(no subject)

[elizilla]

Just returned from a weekend of riding. Phil invited me to come down there for a ride with his local riding group. So I rode down Friday night and on Saturday morning we rode together to where the group was meeting up, at his friend Bruce's house.

There were eight bikes in the group that set out. Here's where I show my lack of Dale Carnegie skills, and my obsession with motorcycles. Phil had his Sabre, I had the V-Strom. Other bikes were a GPz, Concours, Superhawk, BMW R-something-S, and an interesting salvage FZ-1 streetfighter with lovely green paint. They were fast riders, faster than me, and i don't like to follow people too closely if I don't know them well. Phil was leading the group, but I quickly dropped back to the second to last in the pack. The Concours rider was riding sweep and stayed behind me.

We had barely gotten started when we went through a construction site. They were putting down new asphalt and we all got tar all over our tires. Immediately upon leaving the construction site, the guy on the FZ-1 crashed. The tar on his tires made him lose traction. Fortunately he was wearing full leathers and he was uninjured, and the bike was rideable. But it was sad to see that lovely green bodywork all rashed up.

We continued. It couldn't have been more than 20 miles farther on, that the guy on the GPz crashed! Yikes! Not again! His crash was worse. He went off the outside of a curve and dumped his bike in a hayfield. He was also wearing full gear, but it didn't fare as well. He had some nasty roadrash on both forearms and both knees. And a GPz has enough plastic that there was plenty to smash. One of the other riders went home for a trailer. I'm allergic to hay so I was in bad shape standing around with the group waiting for the trailer. After an hour or so I told Phil I simply had to go on. He talked to the others and it was agreed that they would catch up to us at Stockport Mill.

There were several spots on 669 where there was water over the road, deep enough to make the crossing pretty dicey. Just before the first water crossing a guy in a jeep stopped to let us know that we were looking at the deepest water crossing between there and town. We made it across just fine, it was only about a foot deep, and indeed the other two weren't as bad. I always fear that my bike will stall in one of those spots, though.

At the Stockport Mill, we saw a lot of stuff go over the dam. Huge quantities of tree branches, of course. And trash. But the oddest thing we saw go over the dam, was an entire wheel, rim and tire and all. I wouldn't think a wheel like that would float.

After lunch, all but one of the other riders went home. Tris, the guy with the FZ-1 who had been the first to crash, rode on with us. We found some more water crossings, and after crossing one of them, we decided agaisnt crossing the second. We couldn't see all the way across it because the water continued past where the road went around a curve. And it looked pretty deep. So we turned back. The next ten miles of our planned route would probably have had a lot more water crossings since that road runs through a series of ravines. We took a different route and never did get over to WV.

Today Phil and I went to Ray and Sherry's, and Phil offered to stay with their kids while Ray and Sherry and I went out riding and had lunch in a nice restaurant. It's good to give Sherry a break now and then; she gets "Mom! Mom! Mommed" to death.

Parted ways with Phil in Marion. For the first 50 or 60 miles of my trip home alone in the dark, I could see lots of lightning to the northwest. I finally reached the front just a little south of Bowling Green. I took shelter behind the truck weight station and watched the front roll through. I don't mind rain but I am careful of lightning and high winds.

Comments

[pi3832.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you did the right thing in not playing too close to these guys.

Do they regularly ride together? I find that groups that haven't ridden together before tend to be the most chaotic. Once people have ridden together some they tend to have less to prove, and know who to trust and who to laugh at.

This could be yet another reason SabMag stays together despite the ever-shrinking number of actual Sabres and Magnas ridden by the group.