Saturday, January 23, 2010

Pooey the Globetrotting Ostrich

This is Pooey.

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Pooey was born (purchased) somewhere in North Carolina about 2 years ago. Passed from rider to rider, he was the torch on a charity motorcycle relay across the good old United States of America. When you see motorcycle and USA in the same sentence, you're probably thinking a big fat dude on a big fat Harley. But ADVRider.com is all about adventure riding. Off road, middle of nowhere stuff. Cool! You can check out the hellllla massive thread about Pooey here. Check out a couple rad shots from his tours so far:






So after touring America, Canada, Australia, India, and China, Pooey is here in Japan. There's not a lot of epic adventure style riding in Japan, unfortunately, and I don't really have the right kind of bike for that anyways. How to satisfy Pooey?

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Booze! Yep, I use my vegetable crisper drawer for liquor. Shochu is made from vegetables, right?

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Nothing screams Japan as much as Mt. Fuji, so on a brisk Friday morning I hopped on the CB1000 and headed west...

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...with my new sports video camera mounted on the ride. This is a GoPro HD Hero camera. It's meant to be worn on a helmet or mounted on a vehicle. I'm still working out the kinks, but check out a short video of me getting onto the expressway! (warning: it's boring)



Sorry, no more videos. A 2 gigabyte memory card fills up pretty fast. I have a video where I'm at a stop light behind a truck for 2 minutes. Should I upload it?

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Headed west on the Chuo expressway. Cafe culture sucks in Japan, so McDonalds is the choice for caffeine. I ordered a cafe latte, and the girl behind the counter freaked. Turns out they don't have McCafe in the countryside. Also talking to foreigners is hella scary to some countryside folk.

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Arriving at the prime view spot of majestic Mount Fuji...

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... was a disappointment. Fuji's magnetic cloud powers were in effect. Sorry Pooey.

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Took some new roads on the way home (route 147 out of Yamanako to the 246). Monkeys!

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Lookit them crazy monkeys!

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I made a left onto 76, which I thought was 70. After a nice ride along a lakeshore and up into the hills...

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... a dead end. I've got a nice collection of "Don't Enter" signs from Japanese roads. The benefits of being too cheap to buy a proper GPS system.

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Check the map, and try again.

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Managed my way back to the Tomei expressway. Inside a rest stop is a massive real-time map of Tokyo's expressway conditions. A little traffic ahead, but nothing too serious. On a Sunday night, you'll see a lot of red, but on a Friday you're ok.

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Use of an electronic toll collection (ETC) system saves time and money. Being Japan, shit is all fucked up, and the unit for a motorcycle costs 4 times the price for a car. Regardless of that fact, they've been sold out for like 2 years. I just bought a used car one, which is technically a no-no, but it works so I don't really care.

Seriously, if I get busted for using a non-regulation payment system before getting busted for something else...

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Thus ends my day with Pooey the globetrotting ostrich. He is, yep, a Beanie Baby. And, crime of crimes, his tag is missing. Would this ruin the value of this collectible toy? A quick google search, and it looks like Pooey (nee Stretch) isn't on the top of any collector's lists. Onward Pooey, see it all.

1 comment:

daifuku said...

That HD cam totally rocks! :)