The Home of Tom & Morven

Tuesday morning I went to the dentist. I was in a state of shock because he told me that I need fillings done on a couple teeth. This is big news to me because Morven thinks I have OCD of cleaning my teeth rather fastidiously. My dentists over the last decade have always congratulated me for having “teeth of the week” or whatever. From short discussions with my dentist and hygienist it seems like the suddenly large amounts of electrolyte drinks I’ve consumed this last summer is responsible for my suddenly I have tooth decay. Thanks Powerade.

(Note that I was going to insert a picture of a Powerade bottle here with an “equals” sign followed by a picture of rotting teeth, but decided against it as the ones my search engine found look rather horrible!)

Anyway, in my state of shock I went to go jump on my motorbike, but… what the!?!? What on earth is a flaming scooter doing parked right up my arse? This was opposite the Royal Adelaide Hospital on North Terrace.

My bike was parked in the motorcycle park, with my wheel right up against the curb. A scooter had parked right up my arse with it’s front wheel almost touching my wheel. There were free parks. No idea what possesses someone to park like that. Why would you illegally double-park a motorbiker, when you could illegally park just next to the motorcycle parks and not be in anyone’s way? What is a scooter even doing parking anywhere near a sign that says “Motorcycle parking”? How did the scooter think I would be able to get out? What was there to stop me from pushing the scooter over? Regardless, was pushing the scooter over an invitation? So many questions, so little answers. The only thing stopping me from wheeling the scooter down the road to teach the learner scooter rider a lesson was the fact that I was pretty sure it’d be knocked over before the end of the day anyway, as the arse of the scooter was close enough to the traffic of North Terrace.

For purposes of public shame, I present the number plate of the scooter.

I just realised I hadn’t put up the few photos I took when I did the Adelaide Motorbike Christmas Charity Toy Run with Damien in December. I just realised due to getting back into mountain biking I haven’t actually been for a weekend motorbike ride since last year! Click on the photo below to go to the album with a few other photos.

Did you know you can offset the damage you do everyday to the environment with your vehicle by purchasing carbon credits? Now that you know, you don’t have any excuse for not doing it other than being a cheapskate Thanks to my brother I can get away with being a cheapskate, because he just bought enough carbon credits for my motorbike to be carbon neutral until June 2008. Cheers Mike!

Check out the Carbon Neutral sticker on my windscreen, and the Carbon Neutral keyring. Very classy!

Some time ago I began to suspect my wife was having an affair. How did I know that? Well, she began to behave as people do in those situations. When I answered telephone calls at home, someone would always hang up on the other end. She visits her girlfriends very frequently; she has unusually spontaneous coffee shop outings etc… When I ask “Who are you going out with today?” she tells me it’s a new girlfriend of hers whom I haven’t met.

She usually arrives home by taxi for which I wait to arrive, but she gets dropped off several hundred metres up the road and she walks the rest of the way home, so I can never see in what car and with whom she arrives. I once grabbed her mobile only to check the time, but she got into a frantic rage, shouting and screaming - she forbade me to ever touch her phone. All this time I couldn’t decide when to have a serious talk with her about all that’s been happening. I’d probably never learn the truth from her anyway if it wasn’t for a little incident:

One night, my wife left the house unexpectedly. I felt that something wasn’t right so I followed her outside. I decided to hide behind my bike from where I had an excellent view of the street and tried to see what car she was getting in to. I squatted behind my bike and suddenly to my surprise I noticed that the front disks had brownish patches, sort of like rust stains.

Please let me know if it’s safe for me to ride with the disks in this condition or do I need to get them polished? If they need replacing, are there cheaper aftermarket alternatives or do I have to fit OEM Suzuki ones, and if so which ones are better?

Finally I have finished writing about my recent holiday along the Great Ocean Road. Please click on any of the photos to go to the photo gallery containing the complete collection of snapshots.

Day 1 (26th): Left Adelaide and stayed the night at Mt. Gambier in a caravan park. It was a long ride on open road, with lots of wind so we were very tired and had an early night and a good sleep in. I got a tad freaked out about the side-wind whilst doing 110km/h, but you can’t complain when you get to see giant lobsters!

