saddlebags I bought, some Monzas from Firstgear.

I hadn’t looked at the saddlebags after I brought them home, so when I opened them they had a bunch of straps, some hard plastic sheets, and two bungee cords. Okay… what the hell do I do with all this stuff? I had bought the bags thinking that I could just throw them over my back seat and be good to go, but looking at all this included stuff made me think about whether or not my “throw and go” hypothesis was flawed, since I hadn’t thought about how secure a simply-resting saddlebag would be at 85 MPH (or higher). So, I just did the best I could. Threw the bags over the seat, kinda pinned the two rear straps underneath each tail blinker, and used the bungees on the front to secure them to the new saddlebag brackets I installed. These damn things don’t come with an instruction manual so I pretty much just jury rigged what seemed to make sense to me.

Turns out I did pretty well, as far as bags go. I wanted to test them out, so I put all the stuff I normally carry in my backpack (rain gear, towel, tire pressure gauge, windex wipes, and a ride journal that I never use) into the saddlebags, then packed the backpack into the bags as well. I also put in a shirt to see if the insides would stay dry. Then I geared up and headed for the mountains, which had some dark clouds forming over them at about noon today.

I had no real plan, I just wanted to ride. I ended up heading for Hartsel, CO first. The ride there was nice, but halfway between leaving downtown Colorado Springs and getting to Woodland Park I saw a few drops of precipitation hit my faceshield, so I pulled over and donned my rain cover–just the top half. This ended up being fairly nice, as my protection leathers are a porous textile, and past 30MPH it’s easy to forget I’m wearing a jacket due to the amount of wind that passes through… the rain cover acted as a windbreaker and allowed me to avoid alot of the wind chill. I stopped at Hartsel to fuel up and have a cup of hot cocoa. I bought a map as well, a hard plastic one that I checked out to plan the rest of my trip.

Here’s where I have a “lessons learned” that I need to do when I go to Vegas, or any future trip longer than 2 hours. I need to mentally note my next stop, and make an effort to rest. I kinda screwed up today… after I fueled up and continued from Hartsel, the next time I actually turned off my engine was back home in Colorado Springs, and I got back here by way of Denver. I rode a good 150 miles without taking a break, that’s like a 2 hour trip. I need to take a break at least every 75 miles… otherwise I start getting agitated and the ride becomes less fun.

Case in point… I decided to tail some guy who flipped me off on the road, at about 70-90MPH. Bad idea. I could have gotten hurt or worse, fortunately after a while I decided to let my anger go. Not sure what this guy’s problem was… but his Colorado license plate read “018 IUE”. So… look up the address and let me know where he lives. Maybe my next trip can be to slash someone’s tires.

Anyway, on the way back home from Denver it began to hail and I almost got run off the road by some retard in a Cooper Mini. I know this isn’t my fault, but thinking back I could have easily avoided this situation by rolling back on my throttle. See, for some reason this Mini was pulling out of the shoulder, and I guess he just decided to gun it without looking who was in the road he was merging in to. Well, unlucky for me he decided to try to take my space… luckily for me I swerved and the car that was in the next lane saw what was happening and backed away. I’m just lucky really that I didn’t wreck. The driver in the Mini was shooken up, because for the next couple of miles he drove at least a good 10 seconds behind me, which equates to about a quarter of a mile away at the speeds we were going.

I just got home finally about an hour ago. I checked my bags and sure enough everything inside was dry… nice. Even the shirt I threw in there showed no signs of even a drip of water. I think I’ll be ok for Vegas as far as packing enough clothes for a 4-night excursion. I just have to remember to take breaks at least once an hour so I can continue to enjoy the ride next month.