Cameron and I left Seattle Wednesday at noon, on a clear cold winter day. We filled up with gas at Safeway (my gas tank holds 3.9 gallons of gas, which allows my to travel about 200 miles between fillups) and drove south to Vancouver WA on I5. With time for stops, this took about 3 hours. It was a very cold trip despite the fact I wore a lot of cloths. On my legs: motorcyle pants, fleece warmup pants, polypro long johns, bike shorts, spandex tights over underwear. On my upper body: motorcycle jacket, jacket liner, long sleve shirt, long john top over t-shirt. Having gotten quite hot packing the bike while wearing these cloths I forgot to zip up the top inch or so of my jacket and pull the flap across the top of the jacket zipper. Pulling onto the freeway and accelerating to highway speed, I quickly realized this was a mistake as cold air blew through the top the jacket and the exposed zipper, down my torso and down my arms. On a motorbike, unless you stop, you don't have a chance to mess with things like zippers because both hands are on the handlebars. So unfortunately I didn't get a chance to zip up the jacket for another hour, until we stopped at a rest stop past Olympia. I guess that is one difference between motorbikes and cars... you get to play with your zippers in a car!
As for the trip to Vancouver, it went pretty well. Riding the bike was a little colder than I thought it would be. I also experience a more vivid sensation of speed on a bike compared to a car, which made the fast parts of the drive down I5 a litle scarey. After arriving in Vancouver, Cameron and I had coffee and dinner with my mother (a longtime, notoriouse Mexico-by-motorbike hater) which was alot of fun. We all ate greek food (I love baklava!), mom gave me a Saint Christopher medalian and prayer, and after dinner Cameron and I drove to Portland to stay with Manzell Blakely.
The trip to Manny's house was interupted about 2 miles from his house when the bike began to act strangly. Actually, I noticed that something odd was happening while crossing I5 into Oregon from Washington state, several miles before we actually stopped, but given the wind gusting across the freeway, the fact that I had alot of gear on the back of the bike, and that it was dusk with temperatures below freezing, I thought that the bike was handling strangly was due to my lack of familiarity with driving a bike in poor conditions.
After Cameron and I pulled off the highway into a gas station parking lot, we determined that the back tire was flat. Normally we can fix a flat tire with the spare tubes that we carry in our panniers, but upon inspection the tire looked to be damaged and I wasn't sure that it would be a good idea to drive on it. I decided to have the tire examined by a mechanic before installing it back on the vehicle. After making this decision there were sevaral hours of confusion in the gas station parking lot. Phone calls were made to Manny (he offered to drive his 10-speed to the gas station to help us out), my cousin Nick (he answered the first call or two then promptly shut his phone off. Smart man!), and Cameron's friend Tim (he got in his car to drive to the gas station and help us, but his car broke down several blocks fom his house). Manny eventaully rented a flex car, picked up all our stuff and we eventually got back to his house.
I did notice two things in the several hours that Cameron and I spent working on the bike at the gas station: people are really friendly and want to help us out and riding a motorbike in the middle of winter causes people to notice us. All the employees at the gas station were super friendly, offering suggestions about what parts of the gas station I should chain the motorbike too while the wheel was getting repaired (and in one employee's case, even offering to let me change the motorbike to the low profile wheels of his custom chevey caprice) and letting me borrow varouse plastic bins from their convienience store to stack under the damaged bike. Also lots of people getting gas at the station wandered over to talk to us when they saw the bike and our gear in a thousand pieces in the parking lot. Its sort of like the time we took the $25000 ceremonial check to the bars, with with less envey/hatred to go with the attention. People just notice you and want to talk.
After getting to Manny's place we celebrated our arival in Portland by touring the most notoriose hipster bars in Southeast Portland (and SE Portland, being a hipster haven, provides some of the best opportunites of this kind on the planet). It was an awesome night (I ate another baklava at 2:30AM!), and if we can ever get the pictures and video off our cell phones I'll let the images speak for themselves.
