Yesterday (Sat May 6th) was a poker run setup by Leather Boutique to help a local childrens charity. My friends Johnny and Gord had heard about it from somewhere (beats me where) and invited me along.
Gord's on the left, Johnny's on the right
So for the past week e-mails have been flying past and forth.
Where is it?
Leather Boutique?
Okay, where do you want to meet?
Behind Gord's house.
What time?
9:00
No.. wait, 10:00
Yeah 10:00
Where are we meeting again?
10:00
At what time?
Behind Gord's house
ad inifinitum.
Eventually the big day rolled around with forcasts of cold weather and a 60% chance of rain. We made contingency plans the night before to meet for a coffee at the very least if it was going to rain (some of us melt when we get wet...
:roll:).
So, up at 7:00 AM like I always am, I'm sitting in my room waiting, I mess about on the computer, read a book, check my gear, watch tv, check my gear, pick up some stuff, check my gear.
Finally 9:30 rolls around and I get myself together, heavy socks, my riding jeans, long sleeved t-shirt, polar fleece sweater, my Joe Rocket Alter Ego jacket, HJC-CL14, and my First Gear gloves. Lookin' good.
A quick stop on the bank throws a little cash in my wallet, then I bounce off to Gord's house where I get to pull up to see a big black bike waiting around back for me. That can't be Gord's... can it? It looks bigger for some reason. I don't know why, but it was the same old bike, weird. Maybe I should be drinking less or something.
I make it to Gord's about 5 minutes early and meet him in the backyard where he's reading
Riding with Rilke. We wait for a while and he shows me some of the movies he's been making. About 10 after 10 Johnny calls, he lost his glasses and hasn't left yet, but he'll be ready soon. His place is pretty much on the way so Gord and I decide that we'll just stop off at his place on the way to Leather Boutique and pick him up, rather then having him ride out to us then ride all the way back.
So we clip through town down to the Whitemud, which involves spending more then a little time on a rangeroad. Along the way I find a couple drops of water appearing on my face shield. Eh, I'm a big boy, I can take it. Gord however decides to ride right over a napkin laying in the road. His back tire flips it up into the air.... where it whips past my head, close enough that I could read the DQ label. I didn't flinch, but I was bringing my left hand up to drag it off my visor if it got stuck there.
He waved in apology, but I could see him fighting to keep a grin off his face in his mirror for the rest of the ride. "O Ring", I hope you catch a bug in those teeth.
So a quick right onto the Whitemud and we're headed into the city without further incident. Safely to Johnny's where he's... a little hungover, but ready to go. When he gets outside he demonstrates that he has managed to fix his license plate, though it slides left to right on the mounting bracket...
We're going back in time here. In my last post I said that we met up with Johnny at Tim's (coffee shop) on Whyte to go for a ride. On that ride Johnny had managed to lose a license plate bolt, so his plate sent the whole ride hanging by a single bolt. I can remember thinking how handy it would have been to have a couple of zip ties if that had happened so I threw a handful under my seat <Ominous Sound>
Like I said, Johnny had bought some new skulls and fixed his license plate. We fired up and took off. Johnny led the way through the residential area and out onto Gateway Blvd. We're flying down what is essentially a highway, doing an easy 100 Johnny, Gord, Jeff. I like riding drag.
Then disaster strikes, I see something small and black going flying off the back of Johnny's bike, I slow down a little and start honking, the license plate swings to one side, and then P-TANG the other side lets go, Gord starts honking, I'm honking and this piece of sharpened metal is now flying through the air at over 100kmh. It does a quick flip up towards Gord's head, pulls a loop and spins back towards me. Metallic death flipping through the air... then CLANG onto the ground, and I do a quick swirve around it.
Gord pulls over, I pull over and Johnny pulls over. Eeeeek, we're both pretty hyped up, I'm laughing my "O Ring" off, Gord's walking back to pick up a license plate and I'm explaining to Johnny what happened.
Gord shows up with a bent license plate and a short story about how he stood on the side of the highway with his hand out so that oncoming cars would know he was planning on walking out into traffic. He watches car after car drive past without touching it. Then the last car comes by and drives clean over the plate. Couple of nice little bends in it
. The skulls bolts are still attached. So is the plastic washer, this is what REALLY cracked me up:
The imagine this, plastic washer, metal mount plate.
-------- ---------
mount washer
-------- ______
The washer was just BARELY bigger then the hole, so one good bounce and it slipped through the hole. Kerpow!
Remember how I said that I threw some zipties under the seat? I ziptied that mother back in place, Gord pulled out his swiss army knife and cut them short. Johnny watched for cars and asked, "is there anything that we aren't prepared for?" It's good to go now, it'll stay in place don't worry.
