Feel Good Stuff – Page 36 – The ExhaustNotes Blog

The Perfect Bike?

This was a blog I wrote for CSC about 6 years ago, and it’s still relevant. Earlier this year I posted a photo showing my Harley in Baja and Gresh made a good comment: Any motorcycle you take a trip on is an adventure motorcycle. I agree with that. The earlier blogs on my Harley Softail had me thinking about this question again: What is the perfect motorcycle?

Cruisers. Standards. Sports bikes. Dirt bikes. Dual sports. Big bikes. Small bikes. Whoa, I’m getting dizzy just listing these.

The Good Old Days

In the old days, it was simple. There were motorcycles. Just plain motorcycles. You wanted to ride, you bought a motorcycle. And they were small, mostly. I started on a 90cc Honda (that’s me in that photo to the right). We’d call it a standard today, if such a thing still existed.

Then it got confusing. Bikes got bigger. Stupidly so, in my opinion. In my youth, a 650 was a huge motorcycle, and the streets were ruled by bikes like the Triumph Bonneville and the BSA Lightning. Today, a 650 would be considered small. The biggest Triumph today has a 2300cc engine. I don’t follow the Harley thing anymore, but I think their engines are nearly that big, too. The bikes weigh close to half a ton. Half a ton!

I’ve gone through an evolution of sorts on this topic. Started on standards, migrated into cruisers after a long lapse, went to the rice rockets, then morphed into dual sports.

Cruisers and Adventure Bikes

The ADV bug hit me hard about 15 years ago. I’d been riding in Baja a lot and my forays occasionally took me off road. Like many folks who drifted back into motorcycles in the early 1990s, the uptick in Harley quality bit me. As many of us did, I bought my obligatory yuppie bike (the Heritage Softail) and the accompanying zillion t-shirts (one from every Harley dealer along the path of every trip I ever took). I had everything that went along with this kind of riding except the tattoo (my wife and a modicum of clear thinking on my part drew the line there). Leather fringe, the beanie helmet, complimentary HOG membership, and the pot belly. I was fully engaged.

Unlike a lot of yuppie riders of that era, though, I wasn’t content to squander my bucks on chrome, leather fringe, and the “ride to live, live to ride” schlock. I wanted to ride, and ride I did. All over the southwestern US and deep into Mexico. Those rides were what convinced me that maybe an 800+ lb cruiser was not the best bike in the world for serious riding…

The Harley had a low center of gravity, and I liked that. It was low to the ground, and I didn’t like that. And it was heavy. When that puppy started to drift in the sand, I just hung on and hoped for the best. Someone was looking out for me, because in all of that offroading down there in Baja, I never once dropped it. As I sit here typing this, enjoying a nice hot cup of coffee that Susie just made for me, I realize that’s kind of amazing.

The other thing I didn’t like about the Harley was that I couldn’t carry too much stuff on it without converting that bike into a sort of rolling bungee cord advertisement. The bike’s leather bags didn’t hold very much, the Harley’s vibration required that I constantly watch and tighten their mounting hardware, and the whole arrangement really wasn’t a good setup for what I was doing. The leather bags looked cool, but that was it. It was bungee cords and spare bags to the rescue on those trips…

Sports Bikes

The next phase for me involved sports bikes. They were all the rage in the early 90s and beyond, but to me they basically represent the triumph of marketing hoopla over common sense. I bought a Suzuki TL1000S (fastest bike I ever owned), and I toured Baja with it. It would be hard to find a worse bike for that kind of riding. The whole sports bike thing, in my opinion, was and is stupid. You sit in this ridiculous crouched over, head down position, and if you do any kind of riding at all, by the end of the day your wrists, shoulders, and neck are on fire. My luggage carrying capacity was restricted to a small tankbag and a ridiculous-looking tailbag.

I was pretty hooked on the look, though, and I went through a succession of sports bikes, including the TL1000S, a really racy Triumph Daytona 1200 (rode that one from Mexico to Canada), and a Triumph Speed Triple. Fast, but really dumb as touring solutions, and even dumber for any kind of off road excursion.

