Riding To Houston

I packed the bike up for the first somewhat decent distance ride, from Lewisville to Houston. The ride was great, if a little on the hot side. There is a disadvantage to that full fairing in that I don’t have the airflow I did with the Sportster, so the heat was an issue. Other than that the bike performed wonderfully. I averaged about 48 mpg over the entire trip, with most of the cruising in the 80 – 85 mph range. In fact, lets call that a second disadvantage to this bike, if I’m not careful I’m going to be spending a lot on speeding tickets!

I went down I-45 to Madisonville and then hopped on TX90 over to Anderson where I picked up FM149 which goes through the Sam Houston National Forest. The road was suitably twisty, which made the ride through the forest a lot of fun.

I got stuck in a little traffic in Magnolia and Waller, but after that no problems.

I think that the first upgrade is going to be a better seat though. This one was good for about 300 miles, and the last 50 or so were not as much fun as they could have been. Definitely going to have to get a long distance seat!

Riding Gear Refresh

I went down to MotoLiberty this evening to look for a tank bag for the Beemer. I did find one, a nice black Cortech Mini. It’s got everything I needed, including a non-magnetic mounting system for a bike with no ferrous metal in the gas tank or fairings.

After that I decided to look at helmets and jackets. Thanks to some great help and advice from the staff I came home with a Dainese Air-flux tex jacket and an Arai Vector helmet.

The jacket is amazingly light and comfortable, even with the spine armor in it. And best of all it’s got pockets all over the place.

The helmet is nice and comfy with great air flow for hot Texas days so we’ll see how they perform on the Houston ride…

The Procession of the Honorable Wood of the Life-giving Cross of the Lord

After work today I headed out to the Cathedral of the Most Holy Theotokos for vespers and to pray at St. John’s tomb. I’d forgotten that they’re on the old calendar and so it turns out that I was there for the Procession of the Cross. It was really interesting to see and participate in it in Russian, even though I couldn’t follow much…

Afterwards I got a couple bottles of oil from the lamp at St. John’s tomb and a book of sayings of the Desert Fathers.

Article 23

And the second of the two books-whilst-traveling is Article 23. It looked interesting at the store and it was mildly amusing, sort of a cross between A Few Good Men and Crimson Tide, set in space. Not a bad book at all, fun and quick to read. I was almost done with it on final approach to San Francisco and finished it before dinner.

The Ionian Mission

Seeing as I spent most of my day being cargo inside a pressurized aluminum tube I had a chance to get some reading in. First up is the last of the Aubrey-Maturin series that I have in my possession. The Ionian Mission was a fun read, definitely back to the seagoing adventure that the first few books had as their central theme. Not that the others were bad, just different. Jack and Stephen are in the Mediterranean on blockade for a good portion of the story but due to a twist of fate they get sent off on a mission to deliver some cannons to potential allies. The story ends rather abruptly, but I’ve come to expect that and will have to stock up on the next few once I get the stack down a little.

Digging My Way Out

I just mailed off the last check for the Jeep. It’s now paid for. One less bit of debt hanging over my head, and there’s a bunch more to go, but I’m making progress. Just had to brag.

Long Way Down

There was a one night only sneak peek screening of an edited down version of the Long Way Down series that’s about to air and I got tickets thanks to a timely announcement on the BMW club’s mailing list.

After reading the book it was clear that they’d have to cut a lot of content out to fit into a movie length. They did a good job, though there were a few things I would have liked to have seen, but overall it was a good lead-in to the series.