Towing with a Tesla

I mentioned in a previous post that I was likely replacing my Husqvarna riding mower that has the ailing and mostly unserviceable hydrostatic transaxle with my dad's Kubota GR2100, which is far more robust and seems generally better suited for the amount of hills I have in my yard. My dad lives down near Martinsville (about a 4 hour drive from here), and we'd been sort of idly talking about how we might make the handoff. 

He has a small trailer that he bought specifically for hauling the aforementioned tractor, and so I had been thinking of maybe borrowing that to save him from having to make the trip. I got the factory towing package when I bought my Model Y, partially because I wanted a receiver hitch for my bike rack but also because it seemed reasonably useful to have another vehicle capable of towing a utility trailer or some similar should the situation call for it. We got as far as checking weights and things and confirming that it was well within the safety margins for the Model Y, but hadn't really planned to make it happen yet. But in the last week, my 100 year old step grandmother was called home, so I found myself in the area on fairly short notice this past Friday. Fortunately my dad had just last week put in an outdoor NEMA 14-30 for me to use for charging, so after the funeral we plugged the car in and set to sorting out the towing situation. Took some digging to find the right combination of receiver hitch/drop, tow ball size, and locking pin, plus the keys to unlock trailer, pins, etc. but we got it all sorted out. 

The Model Y's factory hitch has a 7-pin harness including wiring for an add-on trailer brake controller, and a Class III receiver. The Class III is kind of overkill, because the Model Y actually only has a 3500 lb towing capacity, with a 350 lb max tongue weight, which is technically within the limits of a Class II hitch. This does assume 3 passengers, so I suspect you could probably push it beyond that and not exceed the GVWR/GAWR, but I probably wouldn't go north of 4000 lbs even with a trailer with brakes, mostly because I'd be concerned about the rear end squat. As it was, because this doesn't ride particularly high (it's really more of a tall wagon than something with any pretention of being an SUV), I had to use a hitch with basically zero drop, and I was careful to get the meat of the load's weight over the trailer axle to avoid too much on the tongue. 

The trailer in question weighs about 1000 lbs, and the tractor is listed at 940, though I suspect that's dry weight, so it's probably around 1000 too, meaning we're at a nice even ton, plus just me in the car, meaning a total rig weight of around 6800 lbs. This trailer doesn't have brakes, but that really wasn't a big deal, because between the regenerative braking and the fact that the Model Y has pretty strong friction brakes, I was never concerned about the stopping ability for the whole rig. I'd want at least some surge brakes if I were hauling another 1000 lbs though. 

Prepping for towing

Accessing the hitch involves prying off a plastic cover on the rear fascia with a flat blade screwdriver. My Jeep had a cover, and it had thumb screws. This has plastic friction clips, and let's just say I suspect they probably only survive one or two removals no matter how careful you are. It's not a great design. Once you have the cover off, hopefully with all of the clips intact, you discover that the amount that the hitch is recessed, combined with the relatively small opening means that you're sort of fumbling around to get the hitch pin in place, and probably some longer ones might not fit at all, especially depending on the orientation of the lock. Additionally, the chain ears are way up inside the recess. Smaller hands probably make that easier to manage. Again, this is a case where the people who designed this probably didn't do a lot of towing. The rear camera does make it super simple to line up the ball and tongue. That's not unique to Tesla, but it is really nice to be able to turn on the camera when you're underway to check that part of the trailer. My trailer was fairly short, and about the same width as the car, so the regular mirrors were adequate once I adjusted them a bit, but a longer or wider rig would require towing mirrors, which would add drag and affect range. 

Plugging in the trailer harness activates Tow mode, which according to Tesla disables Autopilot, increases the following distance for the adaptive cruise control, and supposedly uses some different logic on the stability control to help manage trailer sway, something I thankfully did not have to test. I understand why they'd disable auto lane change, but I've grown very accustomed to using Autopilot's lane keeping, especially on long trips, and would have liked to be able to use that, especially since there are some times that you really do need to be able to look at the screen for a minute, and having something handle keeping you literally between the ditches is a great help. 

Actual Towing

Tow mode has a major thing missing, in that it doesn't adapt the car's baseline range estimates or trip planning algorithm at all. I get that every trailer is different, and the weight, aerodynamics, etc. all affect range differently, but at the very least, they could characterize a generic impact on range from towing and use that. This is an area where it's better to be a little conservative and end up with more range than you thought than dealing with constant range anxiety or worse, actually being stranded because you didn't stay ahead of the aggressive burn rate. Even if there was some way to manually tell the car to assume a certain percentage drop in range when planning the trip and determining needed charging stops, that'd be an improvement. But the car's default range displays were still claiming what is effectively ideal (aka only achievable on the EPA test cycle) range, and calculating charge stops according to Tesla's standard usage projections (which are more real-world accurate than EPA). What you end up having to do is put in your destination, drive for 30+ miles, which is long enough for the energy usage screen to get an average usage with you towing such that it can project your range based on the past 30 miles of historical burn rate, and then you have to compare that with how far the Nav system says you're supposed to be going. When it almost definitely is longer than your available range, you have to find a Supercharger on your route and add it manually. To make matters worse, because you have basically no sense for how much more range you're going to burn, you have to keep checking this periodically to make sure that you still have enough range to make it to the charger you chose, and then once you're at the charger, you have no guidance on how long to charge. I erred on the side of caution and charged back up to almost full, which meant that instead of the normal 15-20 minute stop to gain back 100-150 miles of range, I was looking at closer to 50 minutes, because the charge rate tapers off dramatically as the battery gets above about 80% charge. 

