2016-04-22 - 4-day Weekend Day Rides

[kdtrull]

Ahh....another long weekend with almost all free-time.  Just a few chores to do on Thursday and some sketchy weather to be followed by happy-funtime.
Many times, once I realize that I have a whole day of free time, I also have a difficult time deciding where I want to go....but I HAVE to go...so I go here to sit on the rock and think.  The view is quiet and peacful on a weekday and you can develop peace of mind and clarity of thought.  Sometimes the view is riddled with canoe and tube passengers :) that are fun to look at but really cloud the old thinking gland!!  That particular view is somewhat rare and more often consists of passengers that invoke the sounds of banjo music and images of dental procedures. :(



While there, I tend to my little island mushroom farm (just behind me if looking from the rock):



Eventually, with still no destination in mind, I left to ride a few more staple-roads to calm the mind and pass the time.  This old road is NE of Iron City and is about 5 miles long with a house on each end.  The first one contains a mean-looking old lady that always gives me the stink-eye...so I pass on by without stopping.  She has a cool old place...but I'm skeert of her.  On the other end is this, usually vacant, rock house:



Then, while sitting in the zippy-mart in Collinwood, eating tater-smashers and a corndog, it hits me that Randy gets off work at 2:30 on Fridays.  I texted him about riding after work.  You can guess what he said.  So we rode until almost dark, not taking many pictures, then went home to rest up for Saturday.  Yep...I hit the jackpot....he wants to ride Saturday too.

The only picture from Friday with the lazeebum: (Edit: not true...just a brain-bump...you'll see in the following post)



I'll try to get Saturday and Sunday posted tomorrow....sleepy time.

[kdtrull]

One more thing:
Does 153 miles in 10 hours sound like fun?  It is to me.

[kdtrull]

Some of you may have noticed that my late-night postings can be somewhat skewed.  I like to blame it on Mama, and her drinkin' while I was waitin' to get born, an' what-not, and a lifetime of blunt force head trauma :) . Truth is, that's mostly just schtick.  My mother never drank a drop that I know of but I still like to play as if there's a good reason for my goofiness.

There's quite a bit more from Friday that I just didn't remember until I pulled up the .gpx file and looked at the map.  And, it turns out, it was well after dark when we got done riding because I now remember recording a huge full moon on the way back and a carnival in the K-Mart shopping center in Florence:





Here's the ride overview:



I'll get the rest of Friday on here after I track down the pictures.

[kdtrull]

What had happend wuz....I rode down from Collinwood to meet up with Randy where he works.  We tossed around some ideas, then decided to head NW over to the Dry Creek Wildlife Management area and ride it south back down into Waterloo and then slab it home.  Last Summer, they were closing some of the roads and trails over there and I was really hoping that they were not gradually trying to close the whole area off.  Thankfully, it was still the same few paths closed.

Now, just so you don't get no faulty images stuck in your noggin, the very last thing Dry Creek WMA is.....is dry:



Niether of us thought it would be a good idea to go this way with Shinko 705s on the KLR.



So, we took a detour that followed one of the creeks.  But we kept getting lower and the main road kept getting higher.  "We gotta start looking for a way out."  The first exit didn't look to good for 705s either.



Just a short way on down the creek was a better option:





Boy, when it's hot outside, you sure can have fun in Dry Creek:



And you can have a great deal of fun when it ain't so hot too:



There's a way around almost all of the wallered-out mudholes but it's not always a piece of cake on a larger bike:



The main road through the area has not been tended to in a long time and nature and erosion are friends of the dual sport rider.



Then, way too soon, it was time to go home again.  You guys doing the big 1-week, 2-week, month-long rides really know how to do it right.  One of these days....
A few shots on the way out:











It's hard to keep tabs on just how much ride-time slips away in stopping to talk, water breaks, eating, fuel stops...that's all part of the adventure.
But TopoFusion does an excellent job of reminding you.
Uphill time 2hr5min11sec.  Downhill time 2hr7min55sec.  Flat time 2hr36min43sec.  A little over 6.5 hours riding....3.5 hours making it memorable...well most of the time...remember in the first post, I forgot this whole second part...doh!

It will also show you an elevation profile for the trip including many detailed specifics:



[Bonus Puppy] Bessie Grace and Ellie Grace's successor as the family boxer is here.  This one's a boy.

