Payson and then Roosevelt Lake again.

Our ride yesterday..(Thursday)..  Was much the same as last week, but with different stopping points and a much bigger circle....

This club uses several meet up points, and today it was the Denny's Restaurant on Country Club and Southern..  This is not convenient for me out here in the extreem East part of the valley..  But hey it is what it is...  So the first part of the ride was down the 6 lane highway 60 back to the center of downtown Mesa...  

They met up at 10 AM and I was so early that I thought perhaps they had changed things...  The reason for using that as the starting point, is because it is on highway 87 which is the road to Peyson, Az.. 

 

Once on the highway, these folks are all long range riders, and they put their head down and set the cruise controls on 70..  The ride is led by people with hundreds of thousands of miles on Goldwings and they ride thru the mountains like it was flat land...  Of course I am brand new on my three wheeler, and that pushes my skill set...  So I slow down at times when the road is challenging, which makes them pass me by and think poorly of me...  Oh Well...

We ate lunch at the El Rancho Mexican Restaurant there in the middle of Payson...  It is right across from the McDonalds...  At the main intersection of highways...  The food was authentic and good, but I have trouble with the spices in Mexican, so I stuck with a hamburger...  and a salad..

As we were congregating out in the parking lot, I asked if we were going right back down the highway  to Mesa...  And most folks didn't want that.  We decided to veer off and do the same ride we did last week passed the Roosevelt reservoir..  And then back thru Globe...  We looked at the GPS and it was another 127 miles..  That took most of the afternoon, but it was a high 80s day in the mountains and past the lake...  There wasn't a cloud in the sky, so the lake was very blue...

Once back into town, people veer off from the main highway heading on to their home points...  No one returns to the original beginning point...  So we just honk and wave as we leave the remaining riders...

I was gone about 6 hours, and Biscuit was glad to see me come home...  She was sleeping in my big recliner, and sat on my lap once I wiggled into it with her...   

Retired Rod 

Yard things...

I'm still here, but just some slow laid back days...   I was working in the yard, trying to get it cleaned up, but also asked the home management guy to send his guy to help...

So last night I went out and bought a bush trimmer, and just like that....  Using it this morning, caused the yard guy to show up right after lunch...  I hadn't even cleaned up my piles of clippings....  Of course the yard guy did way more work in a couple of hours than I had done all morning....  Its his business...

I had ordered a hose cart from Wal mart on line..  And they told me it would come by November 10th..  or perhaps later... Its a steel one with rubber tires...  They rust back in the Midwest, but not much chance of that happening out here where there is no rain or even water in the air for that matter..

It came in a big box this afternoon, and parts and pieces came raining out when I opened the tape...  Bolts and nuts and things all over the garage floor..  I told myself to stay positive...  The box didn't look damaged...  Surely it was all there....  So I just laid it all out on the floor and decided where the bolts and screws must go...   I did have a booklet in seven languages, written by someone that had Chinese as his first language...  Oh, goody!

But I managed to get the thing pieced together and was only missing one little washer..  So the hose is on its nice cart out by the water spigot...  Now watch someone will like it better than me and roll it off...

Tomorrow is the big motorcycle ride..  So perhaps that will give another story to tell...

Retired Rod

Out and about for another week...

This was taken from the street with the Samsung S5 phone...  I will probably make it the new header picture unless everyone votes against it...

The Bushes need trimmed, and the home management fellow assured me they were part of the monthly billing to take care of the yard...  Well do they look trimmed, or perhaps that new growth is just this month...?  I did go out and cut off the sprouts that are volunteering around the base of that Acacia tree...

We went on a big ride again today... and as usual, I was the only non Honda...  But we did have one other rear wheel tricycle Honda conversion bike...  Again I am still wandering all over the road at high speeds...  They put up with me, but I'm certain they don't like it...

We rode up to Roosevelt Lake North of Globe, Az....

We ate in a little country restaurant along the highway called Butcher Hook....   That was what the little town was called as well, but I couldn't find it on the map from Google, so I am betting that it has a name but its not incorporated with the state...

The 60 higway is very mountainous on the way to Globe East of where 79 goes South..  89 North of Globe is also but not as tight in its curves...  The ride along the lake is quite nice, but the water is again lower than I have seen it in years...   The front of the dam is exposed down well beyond where the new part was added, allowing at least 10 feet of the original dam from the early days to be seen..

These motorcycle folks don't stop for anything, let alone something frivolous like picture taking...

But I was quite surprised to find a white haired 60s something gal come out from under one of the helmets at the restaurant..  She was riding her own Goldwing and said she was from Vancouver Island, North of the Malahat summit..   She didn't know Rick Doyle...  She asked if he rode a motor cycle....  "Ah, well no, I don't think so..." The bike had BC plates on it and I wondered if she rode it down here, but then I trailer my bikes all over the place so why wouldn't she...?

