When my old motorbike got knocked over by a car on a parking lot, my daughter’s first reaction was: “Yay! Dad is going to have a new bike!” Although I didn’t share her enthusiasm at the moment, the bike hit all the expensive parts as it fell, and the insurance company wrote it off as a total loss. So it turned out my daughter was right, I now have a brand new Yamaha MT-09. I’ve been enjoying riding it everywhere for the past week.
While looking around online for bike reviews, etc., I came across a motovlog by Royal Jordanian, who has a very particular style: he rides round London and uses very little commentary to complement his GoPro footage. It’s counter-intuitive that movies like this would be interesting, but they are, in a strange way. This inspired me to try a variation of this blogging while I ride around. Granted, Victoria traffic doesn’t offer the entertainment value of London’s jams, and filtering between lanes (a main feature of RJ’s rides) is illegal in Canada anyway. Still, I remember the time when, before moving to Victoria, I was looking for anything related to the city – webcams, blogs, videos – to make a mental model of the place that was going to be my new home. I would have certainly liked to see the city from the perspective of someone on a motorbike.
MT-09 is a naked bike, so I didn’t want to spoil its look and feel by installing any luggage racks. Likewise, I didn’t want to mount a GoPro camera on my new helmet. My current compromise is carrying a backpack (it is a bit of an adjustment to minimize the amount of stuff I am used to lugging around on a daily basis) and mount the GoPro on a chest harness.
So here is the result. Maybe, the first video in this series.