Max Weber Blog's

Well, my dad just got back to Chicago, and what was waiting for him in an envelope there? My driver's license (I use his house as my official address for stuff). Apparently I'd left it at the Canadian border post in New Brunswick.

I am so awesome.

DAMMIT! I was working on this giant post update, and had put about four hours into it (actually, maybe more). And the Firefox ate it. Goddamit. So I basically wasted most of my day.

And this is probably the last time I'm going to have internet for a while. I'm in Athabasca, which seems to be one of the last towns that I'll pass through before going north into the Northwest Territories.

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The library is closing in fifteen minutes, so I'll have to try and update some other time. The plan is to head north in the direction of Yellowknife, then over into the Yukon. When I'll find internet again, who knows.

First long sections of gravel rd the last few days. Took 165 north of Prince Albert park to Beauval, thn went west. Now in Lac La Biche, Alberta.

Its sad that I have a better cell phone signal in the middle of the canadian wilderness then I did in my apartment in chicago.

After I left the airshow, I stopped at a gas station just outside of town to top off my spare tanks in preparation for the journey north. Best I could tell on the map, I had about 230 miles until the next gas station in Chibougamau, and I can get maybe 180 miles on the main tank if I'm lucky. Now that the spares were full of fuel, I figured I needed a more secure way to mount them, so I ended up with this amalgamation of bungee cords and rope.



Of course . . . you see that long blue bag on the side there? That would be my tent poles. Notice something about the buckles that I usually used to hold them on?

Yeah . . .

(I've already posted this video here a while back, but for the sake of continuity, here it is again)

Well, dammit. At that point, the main tank on the bike was almost empty, I was running on the reserve. I refueled the bike from the red tanks, and headed back the way I came. It was almost midnight by the time I got back to town, where I got a hotel and let the internet know that I'd been stupid again.

The next morning, I refilled all the tanks, and treated myself to some congealed sugar. Mmmmm, sugar.



The next day (6-14-9), I took Rt 155 south in the vague direction of Montreal. The weather wasn't bad, it sprinkled a little bit here and there, but was mostly dry, and very pretty.








One thing that really struck me about Canada so far, and more specifically Quebec, is that even in these tiny little out-of-the-way middle of nowhere towns, all of the houses are very well maintained. I spent the better part of three weeks riding through the midwest and Appalachia, and had just gotten used to seeing miles of falling-apart trailers, mobile homes, and houses that you would SWEAR were abandoned was it not for a light on inside.

You simply don't see that in Quebec. Even the mobile and pre-fabbed homes (of which there are a lot of) are all in really excellent shape, with well-cared-for lawns and landscaping. And then when people did have houses, they tended to do . . . awesome things with them.



Check out the little baby dragon hatching at the base!



Well, that's a very . . . unique choice of colors.

Anyway, that night I got a hotel somewhere north of Montreal, and the next day headed south along the St Lawrance River. I passed a sign advertising a pull-off for the Thousand Islands parkway, which I figured had to be better then interstates.

But holy crap was it cool! This is roughly near the "Town" of Shearwood Springs, Ontario. The river is full of hundreds of these little islands, some of which are no large then a few rocks, but all of them have something built on them! Everything from full houses with manicured lawns, to what amounts to little more then a shack.



Dude. I want to freakin' live there.







How is that not just the coolest place ever? I don't even want to think about how much some of those places cost, though.

I'd been texting my dad regularly since I lost my tent poles, figuring that we'd meet up somewhere along the way. Unbeknown to me, his phone didn't work in Canada (Stupid Nextel), and he was sending me e-mail updates. . . but I didn't have any internet access.

Moving southwest in the direction of Toronto, I stopped at this little place for some food. i know I'm trying to stick to a budget, but when I see a place that has this kind of personality, I can't help but stop and give them some business. It's better then going to McD's (And actually, all this food cost me about $7, so hey, that's not too bad).





They even had Mt Dew, yay! Until I noticed something very disturbing printed on the can.



WAIT, WHAT?! SRSLY?! What the heck is the point of Mt Dew without the caffeine?! I'VE BEEN CHEATED!!!

Ah well, at least the burger was pretty good.



