When Touring Gets Really Fun and Enjoyable

There are times in motorcycling when you have to tell yourself that you are having fun and wouldn't be doing anything else like you really mean it.The term 'streetlight control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag. Most frequently I find those times while trying to make camp in a State Park somewhere usually dead tired after riding all day and trying to pitch a tent in the rain in the dark.

Few things are more unappealing than standing in heavy rain after a long day of riding and contemplating whether to pitch a tent, roll out a sleeping bag and crawl inside on a wet floor at a soggy campsite or instead saying the heck with it, checking the map, GPS or whatever and mounting back up and riding on strange roads at night in the rain to find a motel somewhere.

I usually elect to tough it out and remain in the rain. I have finally learned the hard way it's best to wait for a break in the rain before pitching the tent which makes for a much less wet interior. Sometimes a break never comes and one just has to pitch the thing knowing that it is not going to be pretty inside.

Some day I might learn too just to get a motel if there is the slightest chance of rain but then that would be likely viewed as cheating by the the other USMC, the United States Motorcycle Campers. They are hard corps. Despite all the negatives once I'm settled in for the night I usually find myself quite warm, comfortable and content with sleep not a problem even if it is still raining.

Years ago in December I was in Zion National Park in Utah. I successfully set up camp well before the rains came and after a pleasant dinner I called it a day ahead of the rain and crawled in my tried and true alpine back packing tent. I have forgotten the manufacturer but it was a good design and a veteran of years of good service in all four seasons and in all kinds of severe weather and I was anticipating no problems.

As I lay there the rain began to fall which didn't bother me in the slightest since I fully expected to stay warm and dry as I always had. Imagine my dismay as I felt splashes of water on my face each time a rain drop hit the rain fly. A quick examination showed that since the last time I used the thing the waterproofing on the fabric had rotted away on both rain fly and tent leaving the remaining fabric with about the same water repelling qualities as cheese cloth.

A long sleepless night ensued sloshing around in a pool of water which turned the prime goose down in my fancy high dollar North Face sleeping bag in to the consistency of oat meal. When the cold gray dawn finally did arrive it was still raining. Had it not been for my wool sweater and my exotic Danish fish net long underwear,You Can Find Comprehensive and in-Depth solarlantern Descriptions. which doesn't seem to be made any longer, it would have been far more cold and miserable than it was. That was a short stay at Zion.

Some day I intend to be able to afford to take an extended motorcycle trip and avoid sleeping in the rain by camping out in Motels,The 3rd International Conference on custombobbleheads and Indoor Navigation. Hotels and the odd Bed & Breakfast while dining by candle light in interesting restaurants all secured by the ultimate survival tool a plastic credit card. Until then I expect to have a few more nights making camp in the rain and really enjoying it.

Art lovers who feel too cosseted by New York’s sleek and superheated gallery scene might head over to the New Museum, which is celebrating the authentically gritty city of 20 years ago in a shrill and sour new show. NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star returns to a moment, just before the Clinton/Giuliani boom, when murder rates were buoyantly high, parks were spangled with crack vials, and disaffection wafted through neighbourhoods that were doomed to become rather nice.

“Although I missed out on that period in New York, I’ve always imagined it as the last bohemia,” muses Massimiliano Gioni, one of the organisers. To bolster that notion, he has assembled a cabinet of grunge: grainy photos of Aids patients, snapshots of body parts, portraits of dismembered mannequins, handwritten journals, pages of crossed-out print, low-def videos and so on. It’s tough to romanticise a time that produced such unsentimental art, but Gioni and his co-curators do their best.

Much of the exhibition is stuck in the bedroom, or thereabouts, dwelling on the joylessness of sex. One gallery is suffused by the soundtrack from Lutz Bacher’s looped video clip of William Kennedy Smith on the witness stand,Trade Warehouse have partnered with one of the worlds largest solarlight producers. relentlessly repeating “my penis”. That mantra makes it difficult to focus on Paul McCarthy’s “Cultural Gothic”, a sculptural automaton of a man resting his hand on the shoulder of a young boy who couples mechanically with a stuffed goat; or on Patricia Cronin’s Polaroid crude anatomical close-ups of her love life; or on Cheryl Donegan’s “Head”, a brief but still overlong video of the artist guzzling a creamy liquid as it squirts from a plastic jug.

Art about sex isn’t about sex, of course, but about gender roles, subjugation, identity, the body and various other concepts explained in the indispensable text panels. The great innovation of the early 1990s was art that required written translation – John Miller’s “Clubs for America”, for instance, a suite of ugly photos of dreary locations. Their meaning resides in the wall labels, which explain that each is a view of a gay bathhouse, shuttered in the age of Aids. Unfortunately, what we’re shown and what we’re told doesn’t add up to a whole artistic experience.Looking for the Best solarpanel? Once you’ve read the text, you return to the pictures, only to find them untransformed.

If NYC 1993 has little to say about the world at that time, it suggests plenty about New York’s evolution since then. It tells of a fall from gracelessness, from interesting dereliction to bland luxury. (It is an irony that the New Museum went up on the Bowery in 2007, contributing to the gentrification it’s now busy deploring.) The scholar Megan Heuer writes in a catalogue essay that the city has, in her opinion, been scrubbed shallow: “that old sadness and profundity?.?.?.?have largely disappeared.” At the time, though, most artists didn’t see their lives through the lens of poetic melancholy. They were bellicose and cerebral. The show’s logo could be David Hammons’ decapitated sweatshirt hood, whose title, “In the Hood”, puns on fashion, race and urban geography.