The Squamidian Report – Jan. 31 / 09

 

Issue #349

 

Including:

The Ontarion

 

Hi All,

 

Last weekend was the Vancouver International Motorcycle Show. Strangely, it isn’t held in or even near Vancouver, its held way out in Abbotsford at the airport complex. So that means a drive to way out into the Fraser Valley. By the time you get there you are far enough up the valley that the mountains can be seen closing in on both sides. Mind you, you’re still a ways west of Hope but you are far enough to feel the narrowing of the valley. We scooted out to the Motorcycle Show on Sunday morning. Always neat to look at all the new bikes. There are so many different makes and models that it is impossible to keep track of them all. We were a bit disappointed this year. While there were more bikes and related vehicles there than you could shake a stick at, there were not as many dealer booths for after-market goodies and accessories. Its that kind of stuff that I’m most likely to purchase.

 

I did manage to find and purchase a pair of chap pants for Sue. She has chaps but they can be somewhat difficult and confusing for her to put on and the zippers tend to stick. Chap pants stay together at the top and once the side zippers are zipped, they look and feel like full leather pants. I’ve had a pair since last years show and really like them. They go on and off easily and are comfortable to wear, and they don’t leave any drafty spots.

 

We got there relatively early, which was good for us but not so good for Ryan. He hadn’t gotten home from work until after 5am. Some of those concerts and events they do in Whistler last well into the night and then they have all the takedown work. That work is supposed to be done by labour type guys but they are so short of labour type guys that the senior techs have to do most of it. Anyway, we picked Ryan up shortly after 8 and headed out. He was looking pretty groggy and slept most of the way there and back. However, we got there in time to be ahead of most of the volume of people coming in so working our way through the displays wasn’t too bad. When we left, the lineup to get in was way out into the parking lot. Good thing we went early, I don’t do well in crowds.

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I’m frustrated! Or to be more precise, I’m frustrated with the cell phone company that I have been with for the last quarter century. I’ve been with Bell Mobility since the early 80’s when cell phones cost well over a thousand bucks and could barely lock onto enough signal to allow a static filled, half garbled short conversation. Well, my current cell phone is showing signs of its own demise. It is having trouble finding and holding onto a signal and the battery needs recharging every day. It used to last a week on standby.

 

Cell companies in this country have almost no competition and as a result have done an incredible job of stacking all the rules in their own favour. If you need to replace your old phone, a procedure that they call a ‘hardware upgrade’, you either have to purchase a new one at a ridiculously high price or you have to sign up to a 3-year contract in order to get a price break on a phone. These phones cost them next to nothing, they are pumped out of China by the gazillions for pennies each no matter which manufacturing companies name is on them. If you try to just replace a battery, you need to order it, and if it is even still available they charge almost as much for it as they do for a whole phone. The worst part is, they don’t seem to care whether you stay or take your business somewhere else. It seems not to matter that I have never been late paying a bill and have never even used up my monthly minutes. They just don’t care.

 

And have you looked at today’s modern cell phones? Its like making and taking a simple phone call is almost an after thought. They now store and play 80 hours worth of music, take pictures and videos and do something called ‘texting’. Who wants to listen to music using a cell phone, or brows the Internet, or watch a video or TV on a cell phone? Who wants to type out a text message using tiny little buttons that I must take my glasses off just to see? Why can’t they just make a nice easy to see and use phone that works very well at doing phone calls?

 

So I can either pay the jacked-up ‘full price’ for a replacement phone that does all sorts of things that I don’t want it to be able to do, and barely can do what I do want it to do, or sign up to a contract. I haven’t had a contract in 20-years, don’t like them, don’t want one. Or, I can take my business to the competition. But they are no different. The rate plans all work out to about the same cost per month and the phone pricing is all aimed at forcing you to sign a 3-yr contract. So no matter what I do I am in the same boat. I don’t have a solution. My most attractive option is to just forget about cell phones all together. Cancel my current account and toss my old phone off a cliff. Problem there is that my road warrior wife travels all over the country and my son commutes to Whistler every day. I want be contactable and be able to contact when ever necessary. And what happens if I do sign up to a 3-yr contract in order to get a price break on a new phone and that phone dies just after it’s 1-yr warrantee is up. I’d still have 2 years left on the contract and be forced to pay full price of a replacement.

