The Ride Report

The phone rang at 12:15 this afternoon. It was a friend, saying some of the guys were “getting together to go ride motorcycles.” Did I want to come?

At that moment I was busy ripping out the disgusting, wet carpet from our guest bathroom. The toilet in there tends to back up from time to time, and it had backed up on my 11-year old daughter earlier this week. Unfortunately, it backed up while I was gone and my wife was taking a nap. My daughter, the considerate little darling that she is, didn’t want to wake Mom up. Instead, she quickly made up a little sign saying “Out of Order” and taped it on the closed toilet seat, and then left the room. While the overflowing toilet continued to run … and run … and run for god knows how long before my wife finally woke up and turned the water off. Let me tell you, that sodden, drippy, yellow-brown, squishy, piss and shit-stained carpet was disgusting. And there I was, pulling it out by hand. Blech.

So that voice on the phone was that of an angel and I didn’t hesitate a moment before saying “Hell yes!” I was out the door before the cholera bacterium in the carpet knew what hit them.

I hooked up with one of the guys on the way up to our meeting point. He caught up to me on the freeway on the way up and we rode in together. I thought it was pretty cool that we had happened to meet up on the road like that, but he told me later that he’d been waiting for me at the freeway on-ramp and I had blown right past him. I never even saw him there. He said he had to ride like a bat out of hell to catch me. Oops.

Once we got up to Canyon Country where we were meeting the other guys it turned out that we were smack in the middle of a high wind advisory. It was blowing like crazy and gusting up to 50 mph. It was blowing so hard that it was hard to stand still without getting blown around. Wind like that made riding the canyons questionable.

But we’re rough, tough bikers and it takes more than a little wind to keep us off the road. So we all talked about it and discovered that one guy needed to get home to watch the USC game, another wanted to get home to spend time with his wife, the third guy wanted to drink beers at the first guy’s house, and me and everyone else wanted to go eat tacos at a little Mexican mercado just up the road. So while we really wanted to go riding and the wind was only going to make it more fun, unfortunately we all had other things that needed doing instead and we’d have to do the riding part another day.

So we scattered to (with) the wind and went our separate ways. And I used my new heated vest on my way home and it was great.

And thus began a new year of riding for me — 50 miles round trip to get to a ride that never happened. At least I was warm…