About two weeks ago I had the opportunity to do another great summer trip on my motorcycle with some friends from MEWS. Last year we went to the southeast and hit up the Tail of the Dragon, among other roads. This year we went west and went to the Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, Rocky Mountain National Park and more. The weather was unpredictable ranging from 102.2 degrees Fahrenheit to 40 degrees and raining.
So, let's see how the trip went.
The weather was great this weekend and Megan and I took the opportunity to do another ride from our "Biking Illinois" book. This time we hit up Barrington Hills, which is a well known biking area in Illinois. Lots of really quiet country roads nestled in with horse farms. It is quite a picturesque area.
The ride worked out that we were also heading up to the parents and in-laws places for an afternoon grill out so this was on the way. The ride was a ton of fun and I would love to head back to this area in the fall when the leaves change. Megan had some difficulties with the hills. We did end up cutting our ride a few miles short since she also got a flat tire near the southern end of the ride. We literally had just left a small ret area in the DuPage Forest Preserve when she got the flat. We were a mile away, but the road we were on had forest preserve on either side of us and almost no shoulder. We changed the flat there, but my small bike pump couldn't pump the tire back up to the 110 psi she needed for her bike. We got her back up to around 55 psi and worked our way back north on Old Sutton Road.
Meg and I had a fun time yesterday riding out to Kuiper's Farm near Elburn to do some apple picking. It was a gorgeous weekend and this is something we have wanted to do for a while.
Nothing particularly interesting about the ride itself, but I can tell you that you can put a bag of apples on a motorbike.
Another gaming update. So what have I been playing since I last posted in May? A good bit actually.
Syndicate was a rather average cyberpunk FPS game. The graphics in the game were quite good for the Xbox, but the gameplay overall was pretty dull. Your basic run and gun shooting with a slow time mechanic that I often times forgot was even there. I was pretty disappointed overall since I really love cyberpunk on the whole.
Here is a game that I heard a lot of people talking about when it came out. It is supposed to have a lot of "B" movie charm to it. What it does have is a lot of teenage sexualized drama. I dunno what it is, but the whole over the top sexual thing with the Japanese really annoys me these days. It makes me think their society of men are just perpetually stuck in a sort of adolescent phase. Soap box aside, the overall game I am not really enjoying. The shooting mechanic has to be so precise to make a hit that I just find the game frustrating. I just don't have the time to mess around with perfecting perfect skill shots in a game in order to effectively progress my way through it.
Overall the game just reeks of a bit too much Japanese game design in it in all the wrong ways for me. It is also of the horror genre, which has never really been an genre I have found interesting apart from the original Silent Hill.
Overlord is one of my favorite games from this generation. The first game nailed the Pikmin clone while adding just enough of other elements to make it unique. Overlord II came around and it is basically just more of the same, all the way down to the training and origin story. It again, was rather disappointing since I would have liked to have seen more divergence from the first game. Still and OK game and the end boss this time around was a lot less frustrating (perhaps too easy).
I normally hate open world sandbox games. Saints Row 2 and Crackdown really changed my mind this past generation and Saints Row: The Third was such a highly hyped game that I had to play it. I think it may have been a product of it being over hyped, but I felt the game was just "OK". It is certainly solid and still has one of the better shooting mechanics. It even had some really great moments with some songs, etc. Overall though I found myself bored, as I do with most sandbox games with doing the same actions over and over in the side missions. There is only so much driving and shooting one can do.
Overall, here was an excellent stealth action game. A nice art style with good mechanics and interesting game play. I still felt a bit over-hyped for this game a bit, but it is definitely a world I would like to go back to. My only major gripe was the amount of backtracking and returning to the same levels.
View Ride Log: 09-30-12 in a larger map
Nothing spectacular for a ride this afternoon. Just a quick two hour jaunt near the Shipping and Sanitary Canal west of Chicago. While scoping this one out I notice a road that ran parallel to the canal and though that it might have offered a good view. Unfortunately it ended up being mostly industrial areas which at one point road right through the middle of an oil refinery. I even managed to skirt around the outside of a forest preserve.
View Ride Log: 09-23-12 - Starved Rock in a larger map
A little over a week ago I bought myself a new motorcycle. A lightly used 2012 BMW R 1200R Classic. The bike is gorgeous and is black with white racing stripes, spoked wheels and of course the great BMW boxer engine. I am turning 30 this year and starting to feel a little old, so I figured I would treat myself.
To christen the new bike I decided to do an afternoon run down to Starved Rock. I am slightly ashamed to say this, but I have never been to Starved Rock before. I was in for a treat, for the ride was not only a nice one, but the state park is beautiful. I will have to make sure and go back there this fall to go hiking with the changing leaves.
Have you ever had one one of those games where you couldn't miss a shot? You are just on and you are making incredible shots that you normally wouldn't make. Hit the angles, get the digs, make to impossible shots and return them like a pro? Yeah, that was my opponent today at tennis. I honestly did not play an awesome game, but I was putting some really nice shots into corners that most opponents would not have gotten to. The guy I played tonight not only got to my shots, but hit really solid winners back to me. More than once he would put a perfect a perfect lob over my head while I was at the net and it would land right on the back of the basline.
So I went on a really nice big ride last week up to the Grumpy Troll in Wisconsin with RTRC. I have come to learn that any ride lead by Martin in the group results in an all day adventure. I have no problem with that, but we were out riding from 9:30 until about 8:00 pm that night. Of course my GPS seems to have failed on me with dead batteries again so I did not get the route. I reeally need to keep a closer eye on that sort of stuff.
Also my saga for a new motorcycle is slowing continuing. I am sort of actively looking for something and have calls into two dealers. We will see if something develops, but I can't say that my experience with either dealer has been stellar as of yet. I feel like I need to pull teeth to get any sort of information out of them. You would think they would be making more strides to get me content when they have a person approaching them with a potential sale.
If it happens it happens, if not I will truck along perfectly fine on my ZR-7. Actually I suppose I should say I might. Even if this purchase through a dealer doesn't play out I have a real inkling to try and sell or trade my ZR-7 on Craigslist for a dual sport, likely a KLR. Something about the dual sporting really seems appealing to me and I figure at this point I will get a standard street bike again eventually so why not get the dual sport in the garage?
Again, I think we will just sort of see what happens.