The Big Lobster

Day 2 (27th): Left Mt.Gamber and stayed the night in Warnambull. On the way we stopped somewhere near beachport to record movies of us riding, and doing the odd wheelie, etc, to make for an interesting DVD. (Note to my mum grandma: I was the photographer, not the stuntman!!) It is about then that I think we were really starting to act like a real bike possie. Simon and I bought ear-plugs because of the turbulent wind noise from the head-wind at high speed was probably exceeding 110dB(A). I’m always going to carry earplugs on my bike from now on, because it’s just not worth the risk of damaging your ears.

Me checking out the scenery

Day 3 (28th): Left the guys early to ride to Apollo Bay where my cousins Carl and Christie and Uncle Chris were camping, along with my cousins second-cousin (Jonathon) all the way from Denmark! Rode in to meet up with the guys at the St Kilda Base Backpackers that night. With my cousins that day, we had gone to the beach. It was possibly one of the nicest beaches I’ve been to in Australia apart from in Queensland. During the beach fun, we played soccer, wrapped Christie up in seaweed against her will, and then buried her in sand at a rate that she couldn’t escape from, and then buried Jonathon in the sand. I would like to publicly apologise to Christie for being so mean to her with seaweed. SORRY CHRISTIE I STILL LOVE YOU!!

Carl, Christie, myself, and Uncle Chris

Day 4 (29th): This day we went for a ride into the city, and checked out the motorbike stores. One of the guys (Shannon) got a quote for a trade-in deal on a Yamaha R1 from his R6, and now we have to convince him to follow through with it so he can do phat wheelies on the way home. We then did some ‘normal’ shopping and I bought a book on marathon running. I haven’t really read much about marathon running before, so it should help me a lot.

Day 5 (30th):I’m currently writing this from my Aunt’s house in Melbourne. I came here in the late morning, cleaned my bike and washed her car, had lunch, and gave her computer some good maintenance. Right now I’m sitting next to Carl each of us with a laptop, in the dark, simultaneously watching the movie Virus whilst exchanging geeky comments every so often. I’m trying to convince Carl to create an online journal like myn I just heard that their family friend from Denmark, Karen, has just got engaged! Lana and another person I haven’t met are coming in tonight in fact they will be here now I think, so I will head back to St. Kilda where hopefully they will still be shortly after this movie. Tomorrow for NYE I think I’m going to my other cousins house Daniel, where he’s having a house party with his house mates.I got home to the backpackers place fairly late, and went for a quick walk to stretch my legs. During this late night walk I spoke to Ben on the phone who told me that Jordan is in St Kilda!! In fact, he had been at a pub that I had been to a couple nights ago. Calling him immediately, I discovered he was staying in Fitzroy. I ordered him to get out of bed so we could go for some drinks, and I cabbed it over to Fitzroy to meet him, and several drinks were enjoyed. What coincidence!!

Day 6 (31st), NYE: I trammed it back to Fitzroy to meet Jordan again, and we went out for breakfast, and browsed the shops all around Fitzroy, the city, and the Queen Victoria Markets. I bought two rings and a bracelet, each one has its own little gimmic, and each one is stainless steel, my favourite metal. I got a spinning ring that matches the bracelet, the bracelet has a spekky latching mechanism, and the second ring is made up of three rings that join together. How cool!

Being in Melbourne, I decided to randomly rock up to my cousins house party in Camberwell. I took my cousin’s (Carl and Christie) fathers second cousins son to the party as well, Jonathon from Denmark. Although it wasn’t a particularly eventful night because my cousin spent most of the night with his girlfriend, I did at least get to meet some of his friends. I took Jonathon from Denmark to the party, and still am not sure what actually happened to him - he seemed to disappear sometime after 12.

Day 7 (1st): NY day was spent basically sitting around all day due to bad weather - we waited for it to clear to do the Black Spur ride which seems to be the Melbourne equivalent to Adelaide’s 12 minute run to Lobethal. It wasn’t going to clear, so I went back at my Aunt’s and cousins home watching Entrapment with Crarl, and we’re going to leave at 6 in the morning from St. Kilda to do the Black Spur which should be a 3 hour total trip including travelling time to get there. Leaving really early allows us to leave luggage behind, and we can then pick it up before checking out at ten to head off to Apollo Bay, where we’re staying next.

