Happy Birthday – 1 Year Old Today

Well, it’s been an interesting year. It was a year ago today that I started this blog with the birth of The Drunken Crow, Tales of Adventure in Dual Sport Motorcycles. Oddly enough, I find myself sitting in the same small northern Ontario town that I was in on this day last year. Crazy coincidence? I’m not sure, what are the odds are but, like this town, very remote.

I’m in this small town for work, which lately has had me travelling all over Canada. It’s been great to see parts of Canada that I would not have otherwise seen. I’ve been to Vancouver and Kamloops, BC, Edmonton and Winnipeg a few times each as well as Saskatoon and Regina/Melville. I’ve even had a chance to got back to the Maritimes and visit my folks with a work related trip to Moncton, NB. But the negative side is that I’ve had less time to provide to this blog. But I do try to keep my Instagram active, which a feed shows in the blog pages. But worse still is the lack of time I am able to spend with my family. Most trips take me away for a week at a time and sometimes, just home long enough to change out the suitcase and go again.

If you’ve been following my blog or mostly Instagram, you’ll notice I did get my 2013 F800GS bike back in March and was able to do a road trip from Ontario to Nova Scotia and back with a friend who took his 1986 K100RS BMW. Lots of different weather conditions, some good, some not so comfortable. I learned lots for the next trip. Where will the next rip be?…not sure, I haven’t had much time to think about it.

The last few months have been a little rough; my wife had lost her job and was without work for almost 4 months. She just started a new job a couple of weeks ago. Like most people, we live paycheque to paycheque, so this was a though time. We ended up selling a bunch of personal items to make it though. The one I’m saddest about was my DSLR camera, a Canon 40D with a few nice “L” lenses. We were to the point I was going to have to consider selling the F800. Likely I would have parted with my riding gear first and than the bikes as the last resort. Yes bikes, I bought my wife a 2013 Honda CBR 250R shortly after getting mine.

Now that my wife is back to work, I can consider my options with my job. Being away from my family so much is not what I signed up for. For now I’m sticking with the current job, but at the same time looking into other possibilities. One such idea, is my photography. I sold my camera and lenses to help us out, but sometime soon I’m getting a new camera and I think this time I will move back to a Pentax, the K-3 to be precise and some DA* lenses. This current job has provided a lot for me but taken as much back, like the time I used to be very involved with photography. I want to take that back and possibly turn that into a career, part-time if nothing else.

As for my motorcycle plans for the new year, nothing concrete. I noticed that Alt-Rider same top bars as an addition for their side crash bars coming out in the soon. Those would be nice. Also, I’d like to add a top case to the rear of the bike to match the side cases (Jesse). I found that the Klim Badlands Pro jacket can be hot at times. In part because of the lack of airflow up the sleeves. I found a product called Ventz, that may fix this issue. They are not expensive ($30) and are available at my local store. I’m sure I’ll see these under the tree in a couple of weeks.

My 50/50 Mitas tires made out very well on the 4,000km paved road trip and still have lots of tread to keep me going this 2014 summer. So no new tires required. I did my own oil change in the spring and against the advice of my dealer used synthetic oil, nothing about that in the manual. I plan to change the oil again in the spring and again use the synthetic oil. I did notice on the last wash of the bike, before I put it away for the year, a bolt of the front fender was missing. I will have to purchase a new one and check all the other bolts before hitting the road again. I put just over 8,000km on during this first season and I think the next scheduled maintenance is at 10,000km. I may have the dealer do the maintenance early for the2014 riding season. Which will start for me as soon as the ice/snow are clear off the road and the temperature stays near or above 0C. Some of the trails I use will still have snow in them, but that will part of the fun this year. We’ll see how my spare time makes out next year.

If you’ve been following my blog or Twitter or Instagram or any other social media that I am on I would like to thank you. I only have a few (13) followers of this blog, but have 35 followers on Twitter (not very much, I know) and a few more on Tumblr (101), thank you. But on Instagram I have almost 400 followers, a special thanks to you.

Thanks to you all. I hope you all have a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays or whichever greeting applies to you, and in any case I wish you all the best in the new year. I’ve meet some great new people in the dual sport world this past year and I hope to see you again and meet even more new people. Don’t be shy about letting me know you’re in my area, maybe we can ride together.

Cheers,

The Drunken Crow