Ithaca is Gorgeous

 Bruce took us out on his newly assembled BMW K75 to look at some of Ithaca's best waterfalls.

 Years of hard water had carved out this rock formation, leaving a swimming hole at the base.
 The next falls we visited were massive, magisterial and amazing. Taughannock Falls State Park, near Ulysses New York has a striking natural wonder.  Higher than Niagara Falls by over 30 feet, Taughannock Falls carves out a heart-shaped natural amphitheater from the surrounding mountains.
 Thousands of years of erosion has moved this glacial shelf farther and farther away from Cayuga Lake.

 The tributary snaked around at sea/lake level, seemingly on a river bed of solid rock.
 Bruce, Flan and I hiked for about a mile searching for a route down the mountain, but realized that most people entered the park at the river's mouth, several miles away.

© 2014 Tigh Loughhead

Bruce's Fleet of 1980's BMW K Series Scooters

I rode up to Ithaca, NY this weekend with my girlfriend to visit some old friends from my childhood that I hadn't seen in a while.  Dawn and Bruce actually live in Cortland, and they kindly offered to let us stay for the weekend and show us around some of the cool sites in Ithaca.

I remember Bruce was a serious motorcycle rider, but I had forgotten what a serious devotee of two wheeled vehicles the man was.  In various states of disrepair or dis-assembly, his garage currently houses at least 3 BMW K series bikes (two K100s and a K75) from the 1980's.

 On each of his rides, which he affectionately designates as his "scooters", he has more acquired than 150,000 miles per moto.
 The K Bikes have 3 or four horizontally mounted pistons, with easy access to the fuel-injection system or the crankshaft assembly, though this is an extremely rare need, due to ambitious 80's German engineering.
 Even the single-sided swingarm attaches the rear wheel to the crankshaft and the rear drum brake with only four bolts, making putting the rear wheel on a ten minute job, not the hour-long futz-fest it takes on a Ducati.
 Extraordinarily sturdy and barely in need of maintenance, Bruce's K bike was ready for the road after half an hour, and we took a quick jaunt over to Ithaca Falls and Taughannock Falls, to the Ithaca Farmer's Market (below) and finally to Ithaca Beer Company.
© 2014 Tigh Loughhead