Phase III for me, after going through the Harley “ride to live” hoopla and the Ricky Racer phases, was ADV riding and dual sport bikes. The idea here is that the bike is equally at home on the street or in the dirt. Dual purpose…dual sport. I liked the idea, and I thought it would be a winner for my kind of riding.

A BMW GS versus Triumph’s Tiger

The flavor of the month back then was the BMW GS. I could never see myself on a Beemer, but I liked the concept. I was a Triumph man back in those days, and the Triumph Tiger really had my attention. A couple of my friends were riding the big BMW GS, but I knew I didn’t want a Beemer. In my opinion, those bikes are overpriced. The Beemers are heavy (over 600 lbs on the road), they have a terrible reputation for reliability, and I think they looked goofy. The Tiger seemed to be a better deal than the Beemer, and it sure had the right offroad look. Tall, an upright seating position (I had enough of that sports bike nonsense), and integrated luggage. So, I bit the bullet and shelled out something north of $10K back in ’06 for this beauty…

The Triumph had a few things going for it…I liked the detachable luggage, it was fast, it got good gas mileage (I could go 200+ miles between gas stations), and did I mention it was fast?

The Tiger’s Shortfalls

Looks can be deceiving, though, and that Tiger was anything but an off-road bike. It was still well over 600 lbs on the road with a full tank of gas, and in the soft stuff, it was terrifying. I never dropped the Triumph, but I sure came close one time. On a ride out to the Old Mill in Baja (a really cool old hotel right on the coast a couple hundred miles south of the border), the soft sand was bad. Really bad. Getting to the Old Mill involved riding through about 5 miles of soft sand, and it scared the stuffing out of me. I literally tossed and turned all night worrying about the ride out the next morning. It’s not supposed to be like that, folks.

And the Tiger was tall. Too tall, in my opinion. I think all of the current dual sport bikes are too tall. I guess the manufacturers do that because their marketing studies show a lot of basketball players buy dual sports. Me? I don’t play basketball and I never cared for a seat that high. Just getting on the Tiger was scary. After throwing my leg over the seat, I’d fight to lean the bike upright, and not being able to touch the ground on the right side until I had the thing upright was downright unnerving. I never got over that initial “getting on the bike” uneasiness. What were those engineers thinking?
The other thing that surprised me about the Tiger was that it was uncomfortable. The seat was hard (not comfortably hard, like a well designed seat should be, but more like sitting on small beer keg), and the foot pegs were way too high. I think they did that foot peg thing to make the bike lean over more, but all it did for me was make me feel like I was squatting all day. Not a good idea.

Kawasaki’s KLR 650

I rode the Tiger for a few years and then sold it. Even before I sold it, though, I had bought a new KLR 650 Kawasaki. It was a big step down in the power department (I think it has something like 34 or 38 horsepower), but I had been looking at the KLR for years. It seemed to be right…something that was smaller, had a comfortable riding position, and was reasonably priced (back then, anyway).

I had wanted a KLR for a long time, but nobody was willing to let me ride one. That’s a common problem with Japanese motorcycle dealers. And folks, this boy ain’t shelling out anything without a test ride first. I understand why they do it (they probably see 10,000 squids who want a test ride for every serious buyer who walks into a showroom), but I’m old fashioned and crotchety. I won’t buy anything without a test ride. This no-test-ride thing kept me from pulling the trigger on a KLR for years. When I finally found a dealer who was willing to let me ride one (thank you, Art Wood), I wrote the check and got on the road…and the off road…

My buddy John and I have covered a lot of miles on our KLRs through Baja and elsewhere. I still have my KLR, but truth be told, I only fire it up three or four times a year. It’s a big bike. Kawi says the KLR is under 400 lbs, but with a full tank of gas on a certified scale, that thing is actually north of 500 lbs. I was shocked when I saw that on the digital readout. And, like all of the dual sports, the KLR is tall. It still gives me the same tip-over anxiety as the Tiger did when I get on it. And I know if I ever dropped it, I’d need a crew to get it back on its feet.

