Geoff James spotted out and about......

Is this one of our kiwi friends spotted out and about dragging a knee...........

A Duc, a Wing and an Eagle

It's been a very slow start to the riding year for me, so much so that on Sunday, I finally got out for the first ride of the year. Its also been summer here and its now just ticked over into Autumn, there seems to have been always something to get in the way of getting out for a ride whether it be work, rain , 40°C heat or just family stuff getting in the way, so it was fantastic to get the bike out for a ride. By the end of today's ride one of us wouldn't make it to our destination and another had ended up ploughing off the road.

Checking the tyre pressures that morning at the servo and the front was down to 25 psi and rear was on 30 psi, yep it has been awhile hasn't it and filling up since the last ride I put in 15.48 litres for 298km's. Not bad that's 5L/100km and on a sportsbike too!

So today's plan was to do a full day's ride into the hills stopping off at Taralga pub for lunch. Geoff picked me up on his way through and then we picked up Wayne in the Blue mountains on the way out to Oberon. Wayne mentioned that his ducati was running very roughly. We didn't realise it at the time until we pulled into the servo at Oberon 120km later and he put in 13L. Wow that's over 10L/100km. He wasn't joking when he said it wouldn't pull out of a corner or couldn't overtake. So Wayne decided to pull the pin as riding an ill performing machine was no fun at all, it was just plain scary. I think it's time for a new bike Wayne.

The first stop we pulled over to take in some of the scenery just south of Black Springs. The pine forests here had been cut down as far as the eye could see. If the greenies in the city could see this they'd be up in arms writing folk songs on their acoustic guitars! As we stopped here we saw a couple of gold wings and Harley's and a concourse pass by enjoying the day.

The ride through the hills here was fantastic although it can get a little rough in places. The best thing about this road is that it's in the middle of nowhere, it starts nowhere and really ends nowhere but has loads of bends and hills. Some of my regular readers might remember me talking about this road last year and about the notorious bend over the crest of the hill that quickly turns and drops away to the right going from wide double lane to narrow single lane. Looks like it caught out one of the gold wing riders that had passed us earlier when we stopped to take some pics. He went straight off the road and went down in the gully. He had broken mirrors, scratched up fairing and damaged crash bars. Not too bad all things considered.

I took some video of the trip today with the gopro. Here is a snippet of the road where it descends down the gorge and across the Abercrombie river. It starts just before the gorge you can see the Blue gold wing at 0:37 and other bikes and it ends with Geoff rooster tailing it at the bottom of the gorge in the dirt.



We arrived in Taralga just on lunch time. There were a couple of other bikes at the pub having some lunch as well. The bar staff here were great fun and very welcoming, asking all sorts of questions about my gopro and the ride. They do a very nice lunch here too. A little later the group of guys with the gold wings pulled in so we had a chat to them to see if all was ok. The rider said he was fine just a little sore around the ribs.

Taralga Hotel

It's all vegan.......cept for the chicken

Bikes at the pub

After a beaut lunch it was time to head back up the same road on the way home. I decided to put the gopro in picture mode every 5 seconds and see what it came out with. As it turns out I got some nice shots and something a little unexpected.

Damn is this thing on...I think it is!

Touring by R1

Bridge on the Abercrombie River

I thought I'd pull up at the bend to have a look and see if there was a gold wing mirror laying about. Looks like they must have taken it with them but I found some other interesting things, like a bike mirror and some other plastic bits and pieces. Looks like this bend has claimed a few scalps in its time.

Did I lose this?

Geoff stops to inspect the bit and pieces

It's time to keep on moving so its back to the bike for the trip back to Oberon.

Is this one mine?

One last look back at that bend, they have put up 45kmh signs on the bend since I last rode down here. It was scary coming into this last year at speed with no warning. It's something you'll never forget that's for sure.

On the way back I saw a couple of eagles flying low over the road, and I saw Geoff looking up at one of them. He had a large wing span with white and brown feathers. Now the picture below I don't remember seeing this until I looked through the pictures later to make this post. What does everyone else think the object above Geoff's head is? It looks like an eagle carrying a rabbit or something to me. You will have to zoom in to see it well.

We pulled into the servo in Oberon for one last fuel up before the trip back across the Blue Mountains. I noticed the price of petrol here was the highest I've seen anywhere. OUCH!

Another fantastic day out on the bike. Lets hope that the next trip is sooner rather than later.

