It seems I haven't lived up to my ambition of more frequent, shorter updates, so I'll lay another long one on you to try and cover the last month. I've been working along steadily, still from home. That's going okay, but I wonder if I'll be able to maintain it for a long duration; time all kind of blurs together with little distinction between day and night, weekday or weekend.
A few weeks ago Aaron Draplin came to Louisville for a few days on his Spring Chaos Romp Around The Country/Heartland (SCRATCH). "Ryno" Simonson was due to "make the run" down for his spring break week in early April, but we'll get to the details of that in the next update...but for a few days Aaron was around town, stayed here, and we explored the Louisville area, took a bunch of photos, and journeyed south in search of hills, caves, Uno, antiques, and "what nots." I still haven't gotten around to posting the photos from our trip down to the Horse Cave area...
As many of you may know, I'm something of a prolific photo-taker, trying to document every last goddamn interesting, typical, or old-timey building, sign, or landscape that I see. I shot over 2,000 photos in a two-week period from when Draplin arrived, to the Cincinnati rally to the HHH Appalachian Tour.
Anyway, Aaron had to help me carry up the futon I got on Craigslist for the spare bedroom, we like to make our guests "earn their keep". We had a great time together, some good meals, some greasy meals, lots of show-stopping signs, driving hard bargains at the Most Awesome Flea Market in the World, chatting with haggard (pregnant?) strippers in Shively, inspecting antique treasures aplenty, snooping around abandoned gas stations, bearing witness to a tragedy in Uno, and more...I'll try to upload this batch of 200 photos (and link the above to images) as soon as I finish uploading the HHHAT07 photos, thanks for your patience.
After Aaron left I rode up to Cincinnati for the WKRP rally, one of my all-time favorite rallies and the perfect opener for the scooter season. I've met up with a few Louisville scooterists (that site is lame, but it's free, where Meetup.com charges you now) recently and I was glad that a couple of them wanted to venture up for the rally. Kathleen's friend Meredith has a nice white Stella and a young local guy named Graham has a Harry Khurana metallic green VBB with an LML 150 engine. Graham's bike wasn't sounding good at all the week before the rally and I cautioned him to try to get it sorted out if he wanted to make the trip.
The day came and 4 of us met at some giant twin obelisks by the river for a sendoff, (Graham was going to meet us up the road somewhere). Meredith and I took off up River Rd toward Hwy 42, riding in gorgeous weather. We missed wherever we were supposed to meet Graham and pulled off to wait for him among scenic horse farms. He doesn't have a cell phone, so that makes things more interesting. Coincidentally, my odometer turned over its 11,000th mile near here. Graham shows up and we ride for a while with him in the lead since his bike is slowest. We're cruising along a few miles later and suddenly his rear wheel locks up and he's skidding. I slam on my brakes and start skidding too, fortunately neither of us went down or hit each other. Meredith zips alongside and manages to avoid disaster too, whew. We take a look at his bike, do a few things, new cooler plug, fill gearbox oil and proceed with caution. A few miles later he's having real trouble keeping up, we pull off near another horse farm and look at his clutch (very difficult to engage at this point). Take clutch off, find a nut has unscrewed itself from the crank, tighten back down, replace brass bushing, etc. I told Meredith to go on ahead during this, no need to waste her afternoon on that. Graham and I get it buttoned back up and proceed with caution again, a few more miles up the road the engine shits the bed, apparently the crank was all wonky after the earlier problem. We call his dad to come pick him up and then after a while I'm back on my way to meet Meredith. I felt awful for Graham (would've been his first rally ever, and it was Meredith's first), I know the feeling and disappointment (Summit Point 01 I think it was?) of not making it to a rally because of engine disaster...there will be more in the future though.
I rode through some really pretty country (all hills and curves and horse farms and river towns, with some industry thrown in) and met Meredith on the southern suburban fringes of Cinci. We rode into town together in the dark and eventually found the cheap motel we'd booked rooms at. We got settled in and headed over to the rally bar (the Comet) for giant burritos (I hadn't eaten all day) and to meet and greet a bunch of other scooterists from the 300-mile or so area around Cinci. Eventually Patrick made it into town on his GT200 (hellride across Indiana) and we caught up, he shared the motel room with me and some other Chicago-area scooterists were in the same motel too, so it was all in good fun. Also saw Liz and Jon, who I'd missed a lot.
Saturday we went to Metro Scooter for the brunch and Meredith and I went on the normal (long and scenic!) group ride, which took 3-4 hours and covered almost 70 miles of beautiful terrain around the city. That's a great town for riding, it's just confusing as all hell. I have a great map and still get lost constantly there. After the ride there was a BBQ with veggieburgers and good, hot veggie chili with Mountain Holler and Dr. Pop as refreshments. I took my scooter down to the "concourse judging" area for consideration and lined it up with all of the other beauties; didn't win anything but that's okay, I won Best in Show at Deliverance and that's plenty! After more visiting we went back to the motel for much-needed naps, then woke up with plans to get some Indian food from a great place near the motel (Shalimar?). Patrick and I, Meredith, Liz, Jon, Metro Dave and his lady had an awesome late meal at around 10pm, then went to the Comet for more scooter-gawking, band-listening and raffle-avoiding. I didn't win the nice red Allstate, but that's okay. Went over to Bronz with Liz and Jon but saw no repeat of last year's magic dancing, called it a night soon after.
Meredith and I had breakfast in some little diner then went to Metro Dave's house where Liz and Jon were staying to retrieve my atlas, visited with them for a bit on the back porch overlooking a wooded hillside, and we were on our way back toward Louisville by about 1pm. We decided to take an alternate route through southern Ohio and Indiana (mostly along the river), and this was longer by about 40 miles, but even better riding in terms of hills and curves. Stopped at a nice Antiques/junk place and met this gentleman, picked up a few treasures, stopped in historic Madison, IN for some food, and got home in the early evening. A great rally and good times all around, thanks to Meredith for riding with me, all-told I think she had a good first-rally experience.
More updates/photos to come on the Ryno/DDC front, stay tuned...
Posted by pj at April 15, 2007 12:26 PM