That thing about dropping a bike is a real consideration. I’ve been lucky and I haven’t dropped a bike very often. But it can happen, and when it does, it would be nice to just be able to pick the bike up.

Muddy Baja

On one of our Baja trips, we had to ride through a puddle that looked more like a small version of Lake Michigan. I got through it, but it was luck, not talent. My buddy Dave was not so lucky…he dropped his pristine Yamaha mid-puddle…

The fall broke the windshield and was probably a bit humiliating for Dave, but the worst part was trying to lift the Yamaha after it went down. Slippery, muddy, wet…knee deep in a Mexican mudbath. Yecchh! It took three of us to get the thing upright and we fell down several times while doing so. Thinking back on it now, we probably looked pretty funny. If we had made a video of it, it probably would have gone viral.

The Perfect Bike: A Specification

So, where is this going…and what would my definition of the perfect touring/dual sport/ADV bike be?

Here’s what I’d like to see:

Something with a 250cc to 500cc single-cylinder engine. My experience with small bikes as a teenager and my more recent experience has convinced me that this is probably the perfect engine size. Big engines mean big bikes, and that kind of gets away from what a motorcycle should be all about. Water cooled would be even better. The Kawi KLR is water cooled, and I like that.

A dual sport style, with a comfortable riding position. No more silly road racing stuff. I’m a grown man, and when I ride, I like to ride hundreds of miles a day. I want my bike to have a riding position that will let me do that.

A windshield. It doesn’t have to be big…just something that will flip the wind over my helmet. The Kawi and the Triumph got it right in that department.

Integrated luggage. The Triumph Tiger got that part right. The KLR, not so much.

Light weight. Folks, it’s a motorcycle…not half a car. Something under 400 lbs works for me. If it gets stuck, I want to be able to pull it out of a puddle. If it drops, I want to be able to pick it up without a hoist or a road crew. None of the current crop of big road bikes meets this requirement.

Something that looks right and is comfortable. I liked the Triumph’s looks. But I want it to be comfortable.

Something under $5K. Again, it’s a motorcycle, not a car. My days of dropping $10K or so on a motorcycle are over. I’ve got the money, but I’ve also got the life experiences that tell me I don’t need to spend stupidly to have fun.

It was maybe a year after that blog that the RX3 came on the scene, and it answered the mail nicely. A year or two after the RX3 hit the scene, BMW, Kawasaki, and one or two others introduced smaller ADV motorcycles. I commented that these guys were copying Zongshen. One snotty newspaper writer told me I was delusional if I thought BMW, Kawi, and others copied Zongshen. I think that’s exactly what happened, but I don’t think they did as good a job as Zongshen did.

If you’ve got an opinion, please leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you!

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Singapore

I like Singapore and I fly there a couple of times a year on business. I know, I’m supposed to be retired, but I’m finding I’m not very good at it. And I don’t need much of an excuse to fly to Singapore. The flight is a bruiser (it’s 16 1/2 hours from LAX to Singapore on a nonstop, and it usually goes over 24 hours if you can’t get a nonstop), but I don’t mind doing it. Singapore is worth the trek. I say I go there on business, but my visits are more like vacations than work. I like the place.

Orchard Road: Singapore’s Rodeo Drive

Orchard Road is Singapore’s upscale shopping area, and the architecture, the night scenes, and feel of the place is amazing. These are scenes from a walk along Orchard Road with an 8mm fisheye lens on my Nikon. It had just rained the evening I took these, and it made for dramatic photography.

You see two kinds of buildings in this area, and I captured both in the photos above. Old Singapore consists primarily of shop houses…two-story structures where folks have a business on the first floor and live on the second floor. And there are the modern skyscrapers. The mix of both makes for interesting scenes.

See those trees along the sidewalks? They’re quiet during the day, but at night, the zillions of birds roosting in those trees are deafening. You literally have to shout to carry on a conversation because the birds drown everything out. It gets interesting when there’s a thunderstorm (very common in this part of the world). When the skies thunder, the birds all fall silent for a second. Then, after a brief pause, they start chirping again. It’s all very cool.

Little India in Singapore

On another visit, I poked around Singapore’s Little India section. There are four major ethnic groups in Singapore, and folks from India comprise one of them.