Grey Gums Cafe - Motorcycle Friendly Business's

I thought I'd make a series of posts starting with this one about motorcycle friendly places. It can be difficult sometimes as a motorcyclist getting poor treatment or service from some business people just for the fact you ride a motorcycle. Now there are a lot of great people out there that will go out of their way to welcome us motorcyclists and they appreciate the business we give them. So this is the whole purpose of this post to recognise some of these places that give us great service.

The Grey Gums Cafe is one of those great little places. It is located on the Putty Road half way between Singleton and Windsor. You can't miss it really as its in the middle of no where. It is a great place to stop and relax during a ride. The owner Kim is a very friendly lady and has had a hell of a time with all the government bureauacy that singleton council has put her through just to stay open which you can read here, it was good to see that an Aussie motorcycle forum netrider started the ball rolling in helping in the fight against singleton council and their ridiculous claims to which local radio personalities finally helped in taking up the fight on her behalf. They ended up with over 14,000 signatures on their petition of which one of them was mine. In this day and age you would have thought council would be behind the idea of a place like this where you can rest, revive survive etc as it's a long drive/ride from anywhere to here.


They have plenty of tables to sit down and eat/drink at and there is usually other bikers here to shoot the breeze with. I've said it before and I'll say it again the burgers here are fantastic. The good food, great location and friendly atmosphere tops it off really.

Motorcycle only parking

Out the front is motorcycle only parking on a nice concrete plinth where on any sunday there can be dozens of bikes parked here. They even have free soap & water and chux wipes so we can clean our visors. Now that is biker friendly.

Free visor cleaner

They have a large car park out the side and have clean toilets and even free camping for the first 48 hours I believe all in this little country oasis of sorts. You can view their website here. http://www.greygumcafe.com.au/index.html

All in all a great place to stop for a bite to eat, and relax when out on a ride all in a friendly atmosphere. Oh and by the way I have no affiliation with the owners or staff of this place.

Bruxner Highway

The Bruxner Highway is another one of Australia's great motorcycling roads. Located in far north eastern New South Wales it starts on the coast at Ballina and runs through several towns including Lismore, Casino, Tenterfield and all the way out to Goondiwindi. But the best part for us motorcyclists is where the road crosses the Great Dividing Range which is the section from Casino out to Tenterfield which is a 127km stretch.

There are many sweeping bends and fast straights as you start to slowly climb up the great dividing range from casino until you get to Tabulam. Once you cross the bridge at Tabulam this is where the real fun starts. There are many fast sweepers up and down hill until you hit the mountain section.



Tabulam Bridge

Not far from the small town of Tabulam just off the road is some bike friendly accommodation called Riders Rest. Its about 66 km's from Tenterfield and 61 km's from Casino. I have heard about this place from some other riders and they said it was a great place to stay. I have not stayed here however and cannot say what its like but would like to try it out one day. It's always good to see some rider friendly accommodation especially when you are up in this area on these roads. It reminds me of the Gingers Creek resort on the Oxley Highway which I have stayed at and highly recommend.

Not long after the little town of Drake the road starts to twist and turn its way up the mountain. There is a sign at the side of the road that indicates 34km of winding road. There are quite a few of these bends that are quite rough in the middle of the bend especially the left hand wheel track so be careful of that on left handers to stay out wide and not take a tight line.

Uphill bends to the right

 

 

45kmh bends

55kmh bends





35kmh Hairpins

After the tight bends have finished the road opens up again and flows through the hills here with fast sweepers up and down through the lush country side and over rolling hills. Kind of reminds me of the oxley highway, but I think the oxley is a bit better as the road seems to be in better condition and has quite a bit more of the twisty bits. Each to there own I guess.



Fast Sweepers

Rolling hills and beautiful country

Finally the road comes into the beautiful little town of Tenterfield. I loved the entrance into the town where they had planted tree's along either side of the road escorting you in through the tunnel of tree's. Magic stuff where ever you see it. This reminded me of the run into Bright in northern Victoria which is lined with trees into and out of town. In the Autumn you get the trees changing to all sorts of bright colours yellows, orange, red and green.

There you have it one of Australia's great riding roads well worth a ride through here if your in the area. I know I'll certainly be riding through here if I'm up this way again.


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Water Marking your blog pictures

There has been a lot of talk around lately in the blogging community that I follow within the 2 wheeled world about people ripping off your pictures and using them on other websites and possibly for commercial purposes. Erik and Ms M have both been looking at water marking there pictures due to them having their snaps ripped off. Erik for the purposes of explaining I'm going to use your favourite photo, I hope you don't mind.