Charging while towing a trailer, in addition to being something you'll be doing repeatedly and often, is also a bit challenging, and again seems to be mostly an afterthought rather than something that Tesla tested or consulted with people experienced with towing to work through the logistics. Tesla charge ports are near the driver's side taillight, and because of the large cables involved in carrying 250kW @ hundreds of volts DC, Tesla makes them short and expects you to back into the space to charge. They have started putting at least one pull-in space in, but that's not universal, and it's not always that helpful, i.e. it's not longer than an average space, and it's not pull through, it's just nose-in parking. Only one of the two Supercharger stations I used even had one, and in order to use it, I still had to pull in with my nose well into the adjacent space (blocking a  second charger from being used), and my trailer was hanging out into the parking lot, only narrowly avoiding blocking the air compressor, to the annoyance of at least two Sheetz patrons while I was there. Someone pulled into the space in front of me and then left the parking lot, so I couldn't ask them to move, and so in order to get out, I had to back up with the trailer already halfway to jack-knifed. I managed to do it, but it took a good 10 minutes of back and forth. The second charging station had no good options, so I had to drop the trailer elsewhere in the parking lot, charge, then go retrieve it and reattach. 

Driving dynamics are fine, and it's a solid tow rig from that perspective. It was stable and predictable as far as handling went. Electric cars have stupid amounts of torque, and Teslas are overpowered, so the car barely noticed that the trailer was back there in terms of moving itself along at typical speed. It just used more juice. The trip is mostly highway, the majority at 60mph posted limit, with a few sections of 55, 65, and one 70, along with drops to 45 at traffic lights. I ran a bit above whatever the limit was, and even on the hills, there was no issue maintaining speed. One thing I did notice is that I didn't get as much regen braking as I would have expected going down hills, because the trailer's weight wasn't enough to overcome the increased drag. The only time I got any significant regen was when I was slowing down, rather than just maintaining speed on a downhill. The adaptive cruise control was surprisingly quick to adapt to the extra weight in terms of slowing the car down when needed. 

As I noted, this comes with a harness for an external brake controller, but I'm somewhat curious if you'd get enough control to really take advantage of the dual braking. Specifically - Teslas do regen braking as soon as you take your foot off of the accelerator. The brake pedal actuates the friction brakes directly, without any attempt to try to simulate braking with regen for the first bit of pedal travel before actually applying the friction brakes like many other hybrids and electrics do. Because the regen braking is so aggressive, the brake lights come on as soon as you lift off of the pedal. Assuming that the brake controller keys off of the brake pedal being actuated, the trailer brakes wouldn't be activated unless you need more than regen alone can provide, but you'd have to tweak the sensitivity carefully to ensure that you still are getting as much regen as possible. Seems to me that there's an opportunity to have integrated the trailer brake controller to make the entire system smarter and more efficient, but at this point I don't think Tesla is that invested in making this a full-time tow rig. I'll be curious to see how they do it differently on the Cybertruck, since that has to compete with actual trucks, most of whose manufacturers have spent a lot of time sweating details to make towing easier. 

By the Numbers

Here are the details of the trip, in terms of miles traveled, power used, etc. 

The trip down was effectively a control, because I didn't have the trailer. That leg, plus a bit of other driving around, was 269.5 miles, used 75 kWh, at an efficiency of 277 Wh/mi. Using standard conversion, this works out to 132 MPGe. The actual trip MPGe was probably a bit higher than that, because that figure included probably 40 minutes of me sitting with the AC on before the funeral, and a couple of "check out how fast this thing accelerates" starts for my dad. I used a combination of home charging and supercharging, so the fuel cost would be somewhere between $9 and $25. (I'm still using the last of my free supercharging, so I have to estimate based on what the going rate is rather than telling you what I actually paid.)

The return trip was more direct. I started at 100% charge. The Model Y has a 75 kWh battery, and I charged to about 95% at both stops, though I didn't actually need that long of a charge at the second stop. I traveled 242.1 miles, which used 141 kWh, at an efficiency of 583 Wh/Mi, or 62.9 MPGe. That would cost between $15.50 and $48 depending on how much was Supercharging. 

That was comprised of the following legs: 

• Ridgeway to Lynchburg: 82.7 mi, 51 kWh, 613 Wh/mi, 59.8 MPGe
• Arrived at 24% charge 
• Indicated range was 70mi, estimated range (based on last 30 miles' average) was 29.
• Lynchburg to Madison: 96.1 mi, 57 kWh, 591 Wh/mi, 62 MPGe
• Arrived at 17% charge 
• Indicated range was 84 mi, estimated range was 27.
• Madison to Manassas: 63 mi, 34 kWh, 532 Wh/mi, 68.9 MPGe

So the short answer is that you lose about 50% of your rated range, which is probably pretty equivalent to the haircut a petrol-powered vehicle takes to its range while towing, but on account of the reduced capacity, it is both impressive in terms of its efficiency, but also barely adequate in terms of being able to comfortably make it between Superchargers without careful planning. For me, it's nice to know I can do it if I need to, but clearly the sweet spot is short trips where the 100-ish mile max range isn't much of a concern. 