Singapore Industries

Singapore has a rich maritime heritage (the four major industries in Singapore are shipping, oil refining, finance, and tourism). The shipping industry came about as a result of Singapore’s central location between India and China (the Chinese are another major ethnic group here). There are all kinds of interesting things to see in Singapore, and it’s a walker’s paradise if you like to explore on foot.

You can see all kinds of things in Singapore you won’t see anywhere else in the world. Check this out:

The structure you see above is a shopping, apartment, office, and entertainment complex comprised of three huge buildings capped by a roof styled like a ship (complete with gardens and a swimming pool). The buildings are supposed to be waves, with the ship riding along top. I’ve never seen anything like this. You might have seen it on television when President Trump was in Singapore meeting with the North Korean guy. But that’s Singapore. It has a lot of things you won’t see anywhere else.

Singapore Museums

To me, all of Singapore is a museum with architecture, dining, street sculpture, automobiles, and more that makes getting out and walking around a hell of an experience. There are many museums, including one focused on Singapore’s World War II history I found particularly interesting. Here are a few photos I grabbed in it.

Exploring Singapore on a Motorcycle?

Nope, I haven’t done that (not yet, anyway). But I’m tempted to spend an extra day or two over there on the next trip and see if I can find somebody to rent me a motorcycle. I’ve seen RX3s in Singapore. That would be fun, and I think the RX3 would be a perfect bike to poke around on in this tropical urban paradise. The entire country is only about 24 miles long, and most (maybe all) of it is city. It seems to be very safe, too, so I don’t think I could find myself in any dangerous areas. The only problem is they drive on the wrong side of the road over there, and that would take some getting used to.

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Lucky Boy

To me, the three most terrifying words in the English language are “Where’s the party?” I’m a homebody. I like it at Tinfiny Ranch amongst the trees, rocks and dirt. It’s a safe place. I’ve got my junk cars and junk motorcycles. I’ve got my tractor and shed full of tools. No one can see what I’m doing and I can’t see anyone else. It’s pretty much heaven.

Unfortunately the world has a way of forcing itself on you and my cool nephew Anthony is getting married. I can’t miss that scene, man. I like the kid. That means leaving the serenity of Tinfiny and taking trip to the neon gates of hell: Lost Wages, Nevada.

Chief amongst my pet peeves of this modern world is air travel. I used to enjoy flying but now it’s a trial to be endured. Every time I get on a passenger airplane it seems they have managed to make the restroom smaller. I had to use the toilet on the flight to Vegas and my head was bumping into the curvature of the fuselage while my butt was resting against the bi-fold doors. I’m not a large person yet I still had to remove my billfold, watch, and think of baseball to turn around in the confined area.

Mooing and kicking at the fences, we disembarked into the Las Vegas airport where we attempted to rent a mini van because our wilding days are over. Dollar was out of minivans so we ended up with a Ford Flex. The Flex is like a mini van with a snout. It’s easier to find the squared off profile in a parking lot. So that’s a plus.

It’s always the turbo-charged 1970’s in Las Vegas. The clothes, the hair, the Hugh Heffner value system. There’s a dusty, aged-vibe sucking the life force from fresh-faced youth that is creepy if you pay attention to it. Everybody has to make a living but I’m uncomfortable with the place, you know?

Our hotel is also a huge casino and between visits to CT’s rowdy family I’ve been busy working the electronic slot machines. In only two days I’ve made $4.05 doing nothing more than repeatedly pushing buttons. It’s like taking candy from a really stingy baby. I never bet large amounts. Every expenditure breaks down into bags of concrete. Do I take another spin on the machine or should that 50 cents be used to buy 10 pounds of mud? Maybe I’ll take just one more try.

Shovel Ready

The Kubota tractor is a little too large for Tinfiny’s expansive back yard. Long and narrow, the yard requires a multi point turn to get the tractor aimed in the correct direction for filling the side yard. Once there, it’s another 20-point turn to get the bucket dumped where I need it.

