Day 228 : Monday December 22, 2014 : Miles 19241
KonTour review and Winter Solstice LD ride.
Last Tuesday I received my KonTour custom saddle and put it on the moto. When I get some good light, and the energy, I will take some photographs and post. The workmanship on the saddle was great, but there is a slight forward pitch to the seat when it is on the bike. When I went for my first ride I noticed immediately that I slide forward on the seat every time I use the breaks or even when I go over a bump and I attributed this to the pitch of the saddle. This meant that I was constantly pushing myself back on the seat or gripping the tank with my legs in an effort to stop sliding forward. It also meant that I was using my arms quite a bit to keep from sliding forward and I try very hard to ride without a lot of tension in my arms and upper body so that my control movements are fluid. I was very disappointed in the saddle and I spent some time reviewing KonTour's "Comfort" guarantee and had planned to send the saddle back to see if this problem could be corrected. On Thursday I took a day of vacation to attend the funeral of a rider, and I rode quite a bit that day. I noticed that after I had been on the bike for a while, perhaps twenty or thirty minutes, I did not have such a big problem with sliding forward on the saddle. Also, I had planned a good long ride for the Winter Solstice, December 21, as part of a serious of IBA rides called the four seasons ride, and this would give me a good test of the new seat before opening a discussion with KonTour about sending the seat back for corrective work. I wanted to have an experiential basis for asking KonTour to revise my saddle.
I am sick, I think it is just a bad cold. I have had some fever, a sore throat, and some head and chest congestion, but I went riding on Sunday.
I got up at 0230 and was on the road heading west by 0300. The plan was to ride all day, highway riding. I had a number of goals for this ride including completing the first ride in the four seasons serious of rides. I also wanted to test out how far I could ride in a day and had planned a couple of options for my turn around point which would be exercised on the ride when my progress could be ascertained. I wanted to work on ride efficiency, and I wanted to explore various routing option for some more difficult rides I would like to accomplish in the future. Finally, I wanted to give the KonTour saddle a good honest test, which simply required me to ride all day.
To a great extent, I got lucky on the weather and I experienced temperatures from the high thirties to mid sixties, some fog in the morning, and typical west Texas winds.
Some firsts:
1) The head winds in west Texas destroyed my mileage when traveling west. I ran out of gas twice when I failed to reach pre-planned refueling stops. The first time I ran out of gas about 4 miles short of my stop, and the second time I made it to the station I had planned to use, but there where lines at all the pumps so I foolishly decided to go down to the next exit to get gas. I record all my fuel usage and my worst tank mileage for the day was 26.41 mpg and my best was 47.25 mpg.
2) For the first time I was wide open throttle and wanting more horse power. This happened a couple of time when heading into a strong headwind at a little more than 80 miles per hour. The speed limit in west Texas is 80 and I often ride about at about+3 miles per hour over the limit or a bit faster if required by the flow of traffic. I found that my DL650A just did not have the power to accelerate at this speed into the headwinds I was experiencing, at least not when just rolling on in 6th gear, and I had to downshift to 5th.
3) This was my first LD ride on the KonTour and the saddle performed flawlessly except at the start when I was sliding forward all the time as I had experienced previously. After a riding a while, the seat seamed to mold a bit, or soften up a bit, it is hard to describe, and for the rest of the day I had no problems with the saddle. Instead, when I finished my ride at about 0230 on Monday morning, I had no butt discomfort. Normally it takes me a couple of days for my backside to recover from a LD ride, but if I was not sick I would have had no problem at all doing another long day today. The KonTour is going to remove "O Ring" fatigue as the limiting factor for multi-day long distance rides.
4) It absolutely stinks to ride when you are sick. There is just no good way to deal with coughing up gunk while in a full faced helmet. Moreover, I was grumpy. I get rather irritated if a gas pump doesn't spit out a good receipt and I have to go inside for a duplicate receipt. I resent the time impact on my ride plan and I am afraid I was not the friendliest customer. It did not help that I had a sore throat and a lot of gravel in my voice. I apologize for my bad behavior.
5) This was my first long ride where my electric gear was heavily used and it works wonderfully.
>>>> Sunset in West Texas, Sunday December 21, 2014 on I-10
This was my longest day ride to date. I rode 1705.9 miles in 23 hours 34 minutes and I learned a lot about my riding envelope and the performance of my motorcycle.
Safe Travels,
Richard