Road Trips with a Tesla

I took a 900+ mile road trip in the first month I had my Tesla Model Y, and I've managed to put 9,000 miles on it despite being in a pandemic lockdown and working almost exclusively from home in the 10 months I've owned the car, so this is by no means the first road trip I've taken, but the last couple I did (Eastern Shore of VA and Johnstown, PA) revealed a couple of things that I hadn't noticed before that I thought I'd discuss. 

Road trips in an electric car, even one with nominally 300+ miles of range, still require more planning than their fossil-powered brethren. I knew that going in, and TBH it sorta appeals to my inner tech nerd, but it's definitely not for everyone yet. Highway speeds, especially when the speed limit is 70 like many of the interstates around here, eat into that range, and since Tesla seems to have done a lot of work gaming the EPA test cycle for maximum claimable range, a safe estimate is more like 75% of claimed range, with additional modifiers if it's in a temperature extreme or there are a lot of hills. This isn't inherently a problem, but since you're dependent on chargers that even with some 2700 Supercharger stations and lots of other non-Tesla chargers available, are nowhere near as ubiquitous or convenient as ye olde petrol station. 

The car does a fair amount of the work for you, in that you put a destination into the SatNav and if it predicts that you don't have the range to make it to your destination, it automatically chooses a Supercharger on your route, and even tells you how much time you should spend charging to gain enough range to make it to either your destination or the next Supercharger on your route if it's a multi-charge trip. The prediction seems to know something about topography, speed limits, and the like, because I can see obvious kinks on the car's projected energy graph line that correspond to mountain passes and things, and if you run into construction or traffic that slows you down, you often end up with a slight gain in actual range vs projected. Its trip range indicator is pretty accurate on the highway even if the car's primary range indicator on the dash isn't (it uses either ideal conditions or a much less aware average to project range based on percentage of charge remaining). The car will even warn you to stay below a certain speed if it thinks you're at risk of running out of megableems before your destination. 

So they're doing a lot to help you manage range anxiety, and my experience overall has been that a restroom and snack/meal stop is plenty long enough to gain back the required charge such that I've rarely felt like I was wasting time compared with my previous road trips. It's especially nice that a lot of Supercharger stations near the highways are collocated with either a Sheetz or a Wawa, rather than a random mall, as that enables the same sort of relatively quick food/bathroom stop as one would make while refueling.

But there are some fundamental flaws in the way this system works right now, or at least bad assumptions that ultimately require you to do a little more planning than just hopping in the car, inputting your destination, and wafting away on a cloud of inconvenienced electrons, confident in both your car's range to never give you up, and the Supercharger network to never let you down. 

1. Tesla assumes that on a trip that stretches your range, you are going to be able to charge at or near your destination, and it doesn't really take into account whether you actually have enough range to make it to an appropriate charger post arrival, especially if it's not a Tesla charger. To complicate matters further, Tesla also appears to have lowered the threshold of acceptable minimum charge at destination both as their range projections improve, and in an attempt to reduce reliance on mid-trip charging (the Supercharger network is getting busier as more Teslas get sold) such that sometimes trips that a year ago would have featured a Supercharger stop now claim to not need it, but you roll into your destination with a projected 13% SOC (which likely translates to actually single-digit%). This is not user-adjustable. This might be ok if the stay is long enough to charge, but depending on where you are, that might mean:
• >24 hours charging @ 120v/15A (4 MPH of range added) - normal house current
• >12 hours charging @240v/30A (20 MPH of range added) - typical J1772 Level 2 charger/dryer plug
• >6 hours charging @240v/60A (41 MPH of range added) - Tesla AC charger (if these are installed at a hotel or somesuch, Tesla refers to these as "destination chargers")
• 30-60 minutes at a Supercharger (depends on whether it's 150 or 250 kW DC fast charging)
• However long you need on the above methods to gain back enough range to reach the closest Supercharger on your return path.
• There is also the rapidly-expanding CCS DC fast charger network that supports all the non-Tesla cars. In addition to often being expensive, bordering on usurious for its charge rates if you don't have some sort of deal through your manufacturer, Tesla owners have to buy a $500 adapter to make their car's proprietary plug interface with CCS. I suspect it will be a long time before the CCS network footprint exceeds the Supercharger network by enough to make that a worthwhile investment.
2. Tesla's in-car SatNav has no ability to do multi-stop trips, or even a toggle to indicate that this will be a round trip. While it shows you projected state of charge for a round trip briefly when you first start the trip, you can't actually get the car to act on that information. The only way to do this is by using Tesla's Trip Planner website and adding the multiple destinations to force it to calculate charge stops without assuming any other charging is happening so that you know what your charge and range situation might actually look like for all of the legs of your planned trip. And then likely you're going to end up manually selecting the appropriate Supercharger along your route as your destination, stopping for whatever amount of time you deem appropriate, then putting in your actual destination once you're done charging. So you lose all of the trip planning aid in the car. And even when the car decides you need a charging stop, it is basically doing the same thing in the background, so what you get is the ETA and remaining distance to your charging stop, with no sense for total trip duration. This seems like a pretty basic set of missing functionality. Maybe they should reallocate a couple of the programmers working on making the car play fart noises and bring the Nav system to parity with Google Maps, circa 5+ years ago?