I was using the flat point shovel to load droppings into the wheel-buggy. It’s not hard digging and it’s actually faster than maneuvering the machine. I lean the shovel on the tractor between loads.

After the buggy is full I can wheel it to the side yard and place the dirt right where it needs to go. It’s a slow process but I’m at that stage in life, the hobbling stage, where I just enjoy being able to move.

The pile at the end of the yard was getting low and I needed to scrape another few inches off the back yard. I’m trying to slope the yard away from the house.

The Kubota runs great (thanks Hunter!) and as I pulled forward I heard a gunshot. The shovel. The thing was and busted in two pieces. Heavy equipment is called that for a reason. I never felt a thing.

Internet searches turned up shovel handles for $13 to $15 dollars. The big rivet that holds the shovel head in was another couple bucks. I went to the local Home Depot and they had a new shovel for $10. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out the situation and I’d have to be really attached to a particular shovel head to pay more for the honor of fixing it. Maybe a shovel handed down for generations or something.

They wear out, you know. Shovel heads get ground away in use. The center part eats away leaving the sides protruding. I guess what I’m trying to say is, in life, don’t lean your shovel on the tractor.

The Bomber

Gearheads Road Trip stopped by Tinfiny Ranch to say hello. The poor guy ran right into a concrete pour as is likely to happen any time you visit our mountain lair. Nothing stops mud, least of all visitors, so we trundled off to the Big Box store to pick up some concrete.

Lowes has a price break if you buy 70 bags of concrete or more. That ends up being 3500 pounds and the Bomber, my 1990 1/2-ton Suburban groans under the weight. The rear leaf springs invert to frowns and the truck sways down the highway alarmingly. You want to keep it around 45mph.

3500 pounds was a bit nerve wracking on the twisty mountain roads so I’ve since developed a new plan: I order two pallet loads of concrete which gets me to the 70 bag discount but I take the pallets home one at a time. 2800 pounds is a lot easier to haul, and the Bomber totes it nicely with no sway issues. You still don’t want to make any drastic maneuvers, though.

The 1990 Suburban was an oddball, the last year of the straight front axle 4×4. That axle, kind of like a Dana 44, was upgraded a bit for 1990 making it a one-year deal. It’s got the manual locking hubs, 6-bolt wheels and leaf springs. For a 1/2-ton ride it’s a real Dream Axle if you’re into that sort of stuff.

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Ekins, McQueen, Leno, Weinstein, and more…

This is a story I wrote a good 15 years ago and it has appeared online a couple of times before. It’s about an invitation only celebration of Bud Ekin’s life at Warner Brothers Studios here in So Cal. I first published this story on the old MotoFoto site and then again on the CSC blog about 10 years ago. Good buddy Marty and rode our motorcycles to the event and it was awesome. It’s a good story and it was a great day.

I’ll bet everyone who reads this blog has seen Steve McQueen’s The Great Escape. Released in 1963 (about the same time as the original Mustang Motor Products folded), I believe The Great Escape is one of the greatest movies ever made. If you’re into bikes (hey, you’re reading this blog, so you gotta be!), you know about the scenes showing Steve McQueen racing away from the Nazis on a motorcycle in World War II Germany…

The purists among us recognized that the movie dudes took some liberties here…McQueen was on a 650 Triumph in the film, and the Germans didn’t use Triumphs. The movie folks modified the Triumph to make it look like a German military bike because it would have been a lot harder doing this scene on an old and underpowered BMW. And the guy who jumped the bike over that barbed-wire fence wasn’t really Steve McQueen…it was a previously-unknown desert racer and stuntman named Bud Ekins (more on him in a bit).

The real deal: The original, actual Triumph motorcycle used in The Great Escape.

So, how did all this come about?

Most of you probably know that Steve McQueen was a serious motorcycle guy. In his day, he was an avid collector, racer, and rider. McQueen got into motorcycling almost accidentally. A guy who owed McQueen money offered to give him a Triumph motorcycle to repay the debt, and McQueen agreed, but he didn’t know how to ride. McQueen took the bike to the local Triumph guru to learn how to ride, and that guy was a racer and mechanic named Bud Ekins. The two became riding buddies and (pardon the pun) fast friends. Fast forward a bit, and McQueen’s got this gig to star in a movie called (you guessed it) The Great Escape. There are cool motorcycle scenes in it, including the iconic jump shown in the video above. McQueen’s bosses wouldn’t let him do the jump, so McQueen turned to his buddy, Bud Ekins. It would be the first time Ekins did any stunt work, or really any work at all in the movie industry.