We walk back to our bikes and wait for the traffic to clear up. Onwards down the highway to Leather Boutique where we sign in to start the game. Pick a card, and follow the route through the rest of the game. We take a quick tour through the store and Gord makes note of some boots he might want to buy.
Back to the bikes we get our gear back on and head out to the next stop. Along the way we realise that we're being tailed. Some big cruiser has been following us since we left Leather Boutique. We're all pretty amped up, yelling back and forth at stop lights while we're waiting. We wave him up and yell introductions back and forth. His name is Rick, and he's got a Harley, once again I'm the oddman out. In fact, I only saw one sportbike in the whole place besides mine... apprently Poker Runs are a cruiser thing. Whatever, I'm having fun.
So we make it to Scona Cycle (the next stop on our run), and it turns out that Rick is visiting from Fort Macmurray, he just got this bike (he has a shadow at home) and is currently breaking it in, only 700km on the clock. We offer him a map to help him get to where he's supposed to go next, or the chance to tag along we us. He figues he'd rather ride with us, hehe, I felt a little sorry for him.
We popped inside while he talked with some of the organisers and got a couple sets of bolts so that we could bolt Johnny's plate back in place, but decide to just leave it with the zipties they held up to here and seem secure. I spent a little while looking at the supersports parked there, and recieved some razing about when I was going to buy a real bike.
"I'll show you a real bike... or at least the back end of one."
We pull out onto Whyte Ave and follow it to where it's Sherwood Park Freeway. When the light turns red, Gord takes off, and then I goose it and dump the clutch, I'm bye him at 100kmh in first. Rev up from there and down into Sherwood Park we go. Next stop, Ft Saskatchewan. Along the highway we're getting beaten up by a heavy heavy wind coming in from the North, gusts that were trying to blow our bikes out from underneath us.
Worse is worse, we gotta head out into the wind to get to Ft Sask... North on highway 21 with wind doing an easy 40-50kmh towards us, and us doing 100kmh at it. Feels like we're doing 200kmh, and it's painful, I wish I had a windscreen. Rick had a windshield to hide behind, but was playing it careful because he was still breaking in his engine.
After what feels like hours of labouring against the wind we arrive in Ft Sask, and start yelling back and forth about how awful that part of the ride was.
"What?"
"WHAT?"
"THAT SUCKED!"
"WHAT"
"IT'S WINDY!"
"BET WE CAN MAKE IT HOME IN FIRST GEAR!"
"WE PROBABLY CAN!"
"FIRST GEAR ALL THE WAY HOME!"
"WOOOOOOHOOOOOO!"
Into Lammle's Western Wear for our next card, and then back onto the highway. There's something weird about riding with the wind behind you like that, you're doing 100, but it feels like you aren't moving at all, it's eerily quiet, like there's nothing all around. But you can still see the highway flipping past.
We mange to outpace Rick along the way (he's still gentling his engine) and get back to Wye Road which leads into the Sherwood Park Freeway. It rains a little, apparently it feels, "like someone is throwing a fistfull of frozen corn at your face." OR, "you get hit by little ones, over and over and they hurt, and then all of a sudden you get a BIG one, and it REALLY hurts." I can't say I noticed though, I love my fullface.
We stop off at Cycle Works (Rick is still with us) and get our fourth card, then quickly blast back to Leather Boutique to get our last card and turn in our hands.
We stop off for a free cup of warm up coffee and get our last card. I got a pair of kings with a 10 high, and Gord got a pair of kings with an Ace high. bastrd. We don't know who won yet, we just dropped off our hands and need to wait for a phone call. The winner gets a free leather jacket.
At this point Johnny had to head in to work, Gord and I, being hungry decided to head tooooooo.... The Garage, you can't not go there when you're on a bike and hungry.
It's looking pretty grim by the time we get there, but the wind is dieing down. We have a good meal, and Jim comes out to talk with us, we also got to meet his grand nephew who... liked my bike better! Of course with a bunch of big new people crowded around he got a little scared, but he had good taste.
While we're eating it starts to rain... and rain and rain and rain. It's POURING. So we have an extra cup of coffee wait 3 minutes, throw on our gear and head out. I love this jacket, it kept me nice and dry from neck to waste, and on a 30 minute ride home I didn't even notice I was getting wet until my pants were soaked through, I'm very happy with my gear.
I hear a lot about people who don't like to ride in the rain. Personally I kind of enjoy it. It's peaceful for some reason, the water pitterpattering against your helmet, the muted colors and the dulled sound of the engines. Everything smells cleaner, and over all it's actually pretty fun. Sure you need to go a little slower, and brake a little sooner, but it's relaxing in some odd way.
Today, I washed my bike, I figured with the pouring rain it'd be clean, but apparently all it did was leave dirty water marks on anything. We should really have people cleaning these roads more often.