A couple of other random observations that came from more driving:

I've been able to conclusively prove that even if the Nav system has some idea of speed limits for range projection, Autopilot is deriving the speed limit it uses (you can set it so that it automatically sets the max speed as "speed limit +N MPH", and on some roads it automatically limits Autopilot's set speed to 5 MPH above posted limit)  from "reading" the posted signs. I know this because first it misread a sign with a truck-specific speed limit and assumed that it was applicable to all cars, and then after it dropped the speed limit in a construction zone, it didn't raise it again at the posted end of the construction zone - not until there was another posted speed limit sign.

For a system that is supposed to know things like which lane it needs to be in, where to take exits, and to make very specific routing decisions to make semi-autonomous driving credibly safe, or at least defensibly possible, Tesla is absolutely not updating the map data often enough. According to my car, running the very latest generally available software (i.e. I accept software updates within days of them being offered to me), my map data is 2020.48. This apparently rolled out in November, so given that the data was probably aging before they packaged and released it, I'm guessing it's at least 9 months out of date. This explains why the car continues to insist on stopping for traffic lights that have been gone for months on VA-28 near I-66, and why it believed I had gotten off on an exit (and dropped its max speed accordingly) because of changes to the traffic path during ongoing construction on I-66, why it seems to know nothing about some of the other HOT lanes in the area, etc. It may be that part of getting access to FSD (which I don't have yet) includes much more frequent map updates, but it seems like if they have to do it at all, it would be easier to just package that up for everyone. 

I still have an overwhelmingly positive impression of the car and the system, and I don't feel like I've made an undue number of tradeoffs by switching to an electric car, and this electric car specifically. But I do think it's worth highlighting these areas where things could definitely improve as we look both at Tesla and the broader transition to electric transportation over the next number of years. I don't know if anyone at Tesla looks for this sort of discussion, or if anyone reading this might be better informed as a result, but I enjoy writing about it, so I'll continue doing these sorts of periodic updates and hopefully some will find them insightful.

My 969 mile test ride of a Harley-Davidson Sportster

If you've made it through the last few posts, you know all about where we went on our trip, but I thought before I was done writing I would take a bit to talk about my riding impressions after my 969 mile test ride.
Now, I need to start by saying that overall, I had an absolute blast on this trip, and my comments here are in no way intended to lessen that, nor personally malign anyone who has chosen a Harley, Chris and Heather especially (since it was their generosity that allowed me this experience in the first place). To each their own. I am just saying that after having ridden one for that long, it confirms what I had originally thought - it's a nice place to visit, but I'll likely never own one, nor can I understand why they're so popular with people my parents' age who don't have as much tolerance for abuse to their joints. Below are some reasons why this is my opinion.

Chris and his wife both have Harley-Davidson Sportster 1200s. I rode Chris's bike, which is an XLR. It's fuel-injected, has dual front disk brakes, and has the "peanut" tank (3.5 gal). He rode his wife's, which is a Custom. It has single disk front brake and is carburated, and has a slightly lower seat height and the larger fuel tank.

Ergonomics: Riding a bike for 6+ hours a day, or even an hour at a time will tell you a lot about its ergonomics.  When it comes to riding position and rider comfort, the Sportster's are not good. I mean, a lot of sport bikes have stiff suspension and punishingly uncomfortable rider triangles, but usually this is because they are more focused on maximum performance (and to some extent with the Italian bikes, styling) and rider comfort is a secondary part of the discussion at best. I know that it's not performance with the Harleys, so I can only guess that it's styling. Personally, I think if I ever bought a bike that was this uncomfortable to ride for any length of time, it would be a Ducati, because at least then I know why I'm being punished.
The riding position is just like most other bikes, in that no one element makes a good or bad riding position - it's a combination of several different things and their relationship to each other. The Sportsters have that standard cruiser feet-forward riding position, which is actually pretty comfortable if you're not doing it for more than 30 minutes at a time. However on this specific bike, for someone of my height, the foot pegs aren't far enough forward for me to have my legs straight out in front of me, and the reach to the bars is too far forward, meaning that you're sitting in this awkward clamshell position with your lower back hunched forward. Even if you had a backrest, you'd be hard-pressed to use it without having handlebars that extend further back, or longer arms. When we were on the highway, we'd occasionally rest our ankles on the foot pegs, which would stretch our legs out straight, but that was really only workable on straight roadway, because this put our feet about 6 inches from the road - not good if you have to lean. Also, because these bikes have no wind protection, the wind becomes the limiting factor in your speed. At 70 mph, no problem unless you're following a truck and getting wind buffeting because of turbulence. But a lot of the highway that we rode the first day had a 70 mph speed limit, meaning that keeping up with traffic meant running at between 80 and 85. At that speed, the wind is literally trying to blow you off of the bike, causing you to have to hang on for dear life, so your hands and arms get tired quickly. But worse than that is the effect on your legs. Because of the wide seat and engine plus the distance to the pegs, you're sitting with your legs in a fairly open position, and the inside of your legs is the leading edge that catches the wind. This means that the wind is constantly trying to force you into a full split. So you expend a considerable amount of effort trying to keep your legs more together, which tires out your thighs and hip flexors.
Even if you put the standard cruiser riding position aside for a moment, I really don't understand why Harley thinks it's ok to equip these ($10K!) bikes with such unbelievably uncomfortable seats, other than to ensure that they sell expensive accessory seats that make it possible to ride for more than 30 minutes without your keister going completely to sleep. With the pegs out in front of you, all of your weight is on your tailbone, so the seat matters a lot. Whenever we were not going to be braking or shifting for a while, Chris and I ended up using the passenger pegs (which happen to be almost directly under the rider like a standard center-control bike) to shift ourselves forward and take some weight off of our butts, as well as use more of the natural cushioning God gave us. This also helps to change the position of your legs and torso so that the wind is not catching your legs as much and you're able to lean into the wind and use it as a support. The main tradeoff is that you can't see out of your mirrors anymore.
Soo... there's a reason why most touring bikes have center controls and then people put highway pegs on, rather than the other way around.

