New Hat on the Way!

Ordered this lid from Great Britain today. Can't wait for riding season to begin!

Details: It's a Shoei GT-Air, a full-face helmet with a drop-down sunvisor like the Schuberth it's replacing. Slipping it on head is like, as Sabo says, 'putting your head in  a velvet bordello'.

I love the (unintentional) U.S. Coast Guard motif, and I like that it ‘speaks English’ including sporting the name Vauxhall on the back, which is not only the moniker of the German car builder Opel as badged in Great Britain, it is – according to Wikipedia – the name of “an 18th century pleasure garden in New York City.”

In fact, the graphics commemorate an annual 200-mile road race in Northern Ireland. Takes place on public roads through villages and hedgerows a la Isle of Man.

Shoei only made 350 of these, so if you see someone wearing it in the Alps, that'll probably be me.

What's that you say? You don't have a lid with a drop-down sunvisor in it? I’m not kidding you when I say that I will never be without such a lid on hand, and that it’ll be my primary hat for almost all uses. You owe it to yourself to test ride such a lid before you buy your next normal non-sunvisor lid. (and I recommend a GT-Air, of course). Find a store that’ll let you borrow one for an hour (easily done here, if not there) and then go for a ride in changing light conditions. The ideal test conditions are found on a day with the sun poking between scattered to broken clouds, on roads that go in and out of dense forests – a scenario which describes a great deal of the riding over here.

I used to ride with sunglasses all the time on even moderately bright days, even with the drop-down sunvisor installed, because I liked the tint and optical perfection of the Serengetis more that the plastic sunvisor. But the quality of those visors has improved a lot in recent years and now I don’t bother with the Serengetis, I just rely on my integral sunvisor to do the job. As a result the lid is comfier and quieter, and my eyes are never so blinded by sunbright that I wish I had my Serengetis on in addition. It took me years to figure out that the intensity of sun up here at 47 degrees latitude, even on the most perfect cloudless summer day, is far less than what I’d lived with for 40 years down at 32 degrees in San Diego, here. Now my challenge is to remember to bring my Serengetis with me so that I have them when I take my lid off – a mistake I’ve made a couple of times. Checklist, please.