 

[klaviator]

Cool stuff as always.  I noticed you still have your windshield mounts on the bike but no windshield, just like you had last year.  What's up with that?  Are they really some sort of antenna's for talking with alien space ships? :o

[kdtrull]

Cool stuff as always.  I noticed you still have your windshield mounts on the bike but no windshield, just like you had last year.  What's up with that?  Are they really some sort of antenna's for talking with alien space ships? :o

I quit talking to them aliens when they cancelled my Space Jelly of The Month Club membership.  Which was a mistake because now they abduct me in my sleep and smash my hips and legs.....although that could just be the side-effect of the cholesterol medicine.  But I think abduction is more likely because they get super po'd when I refuse to renew membership.  We wont even get into what it costs....but I'm holding my ground!  ???

In "reality", there's a couple reasons.  First, it's super easy to just remove the 2 wing bolts and take the shield off the mounts.  The mounts require a little more effort in tight spaces to remove some hex nuts.  Because of their shape and orientation, I don't consider them much of a puncture hazard in an accident.

The second reason is I keep thinking the mounts might make a good spot to mount a 6 to 8 inch, tight-beam, LED bar light to supplement my dinky headlight.  But I think I'd rather mount a pair of smaller aux lights out on the forks (maybe).  I really like the setup Buzz has on his DR but I don't have much mounting space left up on my bars.

[kdtrull]

Saturday's ride was 8 hours and 135 miles.  Sound slow and boring?  Well it ain't, and I'd be glad to prove it to you sometime.

I'd like to show y'all a few cool things about TopoFusion.  It ain't free but it does some really nifty stuff.  There is a trial version that overlays watermarks on the tiles.
First off, it uses a wide variety of open source maps that you never have to pay for to get updates.  Including a couple different style topo maps.

This is an overview of Saturday's ride using the "US Topo" map.  And, if you'll notice, the tracks can be color coded for elevation with red being the relative highest points of the track and dark blue the lowest:



The detail gets increasingly better as you zoom in (keep in mind it's not as good converted to .jpg):



What TopoFusion calls conventional topo maps is "My Topo" and I believe it's actual printed topo maps that have been scanned and converted to vector graphics.  The reason that I don't think they are just simply scanned and tiled is that this map, as well as any of the others can be rendered to 3D and tilted and rotated and such.



These old-school topo maps are really cool in that they show the same features the paper maps show...like old mines, cemeteries, unimproved roads, and crossings.  Some folks find them difficult to look at because they contain so much information.

Then there's "Open Topo Europe" for you fortunate world travellers.  It's slower loading but it works.  And all tiles, once downloaded, are stored on your HD until you purge them.  So the next time you look at them, they'll display almost instantly.

Also, Canada and Austrailia Topo...likewise slow until they're stored on your machine.

Open Color Aerial and Standard Color Aerial:



LandSat imagery, Black and White Aerial Imagery, Open Street Map, Open Cycle Map, Juicy Trails, MapQuest OSM, and more.



And any of these myriad map types can be renderd and manipulated in 3D:



OK...had enough maps?  Well, just one more thing.  If you're into monitoring your ride performance, you can actually play back your route at around 30 frames per second (depending on your computer's speed, most Core i7 machines will do 60+ FPS) with an overlay that shows speed, direction, grade, elevation, or any number of other performance charateristics....even those of interest to runners and human-powered sports.  Playback can be done at a variety of slowed or accelerated speeds and stops can be automatically skipped.

Oh...just one more thing.  Any two map types can be Alpha channel blended to make a large combination of street / topo/ aerial maps.

[KrisCook]

[kdtrull]

Well, it turns out I don't have a single picture from Saturday except one that one that erroneously appears in the Friday post.
This was actually from Saturday:



Maybe Randy has a few he can upload.
We started out the morning at the St. Joe Cafe.  Pretty good, home-style cooked breakfast food with REAL hash browns!!!  Then we headed out Fall River Rd. and mostly just tooled around up in the Giles County, TN area.  We ride there fairly often.  Some of you may remember the area from the Nowhere To Be And All Day To Get There ride from a couple years ago.
If you remember the Big Red Store, it's always had all the old stuff in there but has been closed for years.  I'd heard that they started opening it on weekends and wanted to see inside.  They've even posted signs out on the major roads that point the way to the store...I thought we were in for a treat.  But when we got there, it was closed and no postings or messages on the doors???  A shame really.  There is a lot of neat old stuff in there.  We also rode over to Mt. Zion church, where the bluegrass festival was.  It's still a nice place to take a break and people-watch.  If you've never heard of or seen it, you should back up to some previous ride reports...they'll have Mt. Zion somewhere in the title.  Nowdays it's frequently visited by packs of Polaris Razors and the like.  They romp up and down the creek.  Lots of local folks ride horses in the area and are fun to watch.  I've posted many pictures and videos there in other reports.  I'll skip all the repeat pics this time.  We actually covered some new territory this time but just failed to image any of it.  Sorry I seem to have flopped for Saturday.