The switchgear and displays are pretty intuitive. This is the first time that I had ridden a bike that had separate turn signal controls on each handlebar (vs the single multifunction turn signal on the left grip), and the fact that the right turn signal was right next to the kill switch had me accidentally almost pushing the kill switch on more than one occasion. The turn signal was a horizontal button, and the start and kill switches were a pair of vertical buttons above it. There was no color or texture difference, so it wasn't something you could tell without looking. I'm willing to chalk this up to an unfamiliar bike and a lack of muscle memory, because for a while I'd hit the horn instead of the turn signal on my bike too.

Engine and transmission: I normally ride a 600cc air/oil-cooled four cylinder that is making around 70 hp, but it makes that at 10K RPM. The Harley twin makes about the same HP, but at 5500 RPM, and it makes nearly double the torque. This is somewhat like the difference between the driving experience in my old Acura RSX Type-S vs my Pontiac GTO - it matters a lot less what gear you are in with the Harley, while on my bike, it likes to be wound out, and has no margin for being in the wrong gear. This makes the Harley a very easy bike to ride - you twist the throttle and it'll go. That said, the transmission on the Harley was smooth, shifted easily, and by the second day I was even able to pretty consistently do rev-matched downshifts. I kept trying to shift into a nonexistent sixth gear, because the bike really isn't geared for cruising much above 70mph without seeming overly busy. That would have improved fuel economy as well, because we noticed a pretty significant drop in mileage when we were cruising at 80+. I will have to say that I was pretty impressed that the bikes seemed happy cruising for more than an hour at these speeds, despite the fact that this means that the engine is turning north of 4000 RPM in top gear (redline is 6K). I guess that I shouldn't complain about the ~100 mile cruising range that Chris's bike had, since that was also about the limits of our cruising range given the ergonomic problems I mentioned above, but it does require careful attention to fuel stops when you're not on the interstate.
The rubber engine mounts work quite well at reducing the vibration, and really the only time I noticed it was at idle or if I was in the wrong gear (below 2000 RPM). The engine throws off a lot of heat, but again, it's only noticeable when you are stopped. The fuel injection makes it so that the bike nearly always fires on the first try, and the only fuel mapping niggle that I noticed was that when the bike was cold, if you blipped the throttle and then let it come back to idle, the FI would sometimes have trouble and would drop the engine to a near stall before recovering and bringing it back to normal idle.

On a related note, these bikes both had stock exhausts. I guess you can file it under more things that I don't "get" about Harleys, but I thought that they sounded great, and were plenty loud enough. Even with earplugs and a full-face helmet, I was always able to hear the exhaust enough for it to contribute positively to the riding experience without it being obnoxious. I was even able to hear the crackles and pops on overrun when I downshifted. I guess maybe if you've been riding for years with an open helmet and no hearing protection, you can't hear it unless it's louder because you're half-deaf already.

Handling and dynamics: While the Sportster does outweigh my bike by nearly 100 lbs, I didn't find that to be as noticeable in terms of the handling as the rake and trail differences, and the differences in weight distribution. The front wheel carries a lot less weight than in a standard or sport bike, and so you don't favor the front brake nearly as much - I definitely tried to lock up the front wheel more than once until I learned this. The other thing that I had to learn pretty quickly was that unlike my bike, the low-end torque is quite capable of overwhelming the fairly skinny rear tire, especially if there is any lean angle. This is an order of magnitude worse if it's wet. So you have to be fairly careful with the throttle lest the bike fishtail or do other scary things. Wet off-ramps or other sharp turns should be high on your list of things to avoid on a Harley.
On dry pavement, it does require more work to get the bike to turn than mine, primarily due to the long wheelbase and the long rake, and so even though it's not particularly top-heavy, it still feels like it's falling into the turn, but once it's in the turn it's pretty stable.
The other learning experience for me was the riding philosophy. If you go into riding a Harley like it's a sport bike, or even a sporty standard (like mine), you'll just be frustrated. As I've gotten more comfortable with my bike's handling limits, I now occasionally drag the pegs when I'm riding close to those limits. With the Sportster, you don't drag the pegs if you come into a turn with too much lean, you drag... the frame! While better than dragging the expensive chrome exhaust, still not something that I want to do on a my best friend's motorcycle, and not too forgiving as a method to warn you that you're being a bit overzealous - my pegs move if I need just a little more lean angle. Frames - not so much...
However, ratchet the riding back a couple of notches, from say 9/10ths to 7/10ths, and it becomes a very enjoyable experience again. Curvy roads are still fun, and actually become relaxing, because you're not concentrating so exclusively on every little bit of your riding technique being perfect, nor worrying about an unknown road or hazard creating a problem that you don't have enough margin left to correct for. You still keep a brisk pace, but you can enjoy the scenery as well!
The one big negative for the handling column, just like in ergonomics is in rider comfort. The Sportster uses a pair of outboard shocks/springs instead of the single inboard shock that is more common in modern motorcycles. I don't know if there's a tradeoff there or not, but I get the impression that the suspension on a Sportster is not really intended for someone of my weight, especially with the extra weight of luggage from our trip. I can't imagine what it would be like with a passenger- maybe that's why the pillion seat is such a joke; it's not actually intended for use. Anyway, as I mentioned before, most of your weight is on your tailbone, meaning that impacts from road imperfections that aren't absorbed by the suspension telegraph directly up your spine, instead of being able to use your legs and butt to absorb some of that impact. Couple that with suspension that was far too prone to bottom out, and things like frost heaves and expansion joints are simply painful.
After doing this ride, I have a lot of trouble believing what I see on motorcycle shows on the Discovery channel where Jesse James and Kid Rock jaunt off to Mexico for several days on one of his rigid choppers, or the Teutols go for a joyride on their latest creation. Quite likely, they ride for 20-30 minutes for the cameras, then put the bikes back on the trailer and head for the next photo op. Based on my experience, real distance riding means wind noise and buffeting, bugs and rocks hitting you (often in the face), and comfort is a big deal. I simply can't imagine doing that ride in an open (or no) helmet and no hearing protection. The amount of bugs on our helmets at the end of the day alone would be a deterrent. Maybe I'm just not hardcore enough. ;-)