 

Remember those phones we used to make as kids. Two tin cans with a string tied between them. All you had to do was pull the string tight and you could almost pretend that you could hear the other kid talking. They didn’t work but the batteries and circuits didn’t give out either. Maybe there is some business potential there. Might be worth thinking about.

 

doug

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THE ONTARION REPORT

 

Hello everyone! We’re back!

 

Sorry I missed writing my Ontarion last week but we had such a hectic week before we left that I just didn’t get time to write a column for the 24th.

 

However, we’re back and I have lots to write about now that we’ve spent a week in “Sin City”! If you can bear to hear it, I’ll tell you about our first visit to Las Vegas! LOL!

 

We flew out of Toronto on Friday the 16th at 8:40pm and landed in Vegas at 9:40pm their time. They are three hours behind us so when it’s say 9pm here it’s only 6pm there in Nevada. By the time we reached our hotel it was after midnight their time. We checked in and were in our room by 1am. We had booked a room at the Luxor Hotel right on the strip and it’s a spectacular building shaped like a huge pyramid and is all glass on the outside. There is a very strong spot light that shines straight up into the night sky from the very peak of the pyramid that makes for an impressive sight in the dark. We had booked a room in the main pyramid but were assigned a room in one of their two additional tower buildings. The girl at the front desk said the rooms in the pyramid were a little shabby and were being updated so, she wanted us to have one of the newer rooms in the out buildings. The buildings are connected to the main building so it was really not much of an inconvenience to walk through the hallway to and from the pyramid and our room. I don’t want to use up all of our vacation experiences in this first column back so I’ll tell you of one of our most interesting days first. On the Saturday (our first day there) Carole surprised me with a 36th anniversary present. I went in to take a shower in the morning and when I came back into the room I plopped myself on the bed. I suddenly noticed my motorcycle jacket lying there. I asked Carole what the heck it was doing there because I had packed the only spring jacket I thought I would need. She said “Surprise!!! I brought it along because I rented a Harley motorcycle for you for a day as an anniversary gift!” Well, I gotta tell you I was in shock and disbelief! I just sat there wondering if she was joking or what! She said “Well, aren’t you going to say something?” She finally brought a sheet of paper over to me from her case that was a receipt for the days rental at a place called Eagleriders Motorcycle Rentals. I guess it finally sank in and I realized she wasn’t kidding me. I thanked her and hugged her and said “Bbbbut Honey, I didn’t get you anything but this trip for a gift!” I thought that was what we were doing instead of gifts for each other. Oh well, I said I could always buy her something nice that she can pick out herself right there in Vegas later in the week. I had to make a phone call that morning to the bike rental place to confirm what bike I wanted and which day we’d be taking it out. I reserved an Electra glide Classic in black for the day. As it turned out, this is the same model that Doug and Sue own and ride. This would be my first time riding a Harley of this model and my first time taking a passenger in many years as well. Come Tuesday morning we were at the rental place as planned at 10 am ready for a day of riding and new experiences.

 

The weather was sunny and high 60's to low 70's.

