Killing time on long boring streches

[David Morrow]

check your public library. rip them to you mp3 player and then delete them when your done

That's sort of what I do but I burn them to CD's. If they're good, I listen to them more than once and always pickup a bit more each time ( slow learner I guess.) When you go to the library, if it's a bigger one, they often store their audio books in different areas - by subject - so search around. It can be a real goldmine.

I also download a lot of podcasts - the various public radio stations have hundreds of good shows - I like science so I find the best at NPR, CBC, Radio Australia, BBC...

[jwhite518]

Audible.com is especially good if your player supports their format. It's highly compressed, way smaller than mp3's. Plus you don't have to buy the high fidelity versions, after all you're competing with wind noise. You can get the a la carte program, don't have to buy a monthly subscription.

My favorite are the Car Talk shows for $0.99 each. I remember riding riding from Gerlach to Alturas late one night during a rally and totally cracking up in the middle of nowhere. Those guys are funny.

Exercises are good too. I'll rip off a few sets of squats to get the blood flowing. You can do bicep curls but without any weight it's pretty dorky. Ride standing up on the pegs for a good long time.

[Desmo Demon]

Maybe try to figure out my speed without looking at my speedo, just time and distance. Maybe work what my distance traveled/yet to travel, like "hmmm if I've covered 120miles of a 750 miles trip, I'm just under 1/6 of the way" then I try to figure out time left, maybe gas mileage while I'm at it.

I do this, but I also try to catch the odometer rolling every 100-mile increment. Also, I guess it is due to all my bikes and the maintenance I always seem to be doing, I sometimes I will run through the steps of a maintenance chore. I've mentally built motorcycles from the frame-up, race cars, and small block Chevy engines in my head while riding.

I do slaloms with anything I can find in the road...cracks, tar snakes, road kill...keeps it interesting when music isn't quite cutting it

No music for me, but I also tag the reflectors or will see how long I can stay riding on the painted line before either wobbling or having to get off of it because of traffic.

[Kiwi]

My favorite are the Car Talk shows for $0.99 each. I remember riding riding from Gerlach to Alturas late one night during a rally and totally cracking up in the middle of nowhere. Those guys are funny.

Car Talk actually has a free pod cast, just look it up in iTunes. They don't offer many old episodes, but all the newest episodes are on there and they update it every week.

[jwhite518]

I know you can get it free but it takes up too much space in MP3 format. I use a Zumo for audio and it only supports MP3s and Audible.com For those of you listening to ipods on your motorcycles maybe it's a different story.

[helodoc]

Once the right hand twist wears off, deer counting wears off, calculating solutions to the Riemann hypothesis, Poincaré conjecture, Hodge conjecture, Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, solution of the Navier-Stokes equations, formulation of Yang-Mills theory, and determination of whether NP-problems are actually P-problems wears off.....Milinda usually sings Etta James in her low sultry voice into my head set.

[jwhite518]

OK now I know you guys are cool. "At Last" was our first dance at our wedding.  

[squeezer]

I really like listening to fiction to break up a long slab run.  

For free (and legal) stuff:   http://escapepod.org/ does a free science fiction short story podcast every week.  Quality of the readers varies but the stories are mostly good.  For the last few years, the publisher has managed to snare the audio rights to all the Hugo nominees except one (I think).  Snag those out of the archives first.  You can download them as mp3's.  Each show is 30 to 45 minutes long (occasionally outside that range either way), short intros and outros, almost all story.  I save them up before long rides.  I think I went through about 8 of them during slab chunks of the Void.  Although I listen to full length books on the bike, short stories work even better.  It takes a shorter attention span and you don't have to ride all the way across the country to hear the ending.

The same publisher does a weekly horror story podcast at http://pseudopod.org/ and a fantasy story podcast at http://podcastle.org/.  It's all good stuff and you can't beat the price (I make a small annual donation to escapepod, but it's really not necessary).

