Paul Teutul's hybrid bike

[last2brake]

I was watching Letterman tonight. I'm glad I did, and I haven't been saying that alot lately.

I get home around midnite 5 days a week, for some reason Since that reason is unrelated to the hybrid motorcycle, I will ( in the interests of brevity ) not get into the reasons why I do that fairly consistantly for 5 straight days, and then inexplicably not do it for a couple of days before I repeat the pattern, but like I said.....brevity, for privacy reasons, and all, so......

I've kinda set the DVR to start Letterman, which I turn on and sorta watch while I undress ( to all the ladies and also Laker fans of any gender, don't get excited and try to visualize me undressing just yet, I don't get naked until much later, and won't be part of this story as I plan to be done by then, but this seems to be taking longer than I planned and maybe I won't get done, so hang onto your panties and we'll see how this goes....... ).

Maybe I should start another post, but anyway,

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As I stretched and started slowly unfastening the snaps on my glistening wet chaps, one-by one, before I slowly unzipped the long zipper from the top of my boot, all the way up my leg, until the wet leather parted, just below my belt, I was more distracted by my thoughts than I was by Letterman's conversation with a beautiful brunette, because....

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My commute was just horrible today-

Normally, my lovely solo motorcycle ride starts in the Napa Valley and gets worse. Within a couple of miles I'm on the freeway out of town and headed into mid-day 4-lane Interstate 80 down into the MacArthur Maze with its ( seriously, close to ) 30-wide lanes in places of at least a dozen cars darting from one on ramp across I'm guessing is maybe 7 lanes of immediate exits for Choosing at least Interstate 80 at the bottom of the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge, along with at least I-280, I-580, I-880, and I-980 all within a mile or so.

This short stretch of five Interstate freeways exiting and entering, merging and darting, sometimes about a hundred feet in the air , on constantly curving multi-lane slabs, with moms, or dads ( nice save, dave ) eating and talking on their cell phone in their Sequoia while yelling at their kids ( I hope I changed all the "hers" to "theirs" ), but eventually I, with a prayer of thanks, get through to the top of this maze, where it spits me out in the middle of a long right hand bend.Remember a year or so ago when a tanker-truck full of gasoline caught on fire and melted a section of freeway above it ? That tanker-truck crashed and burned in the middle of this long right-hand bend ).

So it spits me into this offramp, which is usually empty, one-lane, and it's a hundred feet in the air. All by itself. Like a strip of Hot Wheels track, suspended off of the ground with a bunch of popsicle sticks. After the 1989 quake, when the Nimitz collapsed, they rebuilt a lot of this, and this little off-ramp from-the-sky-back-to-the-ground on a string of single concrete columns, up to a 100 feet tall, grew from the rubble of the Nimitz collapse.

The off-ramp almost immediately splits into two lanes just as it crests a rise and turns to the left to begin a long slowly unbanking to the left drop from about a hundred-feet-in-the-air down to the ground, and SeRIoUSly, if it's not a hundred it is at LEAST 90 feet in the air, as I change direction and go from leaning way over to the right, to way over to the left, way up in the air, with only cement K-wall ( like they lined street-circuits with ) that's about as tall as the top of my gas tank, separating me from a lot of air on both sides, but with Oakland's sewage treatment plant a hundred feet underneath and a couple-of-hundred feet off on the right, in the foreground along with the Port of Oakland, of a pretty spectacular and sweeping view of San Francisco along with the Bay Bridge, Treasure/Yerba Buena Islands.

It's a busy ride.

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But I very seldom admire the view. Like I said, I'm a hundred feet in the air, going through an S-bend, throttling-and-upshifting through a couple of gears up to 80 as I exit 880 leaning ( if I'm lucky and got a good run at the exit ) from hard right to hard left and cresting a small rise into a 100-foot drop.

Not a good time to admire the view. But I just went through at least 15 miles of motorcycle hell ( well, OK, I kinda enjoy it actually because motorcycling is more fun than automobiling but the ride I'd just been through was probably where the differences were the smallest in the Fun Industry's Standard, last2brake's Official Fun Quotient Index. So, Ifeel that, after enduring that, I deserve one short, sweet, little blast, almost in the sky, up over 120 kilometers-per-hour before showing my 800-pound motorcycle how much I appreciate it by making it stop its own 800 pounds of weight going downhill ( plus at least another 200 pounds when you consider gasoline, me, some stuff for work and extra stuff like heated gear, extra gloves, etc. ). After I made it accelerate 30-or-40 mph uphill, first.

So even on a good day, it's not exactly the stuff that pleasurable motorcycle rides are made of.

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But that's on a normal day.

Today, on the way to work, I was in a couple of strings of freeway traffic, when several cars ahead I saw a silver honda civic quickly change lanes, and then I saw what turned out to be a new, yellow, Honda Goldwing, tumbling in the air.

I stopped next to the rider, who was laying in the median. He had a huge clump of sod hanging from his visor. He did not need to be looking to see if his bike was OK, especially since his right arm didn't seem to be moving like he was trying to command it to move. All of his upper/lower leathers were intact. He could move his feet. I sorta lied and told him his bike would be fine once he buffed it out and got the dirt off, but I couldn't recognize what kind of motorcycle it used to be.

We were lucky. I actually was able to see the fire truck pull out of the Fire Station, we were so close.

So I was late for work. But not nearly as late as it could have been. I had been using my jacket to hold the guys head still, but I eventually headed into the maze. I was pretty shook up. I rode pretty sloppily at times. Part of it was the wind

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oh, yeah, the Hot Wheels exit I normally take was closed today.

