September 20th, 2007

I have friends and family members, including my wife, who read this blog ("What? Brian has friends?") I am sure they know me as a mostly safety-conscious moderate careful person. So when I make the kind of admission I am about to make, it is with the mutual understanding that I have mended my wicked ways and am fully rehabilitated. Chastise me if you want, but know I am better now.

Okay, so several months ago I decided to drive my motorcycle out to Hope and back as a nice day trip. Heck, I packed a lunch and a can of pop, and even found a nice babbling brook to sit beside while I ate in cathartic timeless pleasure.

On the highway home I came across a flat long stretch of road that had great visibility and absolutely no traffic. So I decided to wind up my motorcycle and see what top speed on it felt like. Squiddly, I know.

Let me tell you about my motorcycle: It is not a speed monster. It is, basically, a standard medium-sized 2-cylinder street bike with some sporty fairings and styling. It is not a super-sport bike, and it is not an aggressive-stanced performance bike. Just a regular kind of bike that looks great (and has some modern engineering and electronics).

But it's not the slowest of bikes, either. When it wants to, it can get up a pretty good head of steam and out-accelerate, out-pace most cars on the road. A sports car or tuner-boy rice rocket may be able to beat it, but it would be by a matter of scant tenths of a second; in fact, most cars couldn't keep up to most bikes. That's just the way bikes are. (It's all about power-to-weight ratios.)

So when I opened up my bike's throttle on the highway from Hope back through the Fraser Valley, and wound the bike up to top speed, I was, by most standards, friggin' flying. 220 Kilometres per hour indicated, or (since speedometers on bikes are adjusted to show higher speeds than reality) about 200 or 210 Kilometres per hour.

That's very fast for me, and exhilarating and a bit scary too. It's the kind of speed where it would mean they'd need sponges and buckets to collect my body parts if I had an accident. So after a few minutes at that speed, and after I got a feeling for what it was like to go that fast, I laid off the throttle and returned to the posted 100 Kilometres per hour—which suddenly seemed a lot slower than it did before!

This may seem strange, but the bike loved it; it was more perky and responsive for days afterwards and ... well, I loved it too, though not enough to make a regular habit of going that speed.

Okay, I've made my confession. If you have to stonker my stockings and punitively brow-beat me into submission, go ahead. I can take it.

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