Crawled under the rally FX tonight & dropped the engine crossmember. Sure enough, the 3M Window Weld mount has failed again. Didn’t last long, this stuff just can’t handle this kind of stress. Doesn’t help that pumping it out of a caulking gun allows for a lot of air pockets. Come this weekend I’ll give up on this and am going to cut and weld in some plate to make a solid mount. NVH? It’s all there!
Don’t let the black bottle fool you, pours a medium light yellow, medium head. Fairly strong hop bitter and touch of skunkyness. The bitter and strong carbonation gives a feel of dryness, but there is actually a moderately heavy mouthfeel. I can’t say I really like this beer. I’ll drink it, but it wouldn’t be a choice I would make to buy it again.
2 out of 4 sapphiry monkeys.
OK, I guess I’ve been abusing my GoPro beyond it’s capabilities. This was mounted under the front bumper, and today’s course had a couple sections that became rutted so was contacting dirt. Prob should have taken a cue when one of the click in mounts snapped, but instead I switched to shorter mount and kept going. On one of my final runs I got back to see that the mount was intact, but the case was empty! It looks like the latch popped open. Eventually we were able to find the camera and the wifi back. It’s pretty banged up but it appears to still turn on. Connector is crammed full of dirt and the lens is scratched. The real suck thing is that I didn’t notice until I got home, the flash card is gone! No footage!
Saving feral cats is dangerous! Blind cat, scruffed him slightly off and he whipped his head around and took a bite and got me right in the nail. Owtch!
Having used both the Sony and GoPro over our Hokkaido trip, I now have some more thoughts on these two cameras and how they stack up against each other. GoPro feature set wise wins. Their WiFi remote is very useful, much more than linking up a smartphone. How often in -10C with winds blasting enough to almost knock you over and snow swirling in your face are you going to dig out your smartphone, take off your gloves in order to use the phone, wait for the app to sync, then browse through it to change settings or start the camera. The GoPro allows full access to all functions while in the waterproof case, although in use the only setting I changed in the field was the inverted setting. The Sony once it was in case only has the start/stop button, which ended up being fine. And it’s a nice big button that makes it glove friendly.
But the Sony has only one tiny impossible to see record indicator LED on the back, I could never see it in the field. The start tone is too soft, again impossible to hear through layers of neckwarmer, helmet ear muff, blasting snow and wind.
Part of the current Spring Thaw variety pack. I’ve already reviewed the Alpine Spring, which is one of my current faves. This one is a porter and pours moderate heavy head, an extremely dark brown, almost black. There’s a definite dark roast, and yet it does not taste burnt. The bitter is also moderated by its fairly strong maple sweetness. You also definitely get the nuttyness from the pecan, but can’t readily identify it. I’m generally not a fan of beers with heavy sweetness, but it works pretty good here, and surprisingly the mouth feel is not very heavy or syrupy. However this isn’t a chugging beer.
I give it a 3 out of 4 porterly monkeys.
Now boarding. Spent about 45 min at the Sapporo Chitose airport onsen, awesome! Every airport needs one!
yup, never fails, the snow is coming down as we sit on the bus bound for airport. We decided it was too much to try and squeeze in a last day of riding and getting on the airplane all stinky.
The end is nigh, unless the incoming equipment for my flight tomorrow gets rerouted due to weather conditions. Supposedly the near-typhoon level winds are supposed to subside a little tomorrow, but you never know. Time to drink my Silk Yebisu and take the bindings off my board as the wind roars around the building, and the doors and windows breathe in and out like something out of a horror movie. I swear the winds in town today are at least 150% as strong as the wind that shut down Kokusai yesterday. I literally got blown across a sidewalk and into a bollard and hedge. Luckily it wasn’t that cold, as that would have made the whipping snow much more needle-like, though the warmth put the streets and sidewalks right in that ultimate danger range of 0C to 2C where things are at their slipperiest. I’ve seen it worse in town, like where you have to use the bootpack to not get stuck in the thigh-deep snowdrift that was once a sidewalk.
16:00 and on bus heading back to Sapporo. While snow conditions were good, riding comfort pretty harsh with the whipping winds. We called it an early day, we got some good runs in. Bus is slowly making its way back, now this is an honest blizzard. There’s stilla bout seven car lengths visibility so it’s not too worrying. Am now seriously considering riding Sunday and got straight to airport. Stinky riders!