There is not much that you can do to protect your photos from being downloaded by other people so you will just have to live with it. But what you can do is put a water mark onto each photo. It won't stop people from stealing them but at least your web site or blog name is on the picture. If the text is near the edge they can just crop it off but that's extra work for them and most thieves just don't like working very hard do they?

How do you water mark your picture? This is fairly easily done if you have some photo editing software. I use Photoshop but you can use anything. There is some free software called paint.NET that can be downloaded used to edit your photos, its an up spec version of Microsoft paint. Everyone that has a google account can also use Picasa3 to edit your photos and watermark them as well.
I always make a copy of all the photos I use on my blog so then I can edit them. That way I have the original copy just in case.


Its pretty easy to get started its just a little time consuming is the only problem but I have complete control over the photo, text placement, text colour and any effects I want.

Creating your Water mark - In Photoshop

To watermark your image, first select the text button from the toolbar then secondly select the colour you want the text to appear in, in this case I'll make the watermark in Kawasaki colours.

Once you click on the colour button on the tool bar the colour palet will come up. From here you can either select the colour from the palet or use the ink dropper tool which is high lighted on the left hand tool bar and click on any part of the picture to grab that colour. The circled part of the fairing is what I picked as the colour which shows up as Red: 99, Blue: 6, Green: 212.

 

Once the colour is selected just highlight a section on the photo about the size you want the text to be and type in your text as per next picture.

 

From there you can move the text into any place you want, re size the text and even add effects to it like drop shadows etc. To add a drop shadow click on the fx button and then select the drop shadow from the menu and use the sliders to get the desired effect.

There you have it a quick easy way to put text over any of your picture where you have full control of the picture size when you save it, most of my pictures are around 3-4mb but when i save them with photoshop I can select the size of the image which is usually about 700kb to 1mb. Save your watermark so you can use it on every photo you want to use.

So here is the finished product.

The next 2 pictures are just variations on the same theme I have already made. One of them is a little harder to see the text than the other.

Oh and by the way Erik if you want the photos of your bike shoot me an email and I'll send them to you.

Creating your Water mark - In PICASA3

It's very simple to watermark your photos with Picasas3 although it doesn't have many options to allow you to create effects etc but you can still watermark all your photos. If I was using this I would also make a copy of all the pics you are using just in case something goes wrong and your original pictures are damaged or lost.

First open Picasa3 and select a photo you want from your library.

Then once you have selected the picture then select the text button.

 

From this page you can just type your text on the page and then use the buttons on the left to adjust the text colour, size, font then you can just drag the text into the position you want it in by clicking on the ring around the text. If you want to turn the text onto a different angle you can click on the circle part around the text and drag the little wheel until the text is in the position you want.

Now to make the text transparent just drag the slider up and down until you are happy with the level of transparency.

The disadvantage that I can see with Picasa3 is that unless your watermark is fairly simple in its design then you could spend ages doing every single picture with each individual setting. This isn't the case using photoshop as when you make your watermark text once and then you save it and just add it to each picture, quite simple really. With Picasa3 it looks like you need to make your water mark each time, a time consuming process which is not for me.

So there you have it 2 different ways to watermark your picture. If you use the free PAINT.NET program it is similar to Microsoft paint and also photoshop but with fewer features. Happy blogging.


Captains Blog Supplemental

21-2-2012
I've also just discovered that Photoshop will also batch watermark all my photos, it just needs to be set up for vertical and horizontal pictures. It worked a treat tonight so that will save me a little more time on the next blog post. Its a little bit involved, but if someone wants to know then maybe I'll have to do another post. Cheers for the idea Bob.

Christmas in February

It's been a long time coming seeing as it's the middle of February and all, I finally got to take my Christmas holidays horay. You see I worked through the Christmas and new year with only the measly public holidays to keep me sane. Couple that fact in with not being able to get out for a ride on the bike since before Christmas and one could almost be forgiven if I'd gone mad and went out on a rampage Ala Micheal Douglas in FALLING DOWN. Luckily it didn't come to that and I got to go on a 9 day holiday with the family up the north coast of NSW to a small place called skennars head which is just north of Ballina near lennox head.

The drive up the Pacific Highway was its usual crap fest of heavy traffic and road works. Its been 20 years or so since they promised to make it a dual lane highway all the way to Brisbane. There are still huge lengths of road that hasn't been fixed yet and are still single lane road from just above Port Macquarie to up to Ballina and there are huge amounts of road works happening from Coffs Harbour to Grafton and beyond. It was constant 60 and 80 construction zones, Pretty frustrating driving that's for sure. But give it five years and it will be a fantastically fast run up the coast, but for now its still pretty shit.