Ekins and McQueen met with the folks in charge of the movie and learned that the script required jumping a 15-ft fence. Ekins explained to the studio execs that the highest he had ever jumped a motorcycle was maybe 5 feet, but Ekins thought he make the higher jump. McQueen and Ekins worked at it, building up Ekin’s ability to jump greater heights through a series of experiments with ramps, velocity, and ropes. When Ekins felt confident, they filmed the scene in the above video in a single take. That’s all it took.

Ekins negotiated what was then a whopping fee for his jump: $1000. Yep, that’s right…there aren’t any zeros missing in that number. A cool one thousand dollars. It almost seems laughable now, but at the time, it was the highest fee Hollywood had ever paid any stuntman, and it made news.

Frank Bullitt’s ride. The two Mustangs used in filming Bullitt were on display at this event.

After Ekins made that Great Escape jump, his stuntman career took off. Just about any action scene you’ve ever seen in any movies during the last 50 years or so (if it involved a motorcycle or a car) had Ekins doing the real driving. In Bullitt, he drove both the Mustang (the green car, that is…not a Mustang motorcycle) and he rode the motorcycle that crashed during that movie’s iconic chase scene. In The Blues Brothers, that was Bud behind the wheel of Belushi’s and Akroyd’s trashed out police car. In Smokey and the Bandit, it was Ekins behind the wheel of the Firebird. You get the idea.

Speakers at the Ekins Celebration of Life. The guy on the right needs no introduction. The guy on the left is Harvey Weinstein.

McQueen died young a long time ago. Ekins passed away in 2007, and I was lucky enough to attend the celebration of life for him at Warner Brothers Studios. There were a lot of speakers at that event, including big wheels in the movie business (one was a guy named Harvey Weinstein). The were McQueen family members, Ekins family members, and Jay Leno. Something that stuck in my mind was Harvey Weinstein telling us that during the ’60s and ’70s if you asked any guy who he wanted to be, the answer would be Steve McQueen. But, Weinstein continued, if you asked Steve McQueen who he wanted to be, the answer would be Bud Ekins.

So there you have it. Bud Ekins, Steve McQueen, The Great Escape, a famous Triumph motorcycle disguised to look like a BMW, and more. It was a grand day. So, we have a question for you: What’s your favorite motorcycle movie? Let us know with a comment or two. We’d love to hear from you.

More Thai Taxi Photos

I guess we struck a nerve with the blog yesterday featuring Thai moto taxis, and I received a couple of emails asking if I had more photos. Indeed I do, folks…

The orange vest denotes a taxi rider, and I guess Thai law requires that they wear helmets (but their passengers do not have to). So much for ATGATT in Thailand. Another commenter said it was amazing that that female passengers never lost shoes. I thought it was amazing that none ever seemed to fall off (it looks like a precarious perch). I took all of the photos you see here in the space of maybe 5 minutes.

Product Review: Turmeric

Turmeric. The idea is that it reduces inflammation. Your mileage may vary, but it seems to be working for me.

I’ll start this blog by saying I’m not a believer in dietary supplements, but turmeric seems to be working for me. Here’s the deal: I had what most folks would agree is a fairly serious motorcycle accident 10 years ago. I was riding my Triumph Speed Triple on my way to teach a class at Cal Poly Pomona early in the morning when I exited the westbound freeway. It was a trip I had probably made a zillion times before, but this morning would be different. As I rode across the overpass, I saw a guy in a Camaro aggressively braking on the eastbound exit. That’s the last thing I remember, other than briefly waking up when they were loading me onto a helicopter, and then briefly waking up when the helicopter was landing, and then realizing: Man, I hurt all over. I wondered if I was dreaming. Was I still in the Army? Was I in Vietnam?