Day 8 (2nd): Got up at 6:30am to do the Black Spur Ride. We majorly misjudged how far away it really is, because we didn’t realise that there were such things as traffic lights every 300m on a highway for 50km! I took us about an extra hour each way to get to the start of the Black Spur Ride. The actual ride itself was beautiful! 33km of lush windy foresty jungley type road. For the way up I told Simon and Shannon not to wait for me so I can take photos of it, etc, and we planned to meet up the top. Unfortunately they decided to go to a lookout at the top. So when I got there, I couldn’t see them and rode back down again because there was no phone reception. After waiting down the bottom I called them, and discovered they were still waiting for me at the top! baah! So on their way down now, they came across a Porsche which foolishly decided to run itself off the road, and created a major traffic build up. Multiple accidents occured after that due to cars and motorbikes speeding around the corner(s) and hitting into this traffic build up! It took them ages to get down, I was so bored!

Eventually we checked out from Base Backpackers several hours late, and started our way to Apollo Bay where we would be spending the night.

The Black Spur Drive

My bike on the Great Ocean Road

Day 9 (3rd): The aim of this day was to do the Beech Forest Treetop Flywalk, located inland from Otway National Park (which in turn is near Apollo Bay). It was a rip-off to get in at $17 per adult, and there was no student concession! Bastards! Anyway, being seven of us Adrian asked for a group discount - but they only would give us a group discount if we had ten or more - bastards! So, Adrian spent 15 minutes rounding up a group of 17 people (i.e. 10 strangers) to get us all in for $15. Fair enough!

The Group doing the tree-top flywalk in Beech Forest

It turns out it was maybe worth the money, with plenty of breath taking views as shown below.

Beech Forest

Beech Forest

We then continued our journey to Port McDonald, along the Great Ocean Road, and I stopped off at as many of the places as I could. Again, I was broken up from the group and left behind, as they enjoyed their high-speed overtaking, etc, on dangerous windy roads. Fair enough! I didn’t mind, as their was plenty of time now for me to take photos such as below.

Me at the Twelve Apostles (now only seven!)

Adrian’s rear tyre, now with about 30mm of bare wire a quarter of the way around the tyre showing, was decided by him to now be unsafe to ride. Actually scrap that - he probably would have kept riding it if we didn’t all tell him not to. My advice was possibly a little bit much for him to handle in his frustrated state (to say the least), and so I left him behind for a change, and continued taking more photos. (Ever heard of the hare and the tortoise?) Below is possibly my favourite rock. I wanted to spend an hour or so at the blow hole near the razor edge rock, although we didn’t have time due to the worn tyre saga of the day. Next time!

The Razor Edge Rock

After finding what the group (i.e. Adrian) had decided to do with his tyre (which was to continue riding it to Warnambool at speeds in excess of 100km/h (obnoxious and a fool) I got roped into carrying Lana’s gear on my back to help Adrian (who was carrying it). Oh yes, “thanks Tom” - “No worries Adrian/Lana!”??

Had dinner with Trent and Simon in Portland that night. Both of these guys are great people. Ended up riding the rest of the way to Port McDonald in the dark, which was kind of scary yet extremely fun.

Day 10 (4th):Being the final day, we all really just wanted to get home. Port McDonald smelt funny. Robin’s tyre also showed signs of kevlar on this last day. He continued riding on it! He was forced to give up his girlfriend (Lana) riding on the back of it. (Did I mention both of them were told before we left that their tyres won’t last the trip, and they should change them ASAP?)

So that’s the entire trip in summary! The end. Next trip, we’re doing Tasmania - transporting our bikes to Melbourne, flying to Melbourne, and picking up our bikes (or buying new ones!) and catching the ferry to Tassie. Can’t wait! Just hopefully, a couple people have learned a major lesson about maintenance of their bikes by this time.

The Toy Run for 2005 although incredibly hot for motorbiking, was the biggest turnout SA has ever had. It was 40 degrees in the sun, and I was wearing my full leathers which are black. Just imagine sitting in a sauna for five hours, and that’s exactly what it felt like!

I have photos for the day here, and should have some more up there soon.