On the way up I thought that I'd turn off the main highway and drive up the old pacific hwy through the bulladelah bends. I'd remembered seeing this bit of road on the news years ago on every single public holiday weekend with a fatal accident. After driving on this piece of road I can see why. Its a very windy piece of road over a mountain pass and with lots of traffic and poor driving skills coupled in with such a long drive it was a recipe for disaster. Now there is no traffic on this section of road and it makes for an excellent piece of motorcycling tarmac. I'll have to come back and ride it so I can make a post about it.

Skennars Head is a small beach side community. I grew up in the country an know nothing about the sea, so to me beaches are just pretty things to look at and just messy things to play on from my point of view. I'm the type of person who would go out in the surf and get stuck in the first rip and drown, so its a bit of feet wetting and onlooking for me. Lots of people love the beach but not me. Give me rocky mountain scenery and huge valleys and vistas any day over the beach.



Lennox Head Beach

The kids on the other hand loved the beach and played both on the headland and in the surf. And when they couldn't play in the surf they played in the pool. Ah just wonderful to relax in one of those poolside chairs. Actually it was that relaxing I'd fallen asleep in one of them.









 

Its been awhile since I've taken a holiday and done absolutely nothing at all and enjoyed every minute of it. It was just so relaxing to do nothing. If only I had a bike here that I could ride.

One of the mornings we'd decided to check out this little cafe called Lilianas Cafe that was recommended to us from some of the locals. Apparently the cafe has been built in the old remains of the opossum creek public school which was built way back in 1911. It's a up market trendy little cafe that wouldn't be amiss in say down town Sydney even down to the genuine city prices. But what this has that any city cafe doesn't is a wonderful winding single lane road that comes down the hillside in lush green country to a perfect peace and quite. A magic spot for a coffee and morning tea. Just so tranquil.

I'm not sure how this place stays in business as its in the middle of nowhere and not on a major road so tourist wouldn't really be able to find it so it must be locals keeping it running. I hope for their sake that they stay open. Its hard in these small country communities.


Mrs Chiller wanted to visit some relatives in Brisbane on one of the days so I began scheming up ways of getting my hands on Flyboys R1 to check out some roads in Brisbane. Mt Nebo came to mind. Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to go in search of any good biking roads in the area, so Flyboy showed me a few of the roads in his local area one of these being West Mt Cotton road which has a couple kms of down hill twisties. After riding this section I was wondering why he was telling me that many Brisbane bikers have been killed on this section of road after I road down it and not before? Was that a wicked plot?? Ah well it wouldn't have been my broken bike. Heh heh. This was my first ride for the year.

We checked out some of Brisbane bike shops at springwood. There are 5 or 6 bike shops within walking distance of each other. I could have almost bought that brand new CBR1000 for $15,900 including on roads. How cheap was that? Well that's the same price I paid for my R1 13 years ago. That's a fantastic price. I had visions of me bringing home a new bike and then another vision of Mrs Chiller cutting off my nether regions with a blunt and rusty butter knife.

This R1 is underpowered with all this weight

On the trek home rather than come back down the Pacific Highway and its quagmire of roadworks we instead crossed over the great dividing range to Tenterfield which is a fantastic road(I'll make a separate post about that one I think) and down to Tamworth for the night. For those non Aussie readers Tamworth holds Australia's biggest country music festival every year in January. Its where they have the country music awards. I don't really like country music much it kinda grates with me, I think Metallica's 'Mama said' is about as country as I get.

Tamworth is also home to the huge golden guitar which is on the New England highway on the way out towards Sydney. There is also a motorcycle museum at Tamworth which I didn't get time to look at. I'll have to come back one day to check that out.

On the way back down towards Scone we could see the mountain range looming up ahead in the distance. There were clouds coming over the crests of the mountains and rolling down the hillside. It was fantastic to look at, and I tried to capture a few pictures but I think we were just a little to far away to capture it properly.

 

 

 

 

For the final leg of the trip we came down the Putty Rd into the back of Sydney through Windsor instead of driving the boring F3 freeway. We stopped in at the grey gums cafe for some lunch. I was surprised to see no bikes in the parking lot at all. Normally there would be some bikes here and especially so on weekends where its is packed out. It was over cast and some showers in the area so that's probably what kept them away. I must say they really do a great hamburger at this place. Now I just need to get out for a ride soon.