Other things I noticed - ride height makes a big difference. I am high enough on my bike that I can at least see through the windows of most SUVs, and I can see over top of many cars. This makes it much easier to see far ahead even when you're following someone in traffic. Not so with the Sportsters, and this makes it quite a bit harder to ride defensively because you can't scan way out ahead for obstacles, curves, etc.

Lastly, I hadn't realized until this trip how much I use my helmet lock. Even if you have an expensive helmet (I don't) that you're not comfortable leaving unattended, it serves as a very useful place to hang your helmet when you need your hands free after you've taken your helmet off. For lack of a better place to set my helmet, I put it on the gauges. It was not a secure place for a helmet, because my helmet fell off and hit the ground on two separate occasions, which translates into me needing to replace my helmet now. This would be a pretty significant annoyance if I rode a bike like this all the time.

So concluding a long post, it's a Harley thing, and I don't understand. I'm glad to have done it, and I think that everyone should ride a Harley at least once in their lives, because it's definitely an experience. I learned a lot about what I personally do and do not want in a bike, and that is definitely going to be helpful as I look for a new bike in the future. There's no doubt in my mind that I'll be doing something like this again, it's just a question of when.

Motorcycle trip - day 2, Greensburg, IN to Weston, WV

Day two dawned cloudy, but definitely better weather than Kenosha the day before. It appeared from the weather reports that we had gotten ahead of the storm, and it had turned north while we were headed south, so it appeared that we were going to stay dry. After breakfast compliments of the Hampton Inn, we headed outside to pack up the bikes and get moving. It was a good bit warmer this morning than the day before, and we were surprised to find that there was no morning dew to wipe off of the bikes. We dispensed with the rain gear, only to see a few raindrops on the bikes. Fortunately, that was all it was, and we stayed dry today. We realized now that we were able to see the surroundings of the hotel in daylight that it was somewhat strangely located. It was literally in the middle of a cornfield! There was a grain elevator across the street, and a cell tower behind it, but as far as you could see in nearly all directions, it was corn, grain elevator, corn, grain elevator. We were both anxious to get away from the cornfields and into some more interesting riding.

Also, September 19th is the annual observance of "Talk Like a Pirate Day" so I posted all of my Facebook status updates whenever we stopped in some form of Pirate speak.

We headed out on US 421, and picked up State Route 48, which skirted us up north of Cincinnati. It was a nice rural road, with some curves and even a few hills. Chris and I were both amused by the sign when we came onto a part of the road which warned trucks not to use the road due to steep hills and dangerous curves. Sounds like fun! Outside of Cincinnati, we picked up I-71 to get to US-35. 35 is still a divided highway most of the way, but it goes through some cool towns along the way. We stopped in Chillicothe, OH for lunch, for my first experience eating at the Steak 'n Shake. Burgers were good, shakes were better.

From there, we hit State Route 327, which eventually connected to US-50, and both were really great roads. This was really the first of the nice curvy, mountain roads we were looking forward to on the trip. A brief stop for fuel and rest in Coolville (how could you *not* stop there??), and we were on our way again.
From there we caught State Route 47 in West Virginia, which is an amazing road. I found it using this website, and it is strongly recommended for both the scenery and the drive! One thing I will say about the late Senator Byrd and his ability to bring home the pork... WV's roads were in a completely different class from the comparatively awful roads in Indiana and Ohio - almost no frost heaves, and nice smooth pavement even on these little secondary two-lane roads. 47 ended at US-119, which took us into our landing point for the night, Weston, WV. We stayed at a Comfort Inn there that was obviously a converted motor lodge of some sort - still had the external entrances to the rooms, but they had built a new building in the front to house the check-in and breakfast area. We went to the plaza next door to the hotel and grabbed some "Italian" food from a place called Genos. The food was passable, the beer was cold. I ordered an Italian Sausage sandwich, but instead of your standard tube-shaped sausage with peppers, onions and maybe some tomato sauce in a bun, this had sliced sausage, peppers, onions, and the entire thing was covered in cheese, like a pizza, but on a sub roll. It wasn't bad, but definitely not what I was expecting. We arrived a good bit earlier tonight than we had last night, so we were able to get to bed earlier in preparation for an early departure the next morning so that we could get into Richmond in the early afternoon.

