Welcome to NOLA 2015! This year we are traveling to New Orleans, Louisiana, also known as The Big Easy.

I did some research into that name and there are several theories. The most popular is that a newspaper columnist in the 1920 was trying to contrast New Orleans with New York City which was starting to call itself The Big Apple. I guess that is sorta like why we call Calgary 'Hard Town'. Another theory is that it was 'easy' to make a living if you were a musician, especially in the early 1900's. Also the city's rather lax standards when it came to prohibition may have contributed to The Big Easy's reputation and moniker.

I will also be going to Corpus Christie, TX while en route in order to visit another Aircraft Carrier, CV-16 The Lexington. While I do not personally embrace the term 'bucket list' touring AC's has become my thing. I have visited the Hornet in San Francisco in 2013 and the Midway in San Diego this past Spring. I also have seen 2 of the 4 Space Shuttles and visited a missile silo in New Mexico. You could say Cold War technology is my thing.

My trusty Triumph Rocket gave me some problems this year; It is 10 years old this summer and has over 100 000 km. Disappointingly the cylinder compression last year showed 8 - 10% loss across the 3 cylinders indicating a rebuild is necessary, but it wasn't in the budget for this year. It still pulls like a Clydesdale and screams like a Banshee so I put it off for another year.



Also this earlier year it started doing this trick where the throttle would stick open. I had it out in mid March and at first it was only once in a while, then became once a day, then every ride and eventually every time I twisted the throttle. When it would do this I would need to turn the engine off with the handlebar kill switch, then restart it. When you turn the kill switch back to run it takes about 20 seconds to run a diagnostic and determine which fuel injection map to load, this means coasting during that time. That time span is an annoyance around town, but somewhat frightening on the Yellowhead or Groat Road!

The bike became unrideable so I had to take it to Echo Cycle. I took it in around mid May, but my actual appointment wasn't until June 18. They said they would get to it early if they had a cancellation, but that never happened. I insured the FairLady 300 ZX for the road and parked my Ram pickup for the summer.

When they finally addressed it on June 18th they found there was mashed up and decomposed birdie goo stuffed into the external rocker arm that controls the 3 throttle bodies where the throttle cable attaches. If you recall from my Key West trip last year, on my second day I hit 2 small birds that were eating road kill in the middle of the road.

One ended up in my lap, but the other was not to be seen. I thought it had just bounced off but apparently it had wound it's way into the guts of my bike following a path as convoluted as the 'Magic Bullet from The Grassy Knoll'. That is a JFK assassination reference for anyone under the age of 40. Between the forks, over the rad, under the oil sump, down and then around a corner coming to rest against the rocker arm. The birdie remains had so fouled the assembly that once they opened they prevented the rotating parts from closing.

After the incident last year I thought I caught a whiff of something nasty every once in a while but being on the road for 5 weeks I honestly thought it was maybe, perhaps, me! In the position it was in it would have been fully exposed to engine heat so it would have been cooked every time I rode the bike. Kookie!

I also bought a new helmet this year, and iiCON AirMada. My previous iiCON was about 8 years old, and I had never dropped it, not even once, until this year. One cold May morning I dropped it twice within 5 minutes and broke the visor off.

Luckily iiCON supports their products very well and I was able to purchase a replacement 'pivot kit'. Sadly someone somewhere along the line decided to save the company a fraction of a penny per unit so the pivot mechanism was made ever so slightly thinner so that it no longer engages locking mechanism like it used to. Every time I moved the visor up and down, a very frequent occurrence, the visor moved the pivot instead of, well, pivoting it. 3 activations and the visor would pop off on one side. This was not something that could be fixed on the fly, it would take a stop and 10 minutes of fiddling.

Eventually I worked around it by driving a screw into the side of the helmet on each side to prevent the pivot from pivoting. That was OK, but the new pivot kit hardware did not place the visor in the same spot as before so there were many gaps that the wind would whistle through. Although I never rode it in the rain, yet, I knew it would be far from watertight as well. All signs were pointing to a new lid!

My loverly wife Eryn stepped in at that moment and offered to purchase me a new hat. I found one on the iiCON website that was only $160.00! It had all of the features of his higher priced brothers but only a flat matte gun metal finish. Browsing their website I found they had a stripper model of every series of helmet for dirt cheap, all the pricing inflation was for fancy graphics................right up to $829.00!



In the end, based on user reviews on the site, I opted for a slightly more expensive model, the AirMada which is very well appointed and only $225.00. Free shipping too and it arrived Tuesday. It has 7 user actuated air vents, which can be adjusted while riding with gloves on! I used the iiCON head measuring guide and bought an XL for my XL melon, that was the size of my previous helmet but it does seem pretty snug.

Although I loved my previous hat, right up to the moment I dropped it, I think I will make it a mandate to buy a new one every 5 years to take advantage of new technologies. Maybe future helmets will be a Class 5 force field encapsulating your head, or full body.

So all of the hardware was in place, just needed to get the meat puppet up to speed and ready for departure.