So not only was I late, I had to go past the exit down to Broadway and then come back. Driving on streets that have railroad tracks snaking and weaving in all different directions along the roadway.

Roadways that cars and motorcycles share with trains and thus have lots of railroad tracks in all the intersections are almost more fun in a car than on a motorcycle.

So, the wind was because there was a storm coming in. Since I arrived late, I had to leave late. If I had left at the normal time, I wouldn't have spent 30 minutes in the dark riding in the rain.

Which, on a normal day, is just fine. But I really wasn't in to riding in the rain.

So when I got home, I was still kinda shook up, and a little wet. Mostly my gloves. The ones with the electricity running through them to keep them warm. Except I turned them off.

Knock On Wood as far as riding, I don't remember feeling this low for a long time.

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Oops, oh yeah, the Hybrid Bike. On Letterman,

Letterman said he was thinking he might be interested in buying it, and quit at $30,000.

The bike was a Gas/Electric bike. Alleged to have 4 miles of cable in it. Cute little display in the gas tank. Alleged 150 mph, run for 80 miles and then just a couple of hour recharge. No, wait, that was the electric bike he did for Siemens

But 150mph hybrid that actually looked kinda not-so-bad kinda PR-gimmick that was JUST what I needed.

I was getting warmer all of a sudden.

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See, I couldn't really talk to my wife about today and how shook up I was. Even though she rides her own bike, I don't want her to have too much of an idea about how my lovely daily ride can be even on a good day, so I guess I chose to talk to the three people who might read this, instead. Now that I know how it ended up, it should have been in Bitchfest, or non-.

But, at first, it started out being about the hybrid bike.

But after a miserable day of riding, hearing Letterman say that Teutel rode the bike to the the show and reveal that that it had magnetized his nuts, I was smiling.

And if he needs someone to ride the bike 100 miles a day, I could be forced to do it. After RRtracks and riding in the sky, how challenging can magnetized nuts be ?

Well, it's time to unplug myself from the machine and got to the bed.

Don't tell my wife.

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Oh, yeah, the "today" stuff.

See, I'm still on Monday night, getting ready for bed. My wife left for Tuesday's workday a couple of hours ago, and I'm still on Monday.

We can get our schedules goofed up pretty quickly when we're talking to each other.

Good Night.

[GmP]

Didn't see Dave or the hybrid bike, but do know the Maze. Coming down from Berkeley, Ashby entry to 80/880 and than find that one lane that feeds to 880 San Jose. OK, I have only a Kawasaki 250, so 80mph tops, and only during nice warm days in daylight.
btw why drive a motorcycle in the rain when you have a GRAND Marquis at home and could glide through the Maze?

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......btw why drive a motorcycle in the rain when you have a GRAND Marquis at home and could glide through the Maze?Well, the bike is more fun. It's that simple. I could leave it at that. Yeah, sure. I could stop at one sentence....but I really, really hate the process of leaving the house in the middle of the day and getting in a car and sitting almost interminally in traffic.

But I can always talk myself into a bike ride, even if it ends in a real lousy place, like work. In 8 hours, I get to hop on my bike and ride home. I like that better. Even if there's very little traffic.

And besides, the bike is more fun.

Motorcycles are really flexible in traffic, especially in California, where lane-splitting is terrifying but not illegal. Motorcycles can use the Car Pool lanes during the commute hours, which also for the time being means the Toll Bridges are free during the morning and afternoon commute hours ( although I personally am very rarely on the road during those specific hours ). My 45-mile trip in a car is wildly unpredictable and can take anywhere from 45 minutes to almost two hours.

Of course, I have to add, the motorcycle is more fun. More fun than any of our cars, our truck, or van that I would consider driving on that trip, with the qualification that I would walk before I drove my Shelby on that trip for a host of reasons, the least of which being that just me TALKING about driving a 428 with a 4-speed in stop-and-go is probably causing a puddle of anti-freeze to form in my garage right now.

You know how the flats around Emeryville get sometimes, when driving in an auto-trans car means you never use the gas pedal, because you move forward by releasing the brake for a couple of seconds and crawling forward before stopping again. and again. over. and over & over. and over for about a half-an-hour to go about five miles ?? Sometimes, going westbound on I-80 the Eastshore back-up, even in the middle-of-the-day, the back-up can stretch from the Bridge into the Maze all the way past Albany and so far back that traffic can start becoming stop-and-go in Central Richmond. Even without lane-splitting, a bike can save me fifteen minutes on bad days just by their ability to move through bunched up traffic.

And besides, the bike is more fun.

In addition to all that, I'm claustrophobic. I sometimes start to feel trapped in traffic if it's not moving. While I remember it sorta happening lots of times in cars, I don't think it's ever happened on a bike. well, maybe a little bit a couple of times on a hot summer day while stopped for a long time on an air-cooled bike, but that would have been more of a desire to get moving than it was a feeling of being trapped or closed-in.........

And, of course - yeah, I don't enjoy the car so much. Even on really cold nights when I spend more than 5 minutes adding layers of clothes and then getting so worked up struggling to plug the heated gear into the recessed electrical connector underneath my left leg while dressed like the Michelin Man that I quickly fog up my visor so that i can't close it for at least ten minutes, even when it rains a little, even when it might actually take longer to get home ( counting getting dressed and undressed ).

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You never see a motorcycle parked in a parking lot outside of a psychiatrist's office.

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..... know the Maze. ....I have a Kawasaki 250.....
Wow. Anybody brave enough to tackle that area on a 250, with all the nuts and ruts and the grooved pavement, more than once, on any type of day, on those skinny tires, has my respect and admiration. I don't think I'm good enough to do it !

Ride on !