I kept pushing south to Toronto, where the plan was to stay with a friend that night. Right as I started to get to the city limits, though, my GPS started crapping out. First telling me that I was 250 yards south of where I actually was, and then it finally stopped getting a signal at all. The maps function still worked, so I was able to find my way alright, but still. That was damn annoying. This was also about the same time that my speedometer quit working, which I posted a video of a few posts ago. I did make it to my friend's place alright, and spent the night there.

6-16-9

I headed north out of Toronto, hoping to make it to Sudbury be that evening. Halfway there, though, I heard something really weird, and felt beind me to find . . . OH SHIT.



My spare gas tanks, which were both full, had come loose. One of them fallen off completely, and the other had dragged behind the bike for a few hundred yards while I stopped. The one that had gotten dragged now had a hole in it and was squirting fuel out, and I could see the other can about an eighth of a mile back up the road. I quickly found exactly where the puncture in the leaky tank was and put it in a position so that it would stop spraying gas all over the place, and ran up the road to retrieve the second tank.

Oddly, the one that fell off completely was still intact. Some scrapes and road rash, but it was still holding fuel. A quick investigation turned up what had gone wrong.



Stupid cheap-ass tiny bungee cords.

At this point, I was in a bit of a conundrum. I'd gassed up pretty recently, and even after draining as much gas as I could out of the leaky spare tank into the bike's main tank, and into the other spare tank, I still had about a third of a gallon in the leaky one. Due to the position of the leak, there was no way that I could attack the leaky tank to the bike in a way that it wouldn't just end up spraying fuel all over the road. I did what I figured was the best thing to do; I placed the tank in a position where it wouldn't leak, and left it on the side of the road clearly visible. Hopefully the highway crews or something would see it? Maybe a passer-by? I dunno :(

I tied the remaining tank to the bike as securely as I could, and pushed on north to Sudbury.



Once I got to Sudbury, I found a cafe that had internet, and finally checked my e-mail to find that my dad and I had over-shot each other by about 400 miles, due to our lack of communication. I said hell with it, and got a hotel for the night.

6-20-9

The next day, while waiting for my dad to drive over from Ottawa, I tracked down a bike shop and looked into getting a new speedometer cable. They didn't have the specific one for my bike, but they did have a generic, that you were to cut to the proper length and then crimp the required end onto. It cost me about $6.50, so I set to work in the parking lot of the hotel, making sure that it even fit and would drive the speedometer properly. Which it did!



(The smart people reading this will wonder who actually took that picture, and the answer is that my dad showed up at around 4pm. That's the wheel of his van just to the right of the frame)



Unfortunately, the other end, the wheel-driven end, wouldn't work. The kit came with the proper end (square drive), but due to the part that you had to crimp on, it wouldn't fit far enough into the wheel drive to engage. I went to a welding shop to ask the guy if he could heat up the cable end with a torch and squish it into a square shape, but he said that he couldn't, there was no way to control the heat evenly enough to prevent melting the wires. Ah well.

I called up a Yamaha shop in Thunder bay (two days ahead of us, roughly), and found to my surprise that they actually did have the factory speedo cable and housing for my bike in stock. I asked them to hold it for me, and my dad and I headed north, up Rt 144.



Ah, two stripes of electrical tape have never been put to better use.

Okay, I'm getting close to check-out time. I'm calling it quits for this update, and I'm not sure when I'll have internet access, or be able to do a big update again. Till then, I'll keep updating the blog from my phone when I can.

I'm in a town called Flin Flon right now, which is just about as far north in Manitoba as I can go without having to do a lot of backtracking.

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The weather yesterday started great, but right around 10am started to turn lousy, and only got worse. Be amused by me talking for a bit.

Anyone who's known me for any length of time, particularly since high school, knows that I used to be minorly obsessed with military aircraft. It drove my dad crazy because while I couldn't remember how to spell fairly basic words, I could instantly memorize entire tables of arcane facts and figures about any type of military aircraft, modern or WW2 era (and I can still recite most of them off the top of my head).

So, when I passed around Lac Sainte-Jean in Quebec, and found out that WHAT THE HELL, there was a historical military airshow going on that day?! How could I resist that?