We started at our usual gas station on the East end of the US 60 right before it turns Southeast at 10 AM..  It was about 3 PM when I was back in my driveway...  The temperature when we got home was 95...  You could really feel the increase as we descended South from the 188 and 87 corner...

Its almost 5K feet up there, and only 1400 down here in the East valley..  That ride is all down hill and 65 mph speed limit on winding twisties...   Of course, I am getting my trike tippy tilty thing under my belt, so I'm sure they would have liked me to go faster...   We were at or above the speed limit most of the way, and they do have Highway Patrol cops along the route, so I'm not overly concerned that they wanted to go faster....

Nothing else new from here.....!

Retired Rod

Can Am safer?

After several requests, I am going to try and explain how the Can Am motorcycle is different than a regular bike...  Other than it has three wheels which is obvious....  LOL..

But what about those three wheels, ?? aren't they what makes it safer?  Well maybe..  But it won't fall over...  Well neither will a regular two wheel bike if you are going faster than about 5 miles an hour...

The gyroscopic effect of the wheels spinning keeps them standing up..  This is also true for your bicycle...  If you fall over while going forward, its usually because you ran into something or something ran into you...

Now on particularly heavy bikes, like the Goldwing and Harley Davidson touring bikes, they can manifest that  heaviness  when you are sitting stopped..  And once leaned over too far, you may not be able (strong enough) to keep them upright...  But no one gets overly hurt just from tipping over at a stop light....  Embarrassing however....!

What makes motorcycles unsafe, is that you are not protected from other vehicles while sitting out in the open...  Not inside of a vehicle like a car or a truck..  Thus you are ejected from an impact...  This would be just as true on the Can Am..  So if you feel safer on the trike, it might be in your mind...

But wait, aren't tikes unsafe because they will tip over toward the end with only one wheel...?  Well perhaps if you are still riding a kids trike.. But motorcycle trikes are quite long, and designed with the two wheel axle to be long enough that this isn't a problem..   Unless of course you are hit by a car, which will lift the wheels off of the ground..  But then we are back to the same thing......  getting hit by another vehicle is the major danger...  trike or bike it is the same thing...

What makes the Can Am different is that the two wheels are in the front.. This is a selling point that the machine will not tip over from the forces of traveling forward...  But this also makes the machine feel like it is an off road quad bike..  NOT a Motorcycle!!  And for that very reason, motorcycle purists won't like the machine...

Quite frankly, it feels a lot like a snowmobile to me...  The big rear tire has about the same sensation as the snow belt, and the two front wheels feel like the skis do as they keep you from tipping from side to side....   But on a snowmobile, you do tip and raise a ski from the snow at times..  But the forces needed to raise a Can Am wheel are counteracted by a computer operated Vehicle Stability System....

This is similar to modern traction control systems..  What it does is add braking, and adjust the throttle independent of the inputs of the rider..  This keeps the wheels planted on the roadway at all times..

Steering.  Remember this is not a motorcycle, so it steers like a car or quad bike.. It does not require counter steer to cause the bike to lean into a corner..  Actually the bike leans away from a corner and compresses the springs on that outer side a bit...  This can be discomforting at first as you feel like you might fly off toward the outside of the turn...  So you tend to lean your body toward the inside of the turn...

Brakes.  You don't have a handle bar brake lever...  Braking is done with a single pedal on your right foot...   Again the computer is adjusting how much braking each wheel uses...  This was quite apparent at a rapid stop when a light changed in front of me in traffic..  The brakes were  variably applied by the computer brain to keep me going in a straight line...

But that straight line was effected by my inputs..  The steering is power assisted as the front wheels are larger and wider than a motorcycle...  I was then adding too much input and the assist was causing me to wander...  I had this same problem when I first went highway speeds...  I was over correcting and wandering around in my lane on the road...  It will take some time to get this feel under my belt.

Engine and transmission.  The engine is a Rotax 1330 ccd three cylinder inline..  This is bigger than last years 998 V twin..  With the extra cylinder and more displacement, the engine develops more bottom end torque..  This minimizes the amount of rpms needed to develop power in each gear..  The older engine required larger rpms to maintain speed..

Shifting.  The newer bikes come without a clutch lever...  The conventional manual and clutch is available, but the dealer said they didn't sell well against the newer semi automatic...  The transmission has 6 forward gears and a reverse..  This is controlled with a paddle shifter under the left handlebar..   Your thumb changes the gears upward and your forefinger shifts back down... Or you can just let the bike shift by itself as it slows..

So this thing is not a motorcycle! Its not a quad bike or a side by side either...!  Its somewhere in between...  It weighs about 1050 pounds and needs the newer bigger 115 hp engine..  But it gets better gas mileage with that bigger motor than its predecessors..  On the 200 mile run the other day, I used a little under 5 gallons of gas..  That is somewhere near 40 miles per gallon...  That is certainly acceptable...

I know this is a technical post and if your not that interested, you probably didin't make it to this point, but I got the idea that some folks wanted to know all of this..

Tomorrow will be an ordinary, what's going on post I promise..

Retired Rod