M2 Exit!

So I find myself doing the M2 Exit course at the Georgian College in Barrie. I have paid the $400 odd for the one-day course and test. It’s a fair amount of cash, I could have simply booked the test with a MOT approved test center for much less, but I suspect that I would not stand a chance in hell of passing. There is a plethora of little unwritten rules that I don’t know, which would in all likelihood prevent my success. In any event I am sure that the course will be fun. The first part of the course is a Friday evening classroom session starting at 6 p.m. but thanks to horrendous traffic, every bloke and his dog are heading up highway 400 to the cottage, I arrive half an hour late. I mean how was I to anticipate that the 60 kilometers from Newmarket to the campus would take me 2 hours? Anyway by the time I get there the evening had just got underway, and I only missed the introductions. The first half hour is in any event consumed with filling in a bunch of forms, mostly waivers and such like. I assume the college legal advisors have insisted these forms must be read out aloud as if we can’t read them for ourselves. I get it, but it is a real pain in the proverbial, probably more so for the instructor doing the reading. 

Our instructors are Sheri and Carolyn, hope that I have at least spelt their names correctly, at this point Carolyn has not yet made an appearance so Sheri is doing all the talking. She has a whole Kelly McGillis in Top Gun thing going, which is sexy and nice, but I am neither Tom Cruise nor Val Kilmer, so I reign in my imagination and concentrate on the lesson. I begin to realize that I am a really crap rider and start to harbor some doubts as to passing this test first time, there is just so much stuff that I know I don’t do properly and I seem to have developed as many bad habits as your average nunnery. Still Sheri is fairly confident that between her and Carolyn they will get us into shape and ready for the testing on the Saturday afternoon. I am less than sure, but more than willing to give it a go. For the benefit of my non-Canadian readers, divers’ licenses here have three levels (I am only talking about a normal car or motorcycle licenses, any other class I actually have no idea). So an M1 is just a written test about rules of the road and road signs and has a very limited life span, also limits the rider to certain classes of roads, daytime riding, no passengers etc. M2 is what I have, I can travel on any road, at any time of day, can have a passenger, but may only ride with 0% of alcohol in my blood. I am not here because I want to quaff a beer and ride, I am here because my M2 license expires after 5 years, so I have only two more years to get the full M. I could have, and indeed had planned to do this last year, but killing the Suzuki Boulevard in mid-season threw a spanner in the works. I have not entirely let on in these chronicles quite how that incident freaked me out.

M1 Exit course - ready to roll

  

On Saturday, morning after a night of disturbed dreams, I leave home at quarter to seven, which should get me there in time, even with a stop for gas. It is thankfully cool today and apparently forecast to remain cool for the whole day. I am not complaining; the M1 Exit course I did at Georgian College a few years back, took place in the middle of a heat wave.  I totally enjoyed the course and I think that’s when I became smitten with this particular activity, but it certainly was a sweaty two days. I decide to attempt to put everything I was taught last night into practice, maybe by the afternoon when I test, I’ll have drilled this stuff into my thick head. I find that singing the actions out helps me, ‘mirror check, look for hazards, check my speed, mirror check, flash the brake lights, mirror check, look for hazards, curbside lane, left track’. My head bobs up and down, side to side, maybe I’ll live longer, but I’ll surely get repetitive strain injury in my shoulders. I’m not as successful with this as I would like to be, and to my surprise keeping within the speed limits is a harder trick to get right than I imagined it would be – well maybe I shouldn’t be too surprised, I’ve never been exactly great at keeping to speed limits.

Traffic is as expected way lighter than last night, folks are either at the cottage or not going at all, still I manage to keep within the speed limit and to the right hand lane, left tire track just as the book says. A few lane changes for practice, ‘check the mirrors, indicate, check the mirrors, shoulder check, change lanes – keep in the right tire track, cancel indicator, check the mirrors’. Actually that’s exactly how I do this anyway, come to think about it. I fill up gas just before reaching Barrie, my C type KLR has the silliest little tank with a maximum range of 300 kilometers, assuming reasonably favorable conditions. I have discovered to my embarrassment that heavy winds can cut this by as much as 60, but today I’m sure that I’ll have plenty of gas to get through.

The Candidates

 I arrive well in time, most of the other riders are already there so we get to inspect each other’s’ bikes and chew the fat a little. Three of the group are there for trike licenses, all three ride CanAm Spiders, damn nice machines, different sort of ride for sure. There are a few cruisers and a couple of sport bikes, I’m the only enduro. The morning starts off with a quick turn through the M1 exist nemesis. It comprises a short course painted out with white lines in the parking lot. It starts off with a sharp right turning S bend, then into a curve that you are supposed to accelerate through to a stop. You turn around, come back through the curve and stop. Today with 40,000 kilometers experience it seems as easy as pie, yet this is where all the M1 exist course candidates lose points, this is effectively where on my first attempt I failed the test. Even the two big Harleys go through with ease. This is not part of the test, but apparently some sort of screening to check that you can actually handle your bike, I fully understand, this is about safety, they don’t need to be out on the road with a total greenhorn.    