They had designated motorcycle parking, which is usually right next to the entrance, but in this case was AS FAR AWAY from the entrance as it could possibly be. Ah well, I guess I needed the exercise.



Most of the other bikes there were Goldwings or similar bikes that were farkled to the hilt. Mine was the only one there with any mud on it.

As soon as I walked into the airshow area, though . . .



The A-10 Thunderbolt/Warthog. I had thought the USA had retired these a few years ago, but I guess not. They're fairly universally viewed as one of the ugliest aircraft ever put into combat production, and a glance around it shows why. The proportions and dimensions are just weird.



They were excellent at what they were meant to do, though. They were built to "Play in the mud", to do up-close direct ground support, providing assistance to troops on the ground. Designed to be able to withstand lots of damage from small arms and ground-to-air fire, they are able to stay flying with large portions of the airframe missing. Even when fully retracted, the wheels still protrude from the bay by half their diameter, to make crash-belly-landings more survivable, and they can still maintain flight with up to fifteen feet of either wing blown off. The engines are mounted high up and far away from the body and each other, minimizing the chance that an explosion on one engine will damage the other engine, or compromise the airframe.



Their main prey was enemy armor, hunting down and killing tanks with either that 30mm nose-mounted canon firing depleted uranium shells, or with ordinances hung off one of it's TWELVE wing pylons. The amount of weaponry these things were capable of carrying is nuts, seeing one of them fully loaded with Hellfire missiles and conventional heavy bombs and ECM (Electronic Counter-Measures. Radar jamming) pods hanging off them is a very impressive sight. No bombs here, though. Just the fuel tanks.

Moving onto prettier, sexier, more elegant aircraft, they had a couple of F-16s.





Just look at the size of that engine!!! Mmmmmm, power . . .

There were a slew of F-18s there.



For $10, they'd let you climb into the cockpit and take your picture. Oh, I was tempted. I was so tempted. But the line was huge, and I think it was oriented more for children. Not . . . goddamit, it's weird being a pseudo-grown-up. (Also, I'm not joking when I say that I might have started to tear up if I sat in there. Yes, I'm strange. But I really love these aircraft that much)

The F-18 is a carrier-based aircraft, and as such is designed to survive carrier landings, which can best be described as barely controlled crashes. Look at the size of the shock on the landing gear, christ.



And to the "Historical" part. There were a group of what I assumed were perfectly-preserved, meuseum-kept planes that never saw flight anymore. Still, they were pretty and just awesome to be able to walk around and oogle.

There was this, a Lancaster. Not nearly as sexy looking as the more famous B-17 Flying Fortress, but a great aircraft and used to much effect, especially in the famous "Dam Buster" raids in Germany.



Those massive wings provided some very welcomed shade, as well.

A couple of fighter aircraft of the same time period. A Corsair, Hurricane, and while I feel like a failure admitting this, I can't identify the yellow one. I want to say it's a Wildcat, but I think the cockpit is too long.







Going into one of the hangers made engineer-me pee my pants with happiness. They had whole tables lined out with all the parts of the various aircraft, and all the mechanics there, explaining the systems and talking to people.

Including the most awesomest (yes, that's a word. It is because I say so) computer game setup EVER.



I want one for my birthday!



The engine out of an F-18. The front part is the main turbine, the rear section is the afterburner.



Braking and hydraulic systems.





Now that's just cool!



Airplanes weren't the only sexy, testosterone-laden machines there.







Okay! That's enough wandering around looking at stuff! The crowds all started to move to the runway, and although all the loudspeaker announcements were in french, it was pretty clear that something neat was going to happen. The guys who work there got dibs on the good seats, though..



And out of NO WHERE (well, okay, behind the crowd), this guy blasted onto the scene under full afterburner. I was so thankful I'd already put in earplugs, because the crack was . . . awesome.



He flew back and forth a bit, mostly . . . well, showing off. He was joined by an F-16 who actually pulled off some more impressive aerobatic manuvers, flying down the runway upside-down, sideways, and even near stall at an astonishingly low speed.

He did a lot of high-G sweeping turns over the crowd, under full afterburner, of course (Because I think people simply expect to see flames shooting out the rear of fighter jets.) Check out the contrails coming off the wing roots!