Nope, it was none of the above, and it wasn’t that guy in the Camaro that I hit. It was a woman in a Volvo one block further south, but I didn’t find that out until weeks later. What I did learn a few days later was that I had broken my back, and I had broken my femur in two places, and they needed to operate to put a plate in my leg. I didn’t remember anything about the accident because I landed on my head 50 feet from my motorcycle (the top of my helmet looked like a hard-boiled egg after it had been slammed against a countertop) and I had what they call traumatic amnesia.

My 2007 Speed Triple, unquestionably the most beautiful motorcycle I’ve ever owned. It was fast, buzzy, and twitchy, but it made me look good. Did I mention it was fast?

So there I was, in the hospital, in a drug-induced stupor. The doctors reduced the morphine drip enough for me to sign the waivers for my surgery (hey, what else was I going to do), and then they did the body-and-fender thing on my left leg. It was a week in the hospital, then a week in a skilled nursing facility (a misnamed place if ever there was one), and then three or four weeks in a rehab facility. That was followed by months in a wheel chair, then a walker, then crutches, and then a cane.

My “I got screwed” photo, showing the plate and screws in my left leg. That plate ultimately broke, and I needed a second surgery to remove every metal piece you see in this photo and replace it with a femoral nail. You can see the two fractures in this x-ray, one at the top of my femur and the other about 5 inches down. Ouch!

My leg hurt like hell for the next year and a half, and then one day it really started hurting. As in hurting Big Time. Back to the docs again, more x-rays, and more bad news: The plate had fractured. It was time for revision surgery. Trust me on this, “revision” and “surgery” are two words you never want to see together. It seems the top fracture (the really big one you see at the top of the above photo) had healed, but the bottom one had not. Maybe one out of two ain’t too bad in some things. This wasn’t one of them.

So the doctors removed the plate and all the screws, they surgically broke the unhealed fracture again and did bone grafts, and then they put in what they call a femoral nail (that’s a metal rod that extends nearly the entire length of the bone, from the hip to just above my knee). More time in a walker, then crutches, then a cane, and then I was on my own two legs again. My leg still gave me a lot of grief, and then it was yet another good news/bad news story. The remaining fracture finally healed after another year, but the femoral rod fractured. But it didn’t matter, they said, because the bone had healed, and in any event, removing the broken rod wasn’t an option because of the way it broke. That piece of metal in my thighbone would just be along for the ride for the duration. These guys were starting to sound like a few motorcycle mechanics I’ve known. You know, the kind who work in the big dealerships (that wire’s supposed to be hanging out below the headlight, Joe).

What about my left leg still hurting? Man up, they said. Well, they didn’t actually use those words, but it was clear to me these guys had done about all they could do. I couldn’t take the Oxy they offered because it made me hallucinate (why anyone would take that stuff recreationally is beyond my comprehension), and Tylenol/Ibuprofen/Alleve and all the other over-the-counter pain meds didn’t make a dent. Steroid injections and pills helped, but they came with their own set of problems, like terrible cramps and (don’t laugh) uncontrollable hiccups (I once had the hiccups for 4 days straight, day and night). About the only thing that gave me some relief was riding my bicycle, but you can’t live your life from the saddle of a road bike. I was doing a lot of overseas travel, and long airplane rides always aggravated the pain (especially those long flights to Asia flying coach). It felt like someone had stuck a hot knife in my thigh nearly all the time. Every once in a while the bastard would twist it, too.

The docs tell me what I have is traumatic sciatica, which is an injury to the sciatic nerve along my femur (rather than plain old vanilla sciatica, which is induced by compression of the sciatic nerve as it exits the spinal column). Okay, so it has a name. I quit bitching about it and basically, you know, manned up. There wasn’t anything they could do. That hot knife sticking in my leg became the new normal. I rode across the US with it, I covered a lot of miles in Baja with it, I rode through the Andes in Colombia with it, and I rode across China with it. I had, indeed, manned up. But it was a gold-plated bitch.