But, I can show you a nice...eh..OK demo of the track animation capabilities in TopoFusion....yeahh!!! :(  Just skip around as you see fit to see the different maps and controls.  I down-sampled it from 1920x1080 to make a smaller file size.  It should load and play fairly well on most connections...the whole thing is less than 200MB.  Just remember to click the fullscreen button to stand a chance of being able to read any of the text, if your even interested.  It is now 1280x720p so it will be somewhat pixelated.



Bail me out here Randy!!!

Sunday is fairly well covered and will be ready in a bit.  Like camels?  Right...who doesn't?

[kdtrull]

I just realized the embedded version does not have a full screen option.  Click the Vimeo button to go to Vimeo and you'll get the full screen option.

[kdtrull]

So, on the last stop of Saturday's ride (I think it was at the park in Minor Hill, TN), I told Randy "Holler if you get a chance to get out tomorrow.  I'm going again."  Randy says something along the lines of "Where we going?"  How fortunate is that?  Three completely unplanned days in a row.

When I got home and started thinking about where to go, I remembered that Randy missed a really cool ride last year because he was helping an injured buddy take care of business until he got back on his feet.  And thought, with an early start on Sunday, we could probably hit the high points of it on a day ride.

Sorry no labels on this route overview.  The eastern loop, which is quite spectacular, was not created by me.
This one was a full 12 hours covering 320 miles.  Average speed, 39.9 mph.



We lost a fair amount of time riding some trails and decided we have to come back soon and ride some of the very many roads we saw and didn't have time to explore.

That area of the state is truly beautiful.  We may win in the traversable water department over here in the NW, but the NE corner is unmatched for its incredible views and elevation changes.  Giving full credit, that part of southern TN is pretty outstanding as well.

But meanwhile, near and around the really good stuff, is some pretty interesting (if not outright unusual) things to see.  To date, I guess Elk and Buffalo are the most unlikely animals I've stumbled across in my local travels.  Never would have guessed camels could be added to that list.

I think that first one might have had a "thing" for the lazeebum.  Perhaps she thought the KLR was actually a Norton??? :)



Some of 'em gots better teeth than some of those canoe chicks I mentioned up in the Iron (Arn) City:



Some young fellers stopped by in a car and hollerd "You better back up.  Them thangs 'll bite ya and spit on ya."  I didn't buy it.  They either wanted food or rubbin'.  No camel loogies today.



I'm pretty sure they were thinking, "When we get out of here, we're goin' dual sportin'".



Here's a little spot in Tennessee that oughta' be seen if you ever get the chance. 



Same spot, different angle.



I'm not sure if this old place is in its original location or not but it's kinda neat to see out in the boonies.  Maybe that place wasn't always "the boonies".



We had to jump off the backroads to get some fuel in Stevenson where we found another nice piece of history:



Pretty sure a bunch of yens been out to this nearby landmark:



This shot is a little out of sequence...coming out of the hill country headed south to the first old depot:



It was a great day with near perfect weather.  And I'll tell ya', the ride over there from our neck of the woods has some great scenery too.  Photos and shaky videos don't do it justice.
I bet we made 20 GB of video on Sunday but it just isn't worthy to show the beauty of this area.

At some point on the way home from the NE area ride, we were talking about coming back this way and skipping the trails to ride some more of the great roads we'd seen.  A memorable part of that discussion was when Randy said, "It's no wonder nobody wants to come ride where we live."  For a large part, I totally agree.

[lazeebum]

It seems Kenneth and I took the same pictures, so I won't clutter the report with them. It was pretty good timing for Kenneth to contact me Friday about riding. I wuz more than game. For some reason Dry Creek WMA makes a good spring afternoon ride. I was nervous about riding that area on the KLR with mostly street tires, but we can turn around if it gets too rough, can't we? I reckon not, the first treacherous area, with coaching from Kenneth I duck walked through the worst of it. Good deal, no bruises or bent motorcycle parts. There were several fun water crossings, one of which I promptly dabbed my foot in water that was over the top of my waterproof boots. They ain't waterproof like that.

[lazeebum]

In the picture of me duck walking my motorcycle by the big mud hole, kd had to come help me. Kenneth helped me keep the bike balanced while I worked the wide handlebars around the tree. Fuuuuun, right! Oddly enough, yes, for some strange reason. Friday's adventure just got my mind set for the rest of the weekend.

[lazeebum]

Saturday was another unplanned day. We wound up in the Mt Zion area. While we stopped for a break at the church, we asked some ladies about the Big Red Store, I guess we spooked 'em cause they didn't hang around long after that. It was a good day to ride. Here is a few pictures I have from Saturday.

Now if a feller has a lot of time on his hands, he can make himself a hot rod lawnmower


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