Both the F-16 and the F-18 touched down soon after, although the F-16 pilot did show off and held the nose up for most of the length of the runway. Who doesn't love a good wheelie, anyway?



After landing, they taxied by the crowd, waving and generally being cocky and looking incredibly cool.



Oh, to be that guy . . . I can't even begin to explain what I wouldn't give to be that guy. It's basically the only thing that makes me wish I wasn't a screw-up who generally fails at school.

Next, we had skydivers.



Awwwwww, man, can't we get away from the whole AMERICA, FUCK YEAH! thing for a while? I mean, I was TECHNICALLY in a different country.



Maybe THAT'S how skydivers have sex! Mystery solved.



And, of course, they glory-walked past the crowd after landing. Hello, tattoos.



Next up was a stuntplane.




Check out the bits where he stalls the aircraft, flipping it end over end before coming back on power. That's just way too much awesome.

During breaks in they fast-and-loud action, a bunch of these guys came out and did a bunch of trick repelling. Think of those rope-dancers and things that you'd see at places like Cirque du Soleil, only instead of hippy music and gay costumes, you have helicopters and guys in full battle gear. Which means it's like . . . well, again, more full of awesome!



And then the loudspeaker started babbleing something, which I didn't understand, but it ended in the word "Toilet". Wait, what?


There is no better use for a jet engine, of this I'm sure. EVERYTHING should be jet-powered! Especially porta-potties!

At roughly this point, or at some time when the stunt plane was up doing it's thing, I heard a very, very happy noise.

The Lancer fired up it's engines. OMG THAT'S GOING TO FLY? :D


YAY!!!



I'll thumbnail the rest of these, because I guess most people ARN'T like me and want to scroll past a ton of glory shots of the same aircraft.



Wait, is it doing a pass with the bomb bay doors open?



FIRE!



No, they weren't actually dropping anything, it was just timed pyrotechnics on the ground. Which is okay, I suppose. Fireballs are fireballs. A bunch of aircraft actually did this, fake bombing runs, and after each one, a bunch of guys would jump out of bunkers and smack out all the burning grass.



The Corsair and the Hurricane did a lot of formation passes as well. It was pretty great to see those old warbirds on the same tarmac and in the same sky next to each other.







Something else really cool that I noticed when the Lancaster and the fighters taxied by, is that the guys flying them were all at least in their 70s. These were most likely men who'd actually flown these aircraft in combat (not these EXACT airframes, but these models). What a mind trip that must be to fly these machines in dogfights, your life on the line, and then 50 years later still be flying them, but this time for crowds of spectators.



And then . . . then came the squad of F-18s.


Dear god. The sound they make is just . . . perfect. It sounds EXACTLY how they should sound, powerful, sharp yet so deep that it resonates in your chest. You can just feel it all the way in your bones, it really is awe-inspiring. I'm not exaggerating when I say I was close to tears.

Truth be told, I was kinda misty-eyed for many parts of this show, not just the jet fighters. Everything sounded just so good, especially that Hurricane. And I know that sounds really stupid to everyone else, but . . . well, think about the first time you saw your favorit band live. Some group that you'd obsessed over for YEARS, and then FINALLY they tour near you and you can see then and OHMIGAWD they're right there in real life and they're being awesome and they sound great and YAY!

That's sort of how this is for me. Airshows have that effect on me, more specifically these aircraft do. These are machines I've obsessed over for years, spent hours and hours building painstakingly detailed models, reading everything I could about them, memorizing statistics, watching videos and so on, and then . . . there they are, in real life, and they're just as sexy and amazing, and they sound JUST SO PERFECT.

Yeah, I'm weird. But just . . . just listen to them. Even on the crappy microphone on my little camera, run through Microsoft's and then Youtube's audio compression.

And then look at these pictures








The day finished off with these guys. I'm still stupid for not being able to recognize them exactly, but they did some impressive formation flying, lots of looping with smoke. I got zillions of pictures, but I think I've posted the best of them.








Well, that's it for this post. I was standing out in the sun for the better part of four hours, resulting in:



Yay sunburn! I'm still peeling from that.