Monday, February 22, 2010

Riding Motorcycles in Tampa - Part 3

I have a couple of ride stories and an answer to a question as I finish up this trilogy of posts on the Tampa adventures.

Smooth as butter

First, we had a second ride over in San Antonio, FL, but this was preceded by a great breakfast in Zephyrhills. As a side note, Z-Hills is a place near and dear to my heart since I spent several years traveling to the town and jumping out of aircraft while I was in college.

Now there is a cap and gown put to good use. Good times...good times...

Now I was back on an adventure that I would deem probably more likely to result in injury. Riding a motorbike. Yes, I believe with all my heart that riding that bike, while safe, is still more dangerous than jumping from planes with small tablecloth sized sport parachutes. When riding the motorbike around, there are just too many other idiots to pull out in front of you and too many animals to run out into the road. In my years of jumping, I was never worried about having a run in with a dog or armadillo...heh heh...Now a fuel truck on the other hand? That's a different story, but I won't blame skydiving for that little incident.



We met up with another rider that had an absolutely beautiful BMW 1200 R and drove over to BJ's Country Kitchen. In all my lost weekends in Z-hills, I never new this place existed. We ordered up a ton of eggs, coffee, and hot sauce. The Western Omelet had an interesting mix of eggs and cheese, but the cheese was the white "liqui-cheese" type product. I could have done without it, but it certainly didn't stop me from scarfing it down. The funny thing, and the only reason I mention this stop, was that when Rick's food came out, he picked up his English muffin, said something like, "check this out", and turned the muffin sideways. The amount of butter on this thing didn't make it slightly damp, or drip a couple of times, it poured off in a stream. It was like someone had dipped the thing in a warm vat of Crisco. AWESOME! There's a coronary bypass in the making. I'm totally going back there the next time I'm in town...honestly...

BMW doesn't make good tire plug kits -- all that for $40 bucks of course.

The wind was absolutely howling as we rode the loops around San Antonio again. You could see the wind whipping the sand across the road, and in open areas, bracing in anticipation of the gusts was required. It was still fun, but my tall Dual Sport bike really seemed like a sail in cross winds. The other guys, with their more sporty setups, were by far better off with their low profiles. I was blown all over the place, and it made for some really interesting riding when coming through a turn and then getting blown off line by a foot or so.

We rode around for an hour and ended up at the same gas station where Nathan had his epic battle, and tragically, was defeated by the Applebees Ruben from Hell a couple of days before. I'm sure he was just elated to see the place again. We pulled in line with quite a few other motorcyclists and parked. That's when Nathan mentioned that Rick's rear tire looked a little soft. We all looked a little closer and realized that Nathan, with better eyes than ours, had spotted the head of a screw sticking out of Ricks nearly new rear tire. Ugh... That screw had to be 3 inches long, and as soon as it was extracted, the tire hissed flat leaving us wondering how best to fix it. Tom (aka Total Tom), the better prepared BMW driver, kindly offered up his fix-a-flat patch kit, and we thought all was well. On the first try, the tire plug looked like it was going to work and then it somehow disappeared into the tire. The second attempt tore the plug. The third and final try produced a glump of rubber cement big enough to have been molded into a new tire on its own, another mangled plug, a tire that still wouldn't hold air, and a string of foul language that was really quite impressive. @!#@$^&%$%^...$%#@!@@$%...deep breath... &*%^$#$%%#!!!! I was a good thing there were Harleys around, with their owners giving themselves carpal tunnel syndrome by constantly reving their engines for no reason. That noise was enough to drown out the string of curses from the ears of any little kids. Heck, that noise could have drowned out a jet landing or the detonation of a small thermonuclear device had there been one nearby.

The next thing to do was to go and get a real tire repair kit (or 4) from the station instead of relying on some obviously shaky and overpriced German engineered tire plugs. Perhaps we would have had more success if we had read the German side of the instructions?


We bought out the entire inventory of the gas station's tire plug kits, and I kept one for my bike. I didn't want to deal with a problem like that when I was riding home for several hours the next day. The cheap kit worked like a charm, and we headed back to the house. Rick was out $200 bucks to replace a tire that had tons of life left in it. Bummer...

Now, the answer to possibly one of the least asked questions.

What do you do when you have a couple of hours and an empty parking lot?

No, He is not stopped and trying to prop the bike up with his knee.

The last day of the trip was cool and gray, but we wanted to make the most of it. Everyone wanted to get some action shots, and I had sadly neglected my duties of taking pictures of the events as I normally do, so here was a time for some fun with two hobbies at once. Motorcycles and photography. I bummed Nathan's Cannon SLR and off we went on a search for an open parking lot on a Sunday morning. All the local schools had chained up their driver education lots, which, upon reflection, was a good thing for the most part, even if it wasn't convenient for our purposes. Why would that be a good thing, you ask? Because I remember what I used to do in High School with my car's tires smoking and leaving black curly marks all over the school lot, and I doubt that kids have changed any at all since then. Well, they haven't changed much, except for the fact that they all seem to have more expensive and powerful cars than I ever saw in school. I figure that if they hadn't chained up these nice open lots, every other week the school maintenance person would be untangling some BMW or Audi from the chain link fencing due to the offending High Schooler trying to write his name using burned off tire rubber on the pavement.

We eventually happened upon an empty lot near a half vacant strip mall. It was a bit sandy but perfect for getting some fun pictures of slow speed turns from up close. I think some of the shots came out very well! Nathan is amazing, and we even had another sighting of the Ghost Rider to top it all off. It's odd that he seems to show up when we are all riding together. Strange...


Unfortunately, all good weekends must end, and the siren call of work could be heard. (I guess that's marginally better than the siren call of the local police, eh?) Nathan and I packed up after the parking lot adventures and headed north again. In Tifton I parted ways with Nathan, donned my snowman riding suit to fight against the winter that we had returned to, and drove the bike the last 5 hours to the house. It got cold. Seriously cold, and I was seriously missing my old house in FL. That would have been a much more convenient a trip to make. Of course, with the large family that I have now, the FL house would be bulging and it's occupants and furniture would have been spilling onto the lawn. Now that I think of it, had I still been living in the Florida house, my guess is that I may have avoided going home so quickly...

Thanks to Nathan, Rick, and especially Jodi for putting up with us, even though I know we bring only the highest quality wit and commentary during our visits together. I couldn't imagine how she could possibly tire of us.

I would also be remiss to leave out the Modern Warfare battle that we were introduced to by Gavin one evening. That is one of the coolest games I have ever seen from a graphics and intensity standpoint. I'm sure Rick is playing it even now...

I'll bet Jodi is thrilled by that too...heh heh...

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