Amor fati, at two-fifty.

Day eleven of the fast. Two hundred and fifty kilometres of freezing rain and hail from Oberon to Tumut on a route the AI chose. Five days to make the ferry.

The layby is on the side of the Oberon road at seven in the morning, and the hail is the size of small marbles, hitting the helmet visor with a sound that is not the sound rain makes. The Oxford grips are on high. Hands warm, breath fogging the inside of the screen, the rest of me getting wetter by the minute. Day eleven of the fast. Five days, on the calendar, to the Spirit of Tasmania at Geelong. The bike is idling because turning it off in this would be a small admission I am not ready to make.

The setup is the one I had been curious about for months. I handed the route planning for this leg entirely to an LLM and the Garmin Zumo XT2. The prompt was specific — the most adventurous farm-road route from Oberon to Tumut, no highway unless unavoidable, gravel preferred over tar, scenic over fast. The AI obliged with a meandering line through ridge country and forestry blocks I would never have found on a paper map. The Garmin took the GPX cleanly and started giving me turn-by-turn instructions on roads that had no signs. The weather, of course, is not in the dataset.

The day, in the order it happened. Two hundred and fifty kilometres. Freezing rain from kilometre fifteen, intensifying through the morning. A thirty-second hailstorm around eleven that was bad enough I pulled in under a roadside livestock awning and waited it out next to a confused cow. The roads themselves — the AI had chosen well. Gravel ridge lines with the Snowy Mountains stacked up to the south, working farm tracks past sheds and mustering yards, a couple of river crossings shallow enough to walk through. On a dry day in October it would have been the trip of the year. On a day in late March, with the cloud sitting on the ridges, it was something else.

The hail is the hail. Resentment of it adds nothing.

The frame the day demanded was Stoic, and old. Amor fati — the love of one’s fate. Marcus Aurelius wrote it in the second century in a tent on a Roman frontier; Nietzsche made it a banner eighteen hundred years later. The instruction is simple and brutal. Love your fate. Not because the fate is good, but because resenting it adds nothing to it. The hail is the hail. The road is the road. The cold hands are the cold hands. The version of me that wants the day to be different than the day is, is the version of me that uses energy I cannot afford on day eleven of a fast.

The gear note that wants saying. The new Givi tank bag is genuinely ruining my off-road posture. It sits high enough that my knees fight it every time I stand on the pegs, and standing on the pegs is the only way to ride the kind of rough the AI had picked out. The bag is coming off before Tasmania. I will go back to the smaller soft one and accept the storage hit. The cost of the wrong piece of gear is paid in the body, kilometre by kilometre, and the body is louder about it than the credit card was at the time of purchase.

Log Creek is the campsite the AI marked as the ‘ultimate reward’ for the day, which it is not, but the kettle on the gas stove is. I arrived just before dusk, soaked through to the second layer, hands shaking enough that lighting the stove took two attempts. Hot water in the cup. No food in the cup. Steam, warmth, the slow re-arrival of fingers. The head, finally, quiet. The fast does this trick where the relief of warmth becomes the entire content of consciousness for about ten minutes, which is more than most meals manage.

The slow turn is about the AI as a planning partner. The route was good. Better than I would have done. The LLM had read the satellite, the elevation data, the road types, and stitched together a line a local would have been proud of. What the AI cannot do, and probably should not be expected to do, is ride the day. The weather is the editor. The body is the editor. The day, when it lands on you, is the editor. No plan — AI-generated, paper-mapped, hand-drawn at a pub the night before — removes the day from the body that has to ride it. The plan is a hypothesis. The day is the experiment.

I will use the AI again. I would be a fool not to. But the conversation it ends in is the one Marcus Aurelius was already having — you do not control the weather, you do not control the road surface, you do not control the day. You control how you meet it. Everything else is hail.

The cup emptied. The fingers came back. The bike cooled in the dark.

A written companion to I let AI plan my motorcycle journey — Episode 7 on the Motorcycle Seat Wisdom YouTube channel.