I can honestly say that a lot of the roads we traveled today more than made up for the relatively boring, tiring freeway slog that we did the day before.

Motorcycle trip - day 1, Kenosha to Greensburg, IN

Day one dawned bright and sunny and beaut... oh, wait, no... we woke up to a thunderstorm! Just exactly what you hope for when you're setting out on a 900+ mile motorcycle ride, right? So, we set ourselves to packing the bikes and getting ready for the trip, hoping that it would blow over. In fact, it actually got worse for a time, but fortunately by the time we were packed, and had met Heather's sister at the Coffee Pot restaurant for a hearty breakfast (great Corned Beef Hash!), it had mostly stopped raining and the roads were just wet. Either way, it was still looking pretty cruddy, so we suited up in our rain gear, and packed our clothes and electronics into plastic bags to keep them dry. We got a later start than we thought, probably around 10AM, but given the weather, I'm not sure that was a bad thing.
This being the first time I have ridden a Harley (that happened to also be someone else's bike), I was less than thrilled with the idea of starting out in the rain. However, apparently I've gained enough XP for my motorcycle riding skill that I was able to manage the -10 rain and -5 unfamiliar motorcycle modifiers and keep the shiny side up. This is not to say that it was exactly easy. I definitely had a couple of close "saving throws" (ok, I'll stop with the gamer references for a while, I promise) where the bike fishtailed or the front tire tried to lock up on braking, but it didn't put too much of a damper on our travels. Once we got into Chicago, we headed towards Lakeshore Drive, and were able to see the Chicago skyline and Lake Michigan, including Navy Pier, the McCormick center, etc which was really nice despite dampness and intermittent actual rain. Our rain gear kept us reasonably dry, and we drove out of the rain as we got out of the city. As an aside, by the end of the riding day, really the only part of me that was wet was the part of my jeans that stuck out of the bottom of my rain pants, which in turn had wicked moisture down my socks, making my boots pretty damp. Guess there's something to be said for overboots.

One thing to note, because we were avoiding interstates, this also had the practical upshot of allowing us to avoid Chicago and Indiana's repressive toll road system, with one small exception, where we were on a toll road for all of 2 miles to get from one secondary road to another. Chris had an EZ pass, but since I don't have one, I had to pay cash. The smallest bill I had was a $20, so I ended up with 18 one dollar coins as change - fun!

After we got out of Chicago and into Indiana on US-41 and 52, unfortunately the roads were pretty stereotypically midwestern. That is, flat, straight, and flanked by corn. As I will cover more in my actual post on my riding impressions, these are not bikes that really make a 1+ hour run at 75 mph exactly comfortable, so we were squirming a little between stops on this section. The one highlight was that we drove through a portion of the Fowler Ridge Wind Farm. While I have seen wind turbines before, this is the first time I was able to see them from a short distance like this, and it really did give a better impression of their size. I honestly don't understand why people are so worried about the aesthetics of a wind farm - I think they're sort of graceful and beautiful in an industrial sort of way.

We stopped for lunch (and gas - with a 3.5 gal tank, this is a regular occurrence) a bit late, but since we had gotten a late breakfast, we weren't really hurting for having pushed along for a few hours first. Lunch was White Castle. Since neither of us live near a While Castle, I was pleased to have found one right on our route - it's like going to In-N-Out Burger on the west coast - you gotta take advantage of the opportunity when it presents itself. A bit further along the path, we encountered a car show in a car dealer's parking lot, and decided we had to stop and wander around for a few minutes. It was pretty cool. They had the usual cross-section of muscle cars, but they also had a first generation Honda CVCC, which I'm pretty sure is smaller than a first-gen Mini, and a couple of nice choppers. We only spent about 20 minutes wandering around, but it was a nice diversion.

The second half of our trip brought us through the middle of the Purdue campus in West Lafayette. Another unforeseen upshot of getting a late start is the fact that we didn't come through Purdue until well after the football game was over. I don't know how Purdue is in terms of traffic pre/post game, but if it's anything like PSU, we would have been stuck in bad traffic. As it was, traffic was slow on our way out of town because of 2 or 3 different accidents.
Next stop was the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. This was mainly a place to allow us to stretch our legs, especially since we were mainly on the Interstate and there was some pretty major construction and traffic outside of Indianapolis, but we did take the obligatory pictures in front of the main entrance. From there, we headed for Greensburg, IN and our reservation at the Hampton Inn. It was well after dark, probably almost 8:30 by the time we arrived, and we were quite happy to be done traveling for the day. Last order of business was to find some food. There wasn't a lot of options, because Greensburg isn't exactly a huge town, but we ended up at Buffalo Wings and Rings, which had decent wings, good beer, and TVs where we could catch up on the day's college football action. We splurged and had dessert in celebration of my birthday, and then headed back to the hotel.
Preemptive Advil applied, we dragged ourselves into bed and enjoyed some needed rest before the next day of traveling. Day two would see us headed for Cincinnati, covering pretty much all of Ohio, and then a portion of West Virginia.