The day we rented the bike was Tuesday and the weather was beautiful. They had me booked for a Heritage Softail Classic, the bike that I really liked in the Harley lineup but I decided to rent the bike like Doug’s so I could be sure Carole would be comfy on it. She managed to get on and off without too much strain so that was a good thing. We drove direct to the Hoover Dam on the bike. We stopped in Boulder City for some brunch and each time I stopped I found it very difficult to balance the bike. If I was a hair off center it was a bugger to hold in place. The road to the dam is very twisty and narrow with two way traffic. It reminded me of Doug’s descriptions of the roads out in his neck of the woods. The straight wall up on one side and a deadly drop off on the other. We were on the outside of the roadway with the drop off. It was hair raising for a first time rider of such a bike I'm tellin' ya! Wow! Carole was sitting back relaxing and snapping pictures without a care in the world and I was concentrating on the driving. The roadway was of course cut out of the side of the canyon to access the dam site and it was a thrill to ride it! We approached the dam and I realized there was a parking building (3 story) on the left at the beginning of the dam as we passed it. So, we drove over the dam and turned around in a small parking lot on the other side. I stopped in the lot before making my turn and suddenly the bike was leaning to the left. I said to Carole "Shit, I can't hold it its going over!!!" She had the presence of mind to shift her butt to the right and it helped me snap the bike back up. WHEW! That was a lucky one! Thank God she did that or I'd have laid the bike down for sure. It literally took every ounce of strength in every muscle I have to hold it from going down. When I righted it, I was tapped out and half in shock! LOL! We turned around and headed back over the dam to the parking lot. I was shaking like a leaf after the near drop. I turned up into the driveway ramp to the lot and it had a sudden steep incline and turn to the right just as we came to the first floor of the ramp and it shocked the hell out of me too as there was a car on the level floor just over the edge of the top of the drive and I realized I couldn't stop on the curving slope or I'd lose it for sure so, I gunned the bike and literally leapt over the edge onto the floor beside the car! WHEW! Again! LOL! To top if all off, the floor of the garage was shiny and slippery with a very tight U turn for me to get to the bike parking spots. What the hell, another challenge on top of what I'd just been through. However, I managed to get around the U turn and park the bike. FINALLY, I had it parked and sitting on the side stand. What a relief! It took me about ten minutes to recover from the strain and shock of that past several minutes. I guess if I were to have ridden the bike for a couple of days before venturing into all of this, I might have been more confident on it, but taking a passenger on it for the first time I'd ever ridden such a machine I found it VERY difficult to manage. While riding on the highways etc, it was a breeze and very comfortable but as I said, the stopping and coming to balance when I did was a real challenge for me. We visited the dam for almost two hours then decided to continue our ride. I almost had Carole meet me at the bottom of the exit ramp which was the same ramp as we came up on but much less steep at the immediate edge of the parking garage. However, when I looked at the exit side of the ramp I noticed it wasn't near as steep or sharp a turn as when coming in. I decided I could handle the exit all right so she got on and away we went. Luckily as we got to the main road at the bottom of the ramp, there was no traffic and I was able to drive through without stopping. My nerves were shot and I really didn't want to stop for a while. We drove back to Boulder City and looked for the road to the west side of Lake Meed but couldn't find it. We drove up a canyon road for a ways and it came to a dead end. We turned around and headed back toward Vegas. We enjoyed the ride back but every time I had to stop at a light after we hit town, I had a heck of a time with the balance. How do you do it Doug???? I really found it difficult! Carole was an ideal passenger and she said she didn't notice any problem. She sat perfectly upright and never caused any imbalance for me but I guess just having the extra passenger was what made it a challenge for me. I'm not used at all to having a passenger on any bike. I've only ridden with a passenger a few times over the years. Anyway, by the time we hit Vegas again it was late afternoon and they would only take the bike back up to 4:30pm. In Vegas it gets dark by about 5pm this time of year and I didn't want to be in the traffic of the city after dark. That meant I would have to park the bike over night in the Luxor parking garage. We had the bike until 10am the next morning but I decided that if we got up at 8am and got ready for another ride we'd only have about an hour to ride before having to return the bike so I might as well just take it back that afternoon by 4:30. We drove to the rental place Eaglerider's Motorcycles and turned the Harley back in.

 

I'm not sure I'd feel more confident if I drove that size of machine more or not. I also had terribly sore hip joints after I got off the bike. I think riding this style of machine is akin to the problem Adam had with his Yamaha V Star, it's a tad too low for me in relation to where my feet are located. I found I had to lift my feet up to either shift into a different gear or to apply the foot brake and that took its toll on my hips. Maybe if I had a set of forward located controls on the bike that would solve the problem. Otherwise with my long legs, I wasn't happy with that aspect of the ride. Sounds like I'm criticizing the Harley Doug but really these are just my observations after one short day of riding one. In the final analysis I'd have to give the Harley another try to be fair but I really didn't enjoy the experience enough to say I'd trade my bike in on the bigger machine. On the other hand, I give Carole all the credit in the world for being brave enough to trust me with our safety and find that she very much enjoyed the day and the ride on the HOG! She said her back and knees didn't bother her one bit and she was very comfortable on the Harley. We took a cab back to the Luxor and headed in to clean up and get ready for dinner. We had quite the experience on our biking day and were ready for an evening of food and slot’s in one of the many hotels on “The Strip”!

 

That’s all for this week folks!

Thanks for tuning in and I look forward to talking to you all again next week in The Ontarion Report!

 

Bye for now…. Greg.

 

PS: Something To Think About>

Is anything “Real” in Vegas?

 

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Have a good one..

the doug

http://www.thedougsite.net

 

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