My wife loves audio books and goes through a couple a month while walking the dogs in the woods, so a couple of years ago I got her an audible.com subscription for her birthday.  I think she likes it better than any gift I've ever given her -- at least, she uses it more.  I download books from her library.  It's a really nice service, they're the professionally produced commercial versions you see on the store shelves, as noted above the format saves space, and tho' not real cheap, it's much less than buying them at a bookstore (roughly half price).  Garmin units are audible compatible so I usually keep one or two on the zumo.  I "read" a couple of books while riding back and forth to Colorado last summer.  You get a free one with a trial subscription and it's worth checking it out for that one book, at least.

And, yeah, libraries are great sources.

[helodoc]

OK now I know you guys are cool. "At Last" was our first dance at our wedding.  

Nothin', but Nothin', beats Etta on day 6!

[PlayWithGravity]

Uhhh, I do math problems   . Maybe try to figure out my speed without looking at my speedo, just time and distance. Maybe work what my distance traveled/yet to travel, like "hmmm if I've covered 120miles of a 750 miles trip, I'm just under 1/6 of the way" then I try to figure out time left, maybe gas mileage while I'm at it. Of course I'm also listening to my Ipod, and watching traffic at the same time.

I do this, too.

And I ponder the funniest sounding words I can think of.  Talk about making your riding buddies scratch their heads at the gas station:  "Hey, don't you guys think the word "familiarity" is pretty funny?"

[CLAY]

Twice I've solved all the world's problems and created world peace- the problem is that without a pen and paper I don't remember the formula, necessitating another long ride to work it out.  

[mike goodwin]

I cant remember ever really being bored on a ride.
And if i wanted music i would have taken the truck.
So i count fence posts and try to play that old time travelers game of "Name that road kill".

[opera guy]

I look to the left, check the view.

look to the right check the view.

look ahead, check the view.

when i'm riding next to farms, i speculate on how people lives are around farm lands.  ditto for desert, mountains...

even crossing Kansas on highway 70 wasn't that bad.  i have to admit, the second time around, on the returning trip 3 days later, it did loss a little novelty.  such is life on the the super slab.

3500miles on super slab isnt that bad.

you're out riding your motorcycle, you've been looking forward to this for weeks/months (mine was 13 years in the making) can't be THAT boring.

[zer0netgain]

If I'm not deep in thought or listening to my MP3 player...I play back movies in my head.  

[Scoop]

Uhhh, I do math problems   . Maybe try to figure out my speed without looking at my speedo, just time and distance. Maybe work what my distance traveled/yet to travel, like "hmmm if I've covered 120miles of a 750 miles trip, I'm just under 1/6 of the way" then I try to figure out time left, maybe gas mileage while I'm at it. Of course I'm also listening to my Ipod, and watching traffic at the same time.

I do this too.  And I have the added bonus of trying to convert everything from kilometers to miles.  And sometimes I can sing one verse from a song for hours on end.  I never think about real things...life, problems etc.  

[black hills]

Ride fast, real fast.. not only does it reduce the time spent on the boring sections but it keeps you busy scanning the horizon for hazards/cops

[DougD]

This is easy: Phone a friend and yak on your cell phone, and or
Flip up the screen on you portable DVD and watch a movie and or
Clean your bike. I always carry a damp cloth in my pocket so I can get right on those bug spatters before they dry.
Mini naps are nice too.

[Guy]

Mini naps are nice too.

Those have a tendency to turn around and bite you on the ass.  

[Paulie]

Like someone's sig line here, I'm "On the trailing edge of technology". So I far up my FM & scan for "local color".

Once in awhile I strike gold. Last summer in BF western CO picked up some very kewl creepy injun (?) tunes.   Wasn't a boring stretch by any means, tho.

[minnebiker]

When my wife and I used to ride with this one other couple we used to make faces at the kids in the cars on the freeway.

We even had a mask or 2 we made of paper plates and pulled out on unexpecting kids.  We would do something and then drop back a bit.  As we came up on them again we would do something else.  It was great fun to see what the kids would try to do back in response.

We once followed a car for over an hour.  Those kids had the crayons and paper going like there was no tomorrow.  We had a great laugh.  I am sure the parents enjoyed us keeping their kids entertained on their trip also.

This was before mini DVD players and portable video games when it took imagination to entertain.  It probably wouldn't work now because you would not be able to get a kid to look away from his movie or video game.  Think of all the scenery those kids are missing!