Road trip!!! - the beginning

These next few posts are going to be about a fantastic road trip that I just recently took over the weekend of my birthday. This will serve as the introduction.
Logistics were a bit... interesting. First, I had to fly to Chicago to meet my traveling companion. He had flown to Chicago from Richmond earlier in the week, met up with his wife in Michigan, driven to her parents' house in Kenosha, WI, where we would actually set out on the trip, headed for Richmond.

I was able to use my frequent flier miles on United to get a super-saver ticket, which only cost me 8750 miles plus $5. The only downside is that I misread the times, and booked what I thought was an 11AM flight that ended up being an 11PM flight. Doh! While I was a little disappointed that I wasn't going to be able to meet my Uncle Mark (who lives in Chicago) for lunch, for a free flight, I guess I don't have a lot of choices. Side note - I tried "Mobile Check-in" for the first time, which had me using my smartphone's web browser to display a 2D barcode that could be scanned at TSA and upon boarding. I printed a paper pass too, just to be safe, but didn't end up having to use it. Welcome to the future!

Friday night found me going through airport security wearing steel-toed boots and carrying a motorcycle helmet under my arm, which went surprisingly smoothly. I refrained from making any "this is my insurance in case the plane crashes" jokes until we landed in Chicago.

So, I should probably pause here and explain how this all came about, and why I'm carrying a motorcycle helmet (and jacket) on an airplane bound for Chicago.
Chris, my best friend from college, has been living in Orlando, Florida for the past few years. He met his wife there, and they were married last year. He and his wife both have motorcycles, specifically Harley-Davidson Sportster 1200s. However, when his wife moved to Michigan to start grad school (MSU, but we won't hold that against her), they moved most of their stuff and the motorcycles to be stored at her parents' house in Kenosha, WI, with the assumption that Chris would move into the general area once he found a job up there. Chris just recently got a new job in Richmond and moved up from Orlando in early summer. Not exactly close to Michigan, but closer at least, and definitely closer to me, which I'm ecstatic about. So, I've been after him to bring his motorcycle back down so that we could maybe ride together sometime. However, he wasn't really keen on having to load the bikes into the in-laws' truck and trailer and drive them down from Wisconsin, especially after already having to do that once when he moved their stuff down to Richmond. I suggested that they could ride them down, but he didn't figure that his wife would be overly interested in riding all that way. I immediately volunteered (assuming that they were ok with me riding one of the bikes, of course), and so that rapidly became the plan - we just had to figure out what weekend to do it. Well, coincidentally the best weekend for all concerned was the weekend of my birthday, and my very understanding wife agreed that this would be a most excellent birthday present even if it meant she had to be a single parent for a few days, so here we are.

Chris picked me up from the airport late Friday night in the in-laws' bright orange Ford Mustang GT convertible, and despite the fact that it was probably only 55 degrees out, we rode back from the airport with the top down (and the heat blasting). Nothing like romping on the throttle of a big V8 with an aftermarket exhaust while driving under an overpass with the top down to put a big, stupid grin on your face!

With all of the pre-trip traveling covered, I should talk about the actual trip planning a bit. It's pretty easy to get on the interstates and haul yourself across a couple of states at best speed in a day or two, but a real road trip is as much about the journey as the destination. So, I decided to take a page from my Dad's book on road trips and plan a more interesting route, one that avoided the miles and miles of tedium that most interstate travel represents in favor of secondary highways, small towns, etc - actually see the country instead of just driving past it at 80mph. So instead of just plugging everything into Google Maps and hoping for the best, I started doing some research.
I found two great websites, here and here that had maps/gps coordinates of scenic drives or otherwise interesting roads. I started with a list of candidates from all of the states/regions that I knew we'd have to go through in order to get between Kenosha and Richmond. A number of the routes I found on the Open Road Journey website were actually day-trip style loops, so I had to figure out which part of those to use in order to make forward progress, and then set about changing the route on Google maps to string those together and get a rough route laid out.
Once I was mostly happy with the route in Google Maps, I had to find a way to extract that as something that my GPS would understand, as I wanted to at least try using the GPS instead of a map and paper directions. Google has a button that says "send to GPS" and I thought, "AHA!" Well... all that does is send the destination address, which is pretty much useless. None of the multiple waypoints were coming over, so it was time for plan B. There are websites (little script bookmarklets, actually) that you can use to extract Google Maps directions to a file that your GPS understands, which worked like a charm. Once I had that, Garmin has this cool (free!) program called Base Camp that will use the maps in your GPS and allow you to import and export routes, change waypoints, as well as load the route to your GPS's memory. There was a lot of tweaking to be done, because I discovered that once I actually got zoomed down far enough a lot of the waypoints that Google generated were not technically on the road, so there was a lot of U-turns and doubling back to actually reach them that I had to fix. After all of that was sorted out, I was able to play back the route to determine stopping points based on distance and time so that I could figure out where we were going to stay each night, possible lunch and fuel stops, and the like, based on the fact that we'd basically have 3 days to make the trip.
Highlights of the route included riding along Lakeshore Drive in Chicago, through West Lafayette (Purdue), past the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, through parts of the Monongahela and George Washington National Forests, and a bit of Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park. It took me a good portion of Labor Day weekend to hack on this and get the route the way I wanted it, but looking back on it from this end, it was totally worth it! Next post - Day 1.