Week Offers Microcosm Of Riding Season

Sometimes a single week can offer a microcosm of an entire riding season – the highs and the lows, the dangerous and the ridiculous. That such a week would occur during a warm stretch in November may be uncommon but I’ll take it, rejoice and give a two-fingered acknowledgement to any other never-say-quit rider passing me from the opposite direction.

The high point of the week was a more than 200-mile ride last Wednesday with friend Bob Rosen through parts of Putnam, Orange, Rockland and Westchester counties in New York, capped by a trepidatious visit to the summit of Bear Mountain. The dangerous part was the ride on I-84 to meet him in Danbury, while the ridiculous was the sport bike rider who engaged in some stunting behind me as I drove home from Winsted in my pickup a day earlier.

Taken in reverse order…

I had just dropped off my cable box having decided to “cut the cable” after decades of addictive TV viewing. It’s crazy to pay for 70 or more channels that never get watched. What would my reaction be if a supermarket required that I pay for broccoli, fish sticks and prunes when all I wanted was hamburger, milk and kettle chips? I’d be livid, so why was I letting a cable behemoth engage in the same practice? It was time to revolt.

Coming home at dusk on the Winsted Road, I noticed a motorcyclist behind me. It seemed odd that his headlights were there one moment and gone the next until I realized that he was doing wheelies. His headlights disappeared every time his front wheel came off the ground. At one point, as he came up fast behind me, I thought that he might set his front wheel down in the truck bed. On another occasion, he came upon my tail gate and did am abrupt stoppie. It was ridiculous conduct considering the traffic.

That’s not to say that I don’t take risks. Riding with the “flow of traffic” on I-84 on a 650cc motorcycle is risky because everyone ignores the 65 mph posted limit. Heading to Danbury on my 2008 Suzuki V-Strom, I came up behind a tractor trailer, looked to see if it was clear to go around, signaled, started to pull out – and nearly got mowed down by a “tuner” travelling at an excessive speed. A double-check of the mirror enabled me to avoid him. That was certainly a low point of the ride.

One high point was riding the back roads of Putnam County. A long stretch of Route 42 between Kent Hills and Meads Corner has just been repaved, while Route 301 between Meads Corner and Cold Spring on the Hudson River is just a fun road. After grabbing a sandwich and some chips at a deli in Cold Spring, Bob and I found a park bench alongside the river to enjoy our lunches.

After eating, we headed south on Route 9D, crossed the river via the Bear Mountain Bridge and visited Rockwell Cycles on Route 9W in Fort Montgomery. The dealership sells Ducati and MV Agusta motorcycles. There is no more beautifully-crafted bike than the Italian-built MV Agusta. Each one is a piece of art. Even the names are artistic – Turismo Veloce, Rivale, Brutale and Stradale. Say them out loud with an accent!

After that, we headed to the summit of Bear Mountain via Seven Lakes Parkway. I must admit that are times when I’m a chicken when riding. Two patches of road – OK, make that three – cause me to slow to a crawl while holding on with a vise grip. There’s that big curve on Route 44 on the hill just west of Amenia, N.Y.; there’s Route 218 on the west side of (and well above) the Hudson River between Cornwall-on-Hudson and West Point; and, now, there’s the road up to the top of Bear Mountain.

All are high up and all have potentially fatal drop-offs should you leave the road surface. On foot or in a car, I’m not excessively acrophobic. Put me on a bike, though, and my heart races, my gut tightens and my brain panics when confronted by the specter of riding off the edge. Fortunately, I was able to depart the summit at a time when traffic was light. Nonetheless, even at slow speed, I kept thinking it would safer if I were walking the V-Strom down the two-mile road.

Does anyone have a cure for these panic attacks?

If one owns a vintage bike, no riding season is complete without a mechanical issue. The hiccup lastear week involved the 1994 Moto Guzzi California 1100 that I acquired last December. It had fewer than 10,000 miles on the odometer when I got it and the gauge now reads 11,632. I’ve probably put 2,000 miles on it. That’s a fair amount considering that the V-Strom is the workhorse in the garage and the fact that it took some time before I finally became enamored of the Guzzi’s rustic charms.

The hiccup occurred when dodging raindrops last Sunday. Heading toward Litchfield on Route 118, the engine suddenly paused. One second it was running. The next it wasn’t. The next it was. It wasn’t like an electrical outage either, more like the pistons needed to catch their breath.

The pause that surprised happened again twice on the way home, so I soon called mechanic friend Tom MacBurney and got my name in the queue for a service appointment. I also ordered a new fuel filter, two valve cover gaskets and a couple of spark plugs online to go with the oil filter and oil pan gasket that I already have. The Guzzi hasn’t been touched except for a new battery since I bought it, so I figure a thorough end-of-season going over will have it ready for the start of the 2016 riding season.

The question now is when will the 2015 riding season actually end? There was one winter a few years back when I never put my bike(s) into storage. Would it be too much to hope for a reoccurrence?

(Originally published in “The Republican-American” on Nov. 7, 2015.)