Toby's journal

I picked up a new muffler for my motorbike on Tuesday; I had to drive a three-and-a-half hour round trip to pick it up though - I should have just got the seller to post it! (I hadn't quite realised just how far Melbourne sprawls out..)
I had it installed and now the bike sounds... very nice indeed. Long, deep thumping doofs.
The titanium can (a Devil Magnum) comes with an insertable baffle, which makes the sound go quiet and fluffy.. so if needed to pacify neighbours or a VicRoads inspection, one can use that. I'm happy with it :)

In other news - I was feeling a bit off yesterday, and today felt sufficiently generally-unwell to head home early from work, sick. Hopefully another good nights sleep will do the trick though.. Various other people at work have been taking time off lately, so maybe there's something going around :(

I'm safely back in Melbourne with the motorcycle. Hurrah.

Well, I say safely, but actually I think I've done some damage to myself..
My neck and shoulders are feeling completely screwed up at the moment. Massively screwed up.
AND I think I've burst an eardrum!
I wanted to listen to some music, because eight hours of loud wind noise isn't very interesting.. but to get the headphones to stay in, I really jammed them hard into my ears.. and then kept turning the volume up until it was at about triple my normal listening volume.

I realised this was a bad idea after about an hour, maybe less? However the damage appears to be done - my left ear is now almost totally deaf, but it makes a noise like someone crunching up paper if I prod around the outside of my ear. Erm. Oops?

So, I've been packing, packing, and more packing. It's more sorting than packing I guess, but either way, it seems to take forever. The car is pretty loaded up now, and I'll just chuck the laptop/pc/camera into it in the morning and we'll be ready to go. The Araldite repair job to the leaky junction coolant junction box seems to have worked well, which is great.

I meant to go out with some friends on the Bay to Birdwood run, a classic car rally, however due to some communication failures, I didn't. I couldn't really spare the time, anyway, but it would have been nice to see that group of friends before I headed off. Anyway, it was a lovely day, so I hopped on the motorbike and went for a couple of hours riding, out to Birdwood, but via a different route.
My way was totally devoid of other traffic, and so it was just rolling hills, valleys, vineyards, lakes, rivers, and forests with the winding road between them. It's springtime here, and there's been a bit of rain recently, so now everything seemed green with bursts of other colours. I'll miss being able to go for rides like that so easily - I gather you need to get further out of Melbourne to reach that kind of countryside than from Adelaide.

With my chest lying on the tank,
I feel the engine thumping:
My second heartbeat.

Of all the (longer) roads in the UK that I've travelled, I think the M11 will be the one that I end up remembering. It's not a particularly noteworthy road, really. The roads around High Beech and Box Hill are much more fun, and considerably more scenic.
However the journeys up and back the M11 have more mental baggage associated with them.
The motorway starts strangely, with traffic merging into the right-most lane from the North Circular. (The right-most lane being the /fastest/ moving lane, here in the UK.)

For me, the M11 brings back many memories of travelling at night. High speed, often in mist or rain, and always with buffeting cross-winds. There are no speed cameras, and the lighting is intermittent, yet the highway curves back and forth and over hills apparently at random, leaving me straining to see the distant cats-eyes that are poorly illuminated by my bike's headlight.
My trips up that motorway also always coincide with fairly active or intense weekends - parties, strenuous battles in fields, hangovers, strange movies, sex, vodka, architecture, gin, punting, new people.. And I guess that by framing events with a motorcycle ride on either side, the ride becomes part of the event in my memory, even if all the journeys will blur into one over time. Just one night/day ride in the hot/cold, taken fast/slow, with/without music in my ears.