Spring Afternoon Jaunt

[Stichill_imp]

Indeed, LR, I'm now a man with one bike.

It's hard to describe how perfectly suited it is to the kind of riding I like to do, on the kinds of roads I have access to locally. I mean, look at that road in the photo above. It's almost a trace that's been paved. Kentucky is an interesting state in that almost every obscure, hilly, curvy track has been paved, and most of them are in pretty decent shape. These are not roads that require a bike with power, but they do require compactness, nimbleness, and agility. At least...if you want to have fun and not feel like you're holding back a tiger or wrestling a rhino.

It's really rare to find a public road that is still gravel here. I attribute that to the terrain & climate, which are very inhospitable to gravel. We get a lot of rainfall, sometimes coming down in buckets. It takes any gravel on a hill, and deposits it at the bottom of the hill. As a result, the only gravel roads I've found here are on level ground. Which is why, just across the river in Indiana, once you ride up and out of the Ohio Valley and onto the flatter areas west of Madison, it's pretty easy to find gravel roads.

One disappointing trend - and I sort of understand it from an automobile perspective - is that more and more important secondary roads in Kentucky are being "improved" by straightening and flattening, which usually involves hill-cutting. To see Kentucky geography as it really is / was, you need to get off these 2-lane slabs and ride...swiftly...up and then down the ridges...and then down and up the 'hollers'. Which, thankfully, you can do for longer than the sun shines, longer than your fuel range, and longer than human endurance.

The CBR250R is very capable! Young guys like to bling it, gearhead guys like to race it, but I (an old guy) made mine into a flyweight sport tourer. I put a Corbin seat on it years ago, HeliBars, Zero Gravity sport touring windscreen, accessory fuse panel & relay, heated grips, DC coax heated gear plug, luggage rack, GPS RAM mount, and the Hepco & Becker C-Bow pannier mounts. Is it ready? Yes!

Right now I have 50/50 tires on the bike and have removed the lower belly fairing, in anticipation of a June ride in Utah where we plan to hit some unpaved gravel roads like the Moki Dugway and Burr Trail Road. The bike has 26,000 miles and hasn't missed a beat. I just went through it over the winter: new chain & sprockets, valve clearance adjustment, coolant change, air filter change, oil & filter change, front fork rebuild with all new wear parts, brake bleed, and installed a [url=http://cb1100forum.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=2694&pid=294868#pid294868]Tutoro chain oiler (amazing, by the way).

Did I mention? I like this bike.

P.S. The bushy green plant in the photo above is Asian bush honeysuckle, which is an invasive species. It is absolutely devastating our wooded lands here. It sprouts leaves early and keeps them late, so it can propagate under the canopy. Formerly open woods are now clogged with this abomination.