We spend the morning riding on a route through the campus doing the various maneuvers over and over that we will be tested on - roadside stops, left-hand turns on red, on green, right-hand turns on red and green, through intersections, lane changes and so on. I’m liking doing this on the KLR a lot more than I would on any other bike, it’s light and maneuverable and designed to be able to move at 1 km/h without falling over. Soon it’s lunch time and I’m parched as well as hungry, everyone else rides off, I assume to some or other Tim Horton’s, but I am very virtuous, so have a packed lunch of boiled eggs, meatballs, homemade mayonnaise and some cheese…and water, lots of water. It’s not really that hot, yet still one dehydrates when dressed in jeans, motorcycle jacket, helmet gloves and boots.

Now I always dress like this when riding, I’m big into protective gear, especially since my little mishap on the Suzuki Boulevard. Normally the wind factor cools you down, but here doing these circuits and bumps you don’t get enough speed up to keep cool.  Speaking to the other riders on the course, my attitude to protective gear is the exception rather than the norm. Well whatever blows your skirt up, if riding with a piss-pot helmet, shorts, T-shirt and sandals does it for you, that’s fine, but I tell you when the moment comes, and it probably will, when your bacon meets the blacktop it’s way better to be dressed for the fall than for the beach. I actually think that riding a motorcycle at high speeds without proper protective gear is a bit of a Darwin Award thing.

And this year's award goes to....

After lunch we gather around the instructors and are divided into two groups, the Sheri group and Carolyn group, I am in the latter, we are all bikes, whereas the other group has the spiders as well as a few bikes. We are going for a group ride to get us used to what we will be doing during the test, part of which is to wear a wire. Well sort of, in reverse, we can hear the instructor through an earpiece attached to a radio, but our microphones are disabled. Our group sets off through the streets of Barrie with Carolyn’s voice in our heads, ‘When it is safe to do so, perform a roadside stop’ or ‘At the intersection, turn right’, and so on. She is being driven in a car following us. After a while she directs us to a parking lot where we get scolded for not shoulder checking the blind spot enough and insufficient head bobbing and weaving. This it seems is the key to passing or failing on points – of course you will fail instantly on a few other knockout things like; dropping your bike, causing an accident, going through a red light, riding over a pedestrian and exceeding the speed limit by a generous margin.

Final Lecture - Sheri

Doing this group ride makes me a little worried about my left-right/east-west dyslexia. This is a very weird problem that I have always had, goodness knows why. If you say to me ‘turn left’ I have to think first as to which side is left, and I don’t always get it right, or do I mean left? Same with east and west, I have no problems with north and south, up and down positive or negative. Here’s another funny thing, I’m an accountant, and a pretty decent one at that (no false modesty here), yet I also have to think if debits are written on the left or right of a T-account. I am eternally grateful for the computerized format; debits are positive credits are negative, my brain gets that, no problem, it’s a north-south way of looking at things. I am also not into group rides, as anyone that follows this blog may have noticed, the not-so-easy-rider is mostly a lone rider.  I’m fine with two, maybe even three or four, but beyond that I am not keen. Anyway, all goes well, I guess everyone is on their best behavior and Carolyn herds us like a border collie, she knows what to do and after a nice little ride we arrive back at the campus.

I’m lucky, I get to test first – after just a short bio break I’m riding and Carolyn is in the car behind me instructing me to do this, or that, turn left right or go straight, change lanes, take the highway. It’s almost like a GPS. I try not to get flustered by all the FU’s I’m making, wrong lane, dropped the brake light while waiting for the signal to change, missed the shoulder check, forgot to bob the head to show I’m looking for hazards. The right/left dyslexia only manifests once and I hear Carolyn yell, ‘your other left’ when I indicate a right turn.  Finally, we make it back to the campus and I make a last FU, just for good measure, as we get to the entrance, failed to get into the curbside lane quickly enough. I stop in the parking lot and after a few nail biting moments Carolyn presents my result, I did better than I expected, but worse than I hoped. I did crap, but I passed, 20 demit points, just 5 short of failing. I graduate, not with honors, but I graduate. I hope that I may just hang onto some of the good habits I have learnt and leave behind some of the bad ones I have discovered are part of my riding repertoire.

The Graduate 

It’s just after three and I’m done so I head home, but haven’t gone far when the thought strikes me that a little celebratory ride is in order, I go home the long, scenic way, via Terra Nova and a salad and a half pint of beer on the patio of the Terra Nova Public House.  I linger over a couple of coffees to let the beer out of the system before riding home. Technically I have still got an M2 license which, as mentioned, means zero alcohol in the blood. I take a leisurely ride home; life can sometimes be sweet.