Originally I was going with Luke E. and Chris, Warrick and his mates, and an old XC MTB buddy Luke B. and his mates, all meeting at my place for one massively big group ride. All this organising turned to crap, and it ended up just being Luke E., his mate Troy and myself - we decided not to ride with Warrick and his group because it’d be too difficult to stay together. Being really packed out, and really busy, we were sitting on a VERY low speed all the way to the freeway, so with no wind I was incredibly hot. We had a couple stops up there on the way, and accidentally turned off early into Handorf, which we realised was a good thing since there would be no shade up at the oval where we are meant to drop our toy donations off. We ate lunch at Handorf, and then cruised over to the oval, dropped off the toys and went home back to Luke’s for some bevvies.

Whilst at the oval, I saw a friend (more like a friend of a friend I guess) who’s a reporter, and said a quick g’day. She had a hard time getting people for interviewing because they had to wait for the break in the music of the band playing in order to record sound. As I left to catch up with my mates, the music stopped, so she quickly interviewed me and I ended up on the ABC news that night! Yay, my five seconds of fame!!

You can download the ABC news footage of the Toy Run:

WMV best quality

File Size: 10.0 MB

Or download an AVI if you can’t view WMV.

AVI created from the above WMV

File Size: 13.0 MB

I had yet another cool idea, one that I could manufacture in next to no time. The problem was that living at my parents house again, I have to keep my motorbike out the back since the carport is always openly visible. This means that I have to wheel it down the side of the house, and there is no where to turn it around out the back other than turning it around on the lawn which digs big trenches. You can swivel it around on the side stand (which requires balancing and has the potential for dropping the bike) or you can use the centre stand which does some major scratch damge to my Dad’s lovely paved bricks.

Enter, the “Bike Swivel”!!!

This is made entirely using the base of an old floor standing lamp that was being thrown into the bin since it was rather broken. It would be fairly easy to make one even better without an old lamp though. This lamp base was heavy to keep it standing up straight, with many steel discs stacked together, with an external painted disc which has roughly a 25mm protrusion to ‘hide’ all the interior discs. All I did was chuck most of the discs out, keeping three, and the painted disc for them to sit in, and liberally sprayed WD-40 between them, although thinking about it a grease may have been better.

All you do is put the centre stand down onto the platform, and rotate the bike pushing down on the rear to elevate the front wheel! In the picture above you can see some spare discs alongside to see what they look like.

Last night I got pulled over by the cops on my way home from town. I was really scared that he was going to ping me for my half arsed indication whilst changing lanes or something, but it turns out he just wanted to tell me my rear tail light was out! I’m like - “you bastard!”

From the flashing lights, sirens, headlights, etc, I really did think I was going to get fined!

I did yet another epic ride today after giving the motorcycle a good polish yesterday. Lofty -> Stirling -> Lenswood? -> Lobethal and down lobethal road. I’m getting heaps better at handling the bumps when cornering, and committing myself to corners. I really need my new suit to wear in though, as it’s constantly pulling my back up straight, which isn’t good when I’m trying to push the bike down. Hopefully a few more wears and they’ll get more comfortable. I got passed coming down lobethal road by two brand new CBR600RR’s. I heard them coming from behind me for a while inbetween corners, and eventually they caught up. I tried to keep up with those two riders but lost them pretty quickly. I hope with regular riding my skills will improve at least to their standard. Going to ‘bike school’ at the race track will be great for my development I’m sure. After seeing those Honda’s today I’m definitely now excluding the R6 from my shortlist of next bike to progress to, and now I’m down to either wanting the Honday or the Ninja ZX-6R. My friend just got herself a Ninja 750 on Friday, I’m REALLY looking forward to seeing it

I took my cousin Carl that’s over from Melbourne this week for a ride on my motorbike - which makes him my first ever passenger. It was a lot less daunting than I first suspected, and I look forward to taking people more often! It’ll be a while before I can get a second helmet - at the moment I just borrowed a second helmet from a neighbour (thanks Mr. T!) I think Carl had good fun on the ride to Norton Summit - I certainly did!
I found my bike to be heavily affected by the extra mass of the passenger, which gives me further motive to get a bigger bike. Can’t wait!