My good buddy TK, who is a little younger than me, has his own set of orthopedic challenges. We would sometimes compare notes on where it hurt the most. You know, two old guys complaining about the results of too many good times on motorcycles. It was kind of like that scene in Jaws when Quint and Richard Dreyfuss are comparing scars. And then what I consider a miracle occurred a few weeks ago. TK mentioned to me that turmeric was giving him a bit of relief, and hell, I thought I’d try that, too. I’d tried everything else. Like big city folks voting for a Republican, I had nothing to lose.

Much to my great surprise and relief, the turmeric seems to be working. The idea is that it reduces inflammation, I’ve read. That’s the same thing the steroids would do, but the turmeric doesn’t have the side effects that the steroids did. The acid test for me was my recent flight to and from Singapore, and I got through that just fine. My leg is feeling pretty close to normal these days. I’m not at 100%, but I’m way better than I have been. I even did a 7 1/2 mile walk while I was in Singapore with no pain. I hadn’t done that since before the accident.

I bought my turmeric from Costco, and I only started using it after I checked with my doctor to make sure I wouldn’t be screwing anything else up (like most guys my age, I take pills for two or three other old guy ailments). So here comes the disclaimer: I’m not a doctor and I’m not recommending you start taking turmeric. But if you have motorcycle-induced or other old age aches and pains that won’t go away, check with your doctor first and then consider trying turmeric. It’s working for me.

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Masks at the Gilcrease Museum

During a recent Oklahoma visit, one of our stops was at Tulsa’s Thomas Gilcrease Museum. Gilcrease (that’s him in the photo above) was an Oklahoma Native American who discovered oil on his property (Come and listen to my story about a man named Gil, sung to the tune of the Beverly Hillbillies theme song). Mr. Gilcrease collected artifacts of the Americas, western art, and more (cue in the Indiana Jones music), and he built the museum bearing his name. The Gilcrease Museum is an impressive place, and the collection of Native American masks is particularly impressive. Here are just a few, all shot at ISO 3200 on my Nikon. Enjoy, my friends.

The 2020 Corvette

I received an email last night from Chevy advising me I could configure my own new 2020 Corvette online with their website. Hmmmm, that sounded interesting. The new Corvettes are mid-engined, like a Ferrari and some of world’s other exotic sports cars. After doing as Chevy suggested, I’m mighty tempted. The new Corvette is stunning.

I guess I first got the Corvette bug back in the early 1960s, watching a couple of TV shows. One was Route 66, a story about a young Marty Milner and George Maharis (Todd and Buzz) bopping around the US in a Corvette solving the world’s problems. The other was Bonanza, the great western sponsored by Chevy. We watched it as much for the Corvette ads as we did for the show. Ben, Hoss, Adam, and Little Joe. They’re all dead now, I think, but I remember them well, and Adam (Pernell Roberts) even appeared in one of the Corvette ads.

I’d wanted a Corvette ever since I was a kid, and in 2004, as Chevy was transitioning from the C-whatever body style to the C+1 body style, they allowed the dealers to sell the ’04 models to GM employees at the GM employee discount. It’s a long story how I qualified for it, but the bottom line is the discount exceeded $17K on a Z06 (a car most folks pay over MSRP for), and I was in.

To make a long story a little less long, I kept the Z06 for 14 years, and when I sold it, the car had a whopping 40,000 miles on the clock. That’s about 2850 miles annually, and when you consider insurance and registration, that worked out to something slightly south of a dollar a mile just for insurance and registration. Throw in our California fuel costs (currently well over $4 a gallon), depreciation, and maintenance (surprisingly little on a car like the Z06), firing up that silver streak was expensive. I should have driven it more to get my money’s worth, but the Corvette was more of a toy for me than real transportation. I loved the thing, but it wasn’t a good daily driver. I didn’t regret seeing the Corvette go, but every once in awhile I think about another one. Like when I received the email from Chevy last night that led to me playing around with their online configurator. That pastel blue one you see above sure grabbed my attention. There’s no denying it: The new Corvette is an incredibly-beautiful car. And I still qualify for the employee discount. But nah, I don’t think I’ll be pulling the trigger on this one.