Coast to Coast (and back?) with an Italian Supermodel

Antihero that was a good getaway. North Philly is also as shady as Detroit, I remember an incident when a student was shot in broad daylight for refusing to part with his sportsbike to a local kid. In delapidated cities the problem is poverty and the huge divide between the haves and the have nots. Flashing one's expensive belongings in such areas is asking for trouble.

Well that was a relief, timing on my post had me really worried , whew !!

Italian Supermodel :eek1 where!?

I don't take sentiments like this lightly and appreciate you for saying so. The happiest (and at times the most tortured) times of my life was when I devoted to writing. Then 15 years of all kinds of shit happened and here I am again, writing, happier than I've ever been.

Cool ride report. Did the drink turn you into Yoda?

I have not finished the entire report, did the high speed weave ever go away? I have heard about it from reviews in mags.

went back and looked at the detroit pics again... saw that once, and only once, in north philly... as you said, truly eerie

interesting to see so much vegetation growing up around those decrepit buildings.... it reminds me of the maya civilization and the jungle growing up around the maya ruins .... human activity is so full of folly... we are resilient buggers though, as is nature... good thing

keep writing, and taking pics... great stuff!!!

Ha!

I'm not sure if the high speed weave went away. New tires, but I haven't gotten the bike up to the kind of speeds that I was able to in the desert states....and now that I'm in Canada, where they do roadside seizures of vehicles traveling over 90mph on the freeway I am not going to try!!!!

and you missed out on your chance to share a bottle of Thunderbird and hear about all their riding stories.

Great story, but I'm curious as to why, once you saw the scene back at the apartment, you didn't just take off, get some other accommodations for the night and come back for your stuff in the morning under safer conditions?

It's funny how close "fun, exciting, safety and danger" are connected. Also corollary is the perception of danger before a situation that has 20/20 clarity after the experience.

I stayed up WAY past my bedtime last night reading this entire report.

It influenced my dreams (perhaps unrelated, but I'm not sure why I had a Honda cafe racer and SCUBA equipment out on the same trip) and perhaps my life.

There is a point where admiration and inspiration coincide. I think it's probably safe to say that you've successfully taken most of us past that point. Thank-you...

Please continue ! See ya back in California !

Good to see a moment of absolute insanity followed by clarity. Surely you would have never seen your bike again. OTOH, the bike, keeping your helmet on, in and out of the building, backpack, they probably thought you were a drug dealer or a hit man and were happy not to mess with you, lol! Cheers to getting out safe and sound, now let's hear about Toronto!

maybe you need the rapper from the CHRYSLER commercials for back up?

Hard to believe that Detroit was once called the Paris of the West.

Deploy the world's biggest bulldozer. Up, down, left, right.

Problem solved.

In keeping with the discussion on here about "posers" , this may have inadvertetly been one of those poser moments which worked out really really well for Anti Hero and as usual , I am....................................jusayin

AH- I came across this on another website. Give it a look..

http://www.motorcycledaily.com/2012/08/ducati-1199-panigale-recalls-now-total-six/

In other news - Italy seems to finally be recovering from a major vino shortage it fell into between March 16,2012 and July 12, 2012.

I stopped in at the local dealer to get some brake fluid and sat on a panigale. I'm the proud owner of a BMW k1200rs, but my admiration goes to you for riding that bike the miles and places you have. Simply outstanding.

Damn. Detroit looks like a scene from the Walking Dead. That's pretty sad to see in this day and age. Keep the rubber spinning.

I have to close out Detroit on a positive note before I start on Canada….so here's the final chapter and we can get on with the Great White North! (And then to NY and then back to CDN).

Having been underwhelmed by museums in more than one or two cities across the US, I wasn’t sure what to expect from my visit to The Detroit Institute of Art. But I needed a sanctuary and there were one, two, three, four paintings I needed to see. Now, the DIA is no Louvre (which is a good thing), but neither is it SF MoMa. (With artwork valued at around 1 Billion you'd think eventually people would stop robbing liquor stores and move in for the big score....)

One of the most popular 'attractions' of the museum is a large work by Diego Rivera. Though he thought that art should be public (meaning not in a gallery, his best work (a fresco) was painted inside a museum, which was a good call for him....perhaps he knew the spray can was coming?!

The work consists of 27 panel murals that glorify the city's manufacturing and labor force of the 1930s and celebrate the value of unionized labor (Rivera was a Marxist) that without a doubt helped make the city what it was then, but also contributed a great deal to where it ended up. (Hmmm...Communism in the USSR dies about the same time the auto industry/union power in the US does....coincidence, conspiracy or just the fate of a labor system that's not aligned with a free market economy?)



I'm not a huge fan of murals. But the composition and structure reminded me of Egyptian tomb paintings (which I do have an odd obsession with). The thing that blows my mind about all of civilization is everything we make today comes from the same places we’d have sourced them from 3500 years ago. Not a single material Detroit workers utilized (then or now) wasn’t available to humans thousands (hundreds of thousands) of years ago, give or take an ice age. Metals existed in the same ores then as they do now, petrol was underneath the sand in the middle east, elastic polymers oozed from the same trees in South America as ooze today....the only thing lacking was a vision (The Pontiac Aztec, for instance!), the ideas to turn those visions into manufacturing realities (assembly lines, unions, supply chains, etc) and the effort required to make it all happen (same then as it is now: sweat).

And then I thought about all of the other technological advancements and industries that are just waiting to be created and assembled through visions and ideas and effort. Everything created in the future exists (the materials at least) for us here and now. Everything is there…everything Detroit needs to regain what it lost is all around them.

But it's their city and they can do what they want. I don’t have to live there and actually like it exactly the way it is.