When I told my motorcycle friends I was going to buy a Husqvarna Svartpilen 401, I was ribbed relentlessly. To my North American friends, buying any bike with a 400cc single AFTER having bought a Tenere 700 sounded like a downgrade on all fronts; anything that taps out at 140km/h sounds dreadfully boring to a Saint Lawrence valley homeboy who’s not used to riding in the mountains. My european friends also saw it as a downgrade, seeing that I was going from a full-A licence bike to an A2, and had issues with the fact that the newer Pilen series are now made in India and not in Austria.

La lettre ci-dessous a été envoyé à ma conseillère municipale Sabrina Roy ainsi qu’au cabinet du maire de la Ville de Trois-Rivières et la section d’opinion du Nouvelliste. En date de la publication sur ce site, la lettre n’a pas été selectionnée pour publication.

I was recently confronted with a catastrophic failure of Wireguard that resulted in a tunnel hanging on initialization, a situation that required a full restart to recover from. Upon restarting, my list of tunnels in the tunnel manager had all disappeared.

When going on an adventure, determining what is the adequate level of planning is the subject of much debate. For a long time I was on the “no plan is best plan” side of that debate, however the lead-up to my unfortunate aborted experience trying to cross the middle east has forced me to actually try more in depth planning for safety reasons. The extensive planning gave me a new appreciation for the value of planning any trip, no matter the length.

I don’t tend to remember much, but I do vividly remember a car sighting that I never thought would happen. I was grabbing coffee and a croissant in Cannes on a quiet Sunday morning, in a residential sector near to the port. On my walk back, I saw an early 90’s Jaguar XJ with plates that I did not recognize: Kuwait. I immediately pictured some older Arab gentleman leisurely driving one of the least reliable automobiles known to man through Iraq, Syria, or both, slowly making his way to his vacation home in the French Riviera.