My experience with the Triumph Tiger 800ABS 2012 model.  I’ve had this bike since late March and I have to say I’m rather pleasantly surprised with it.  Now I had ordered an 800XC but when the time came to get ready to pick it up it turned out I wasn’t going to get it till mid May.  So at this point I would not even have the bike yet, needless to say I was kind of pissed off when that happened.

But I ended up with the black model and I have named him Ironhide as he looks damned tough and Ironhide was the coolest transformer ever.  Now the day after I picked up the bike I managed to get about 100km in just before it decided to snow about 20cm overnight.  It was a sad sad site the next day, but once things melted up it was back on the road.

I’m not a pro-star rider and Bo knows I have a lot to learn but I really enjoy how this bike handles, I’m 5’11” with a 30” inseam and while my feet are a bit iffy on getting all the way to the ground on this bike it’s not hard to be stable while stopped on it.  However with the stock handlebar risers I was in an awkward hunched over position that caused my back to get sore after about 4 hours of riding.  So when I took a trip to Grande Prairie and Dawson Creek before heading back to Edmonton for the first real post breakin ride I was not an entirely happy camper in the back and ass regions.  Yesterday I received the risers from the XC model which moves the bars out another 30mm and it made an enormous difference in my posture and how I feel riding.

The seat is another area that needs a bit of work, I’m not really willing to take the chance on an aftermarket one at the moment because for one, they all look really lame and two, they are damned pricey.  But what I plan to do is pull the seat off, take out the staples and carve out some foam strategically the same way I did to the seat of my Versys which made an enormous difference in overall comfort.

At this point I’ve only put about 2400km on it but I have installed the engine guards, rad guard and saddle bags as well as a pair of Barkbuster Storm hand guards to help with wind and rocks/bugs.  All in all I am quite pleased with the result and hope to put on at least 10000km this year on Ironhide.

Will post more as I get notable observations or gripes.

So the bike trip was good.  FP Bike Trip 2011 went well right up until Adam broke down by Fox Creek.

We left GP Wednesday afternoon and then met up Thursday morning before hitting the road headed to Canmore and ultimately Golden where the power was out in the entire town.  At this point I crashed and then in the morning we got up, had breakfast and rode out to meet Scotts dad at New Denver.  It was a good ride and after we met up with him he took us on some really awesome winding roads that were a lot of fun for me.

After a couple ferry rides and some more twisties we got to their place and had dinner and drinks while socializing and then spent the night there and were fed breakfast the next day as well before we headed out to Creston.  We fueled up in Creston and then headed to Kimberly where we stopped for lunch and fueled up again.

The road to Radium from Kimberly was hot and insanely boring but we got there and I had to fix my throttle as it acted weird but was a minor issue, after which we road through the mountains to Lake Louise and spent the night there.

The next day it rained and in that inclement weather we headed north through the Icefield Parkway and turned for Rocky Mountain House at Saskatchewan Crossing.  From there we got back to Edmonton nicely and I spent the night at Christinas before heading back home.

Aside from the 6 hours we lost from Adams clutch going on us the whole weekend went quite well and was a lot of fun.

My brother is having his annual pig roast this weekend and the Grovedale Stars hockey team will be doing a cleanup of the local landfill before the festivities.  If you play and only show up for the pig roast you will be dubbed a lazy asshole, so fair warning.

Trying to sell a house and buy in another location is a bitch and a half.

Cleaned up the yard from the winter and torched some old wood laying around.  It’s nicely done and worked with some rum and beer.  Now it’s hot as hell.

So I’m working on attending NAIT this fall as a member of their BAIST Network Management course and I think I have a good chance of getting into it.  I have more than enough hours of post secondary and my certificate and training counts are awesome.  So this should be interesting, the aspect that this adds to is that I need to sell my house and move which are both fairly major endeavours that I am undertaking.  Should be exciting though.

I screwed up playing with the previous site and I didn’t really care enough to try and restore from backups so this is a brand new site!  All nice and shiny.  I’m going to refrain from ranting about politics here mostly because they make me want to drink myself to sleep.