Bezabor: Motorcycle breakfast, Mother’s Day (posted from home)

Sunday, 14 May-
This morning I read the freebie motorcycle mags and surfed the web. I was interested by an ad for a motorcycle touring book, “Great Roads, Great Rides” and spent some time on their web site. I’ve got to get that one to help in planning some regional rides.
Later in the morning we left for a Mother’s Day celebration at my brother’s home. My other brother and his wife drove down for the occasion. We had a picnic in the back yard and a wonderful time talking. My brothers and I spent a good two hours playing with my two penny stoves in the garage. We were perplexed to see that the stoves don’t ‘bloom’ consistently and were trying to figure out why and how to fix it. In the end, we still don’t really know why yet but have some possibilities to check out. I guess I’ll have to go buy another six-pack of Heineken’s for scientific purposes.
We spent the day and evening talking and laughing and just having a fine time and got home late.

Saturday, 13 May-
I wanted a bit of a ride and a bit of a jog today. I took the Concours to Don’s Kawasaki in Hallam, then rode some really nice back roads in Lancaster County to Trans-Am Cycles in Lititz. I was looking around to see what’s new and didn’t really find anything at Don’s but Trans-Am had some freebie motorcycling magazines of interest and some interesting bikes. They had a brand-new Concours in the showroom and those always interest me. This one was dark blue in color. The Concours has been around since 1986 and has changed little but color in all that time. It still is carbureted while the modern bikes have fuel injection, for instance. But it’s also less than half the price of the fancy bikes yet is still an excellent sports-touring bike and it’s a great year-round bike.
The shop also had a brand-new BMW F650-GS adventure bike which looks pretty good but the specs show it’s pretty heavy for any off-road riding. But I’ll have to look into that one some more.
I did my jogging at Rocky Ridge Park. Today was an airy day so that helped me extend my distance a bit. I had recently done a double-loop of the west-end trails there. There’s a central trail on the ridge which bisects a larger circle trail. The central trail ends in a tee where you can turn either way to loop back to the start. A double loop means taking the ridge trail and turning left at the tee to the start, then jogging the central trail again and this time taking the right-hand turn at the tee to loop back to the beginning.
Today I did the double loop and then an outer loop, i.e., after finishing the double loop I jogged the outer loop. And that was PLENTY for the day.
That evening we watched the documentary “Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room”. It’s amazing to see how easy it was for Enron to pull off their fraud and how some of the nation’s largest financial institutions and accounting firms were played for fools.

Friday, 12 May-
Today I attended a motorcycle breakfast event at the Country Cupboard inn north of Lewisburg, PA. I don’t know if the event has a name and don’t know how it started. I heard about it from a former co-worker. He had mentioned it in passing last year while I was still working and then sent me an email several weeks ago inviting me to meet him and his wife there. That turned out to be a great idea.
The event is very simple. Riders simply show up at the Country Cupboard on the second Friday of the month (in season) for breakfast and then go do whatever they want to do afterwards. That sounded good to me.
All week long the weather man had been calling for rain showers for that morning. I thought I’d take a look at the regional radar that morning and so long as the showers were light and fairly-well dispersed, I’d go anyway, even though the rain would hold down attendance and there might not be many bikes to see. But early that morning the weather channel map for the day showed rain all over the east coast except for this nice, big hole in central Pennsylvania. Whoever organizes that event must have an ‘in’ with the weather man!
I left the home at 0700 that morning, anticipating a traffic backup on I-83 as it approaches Harrisburg. But that turned out to be very minor and within the half-hour I was well north of the city and enjoying wonderful morning light on the shining Susquehanna. I had my electric jacket-liner plugged in but turned down low, making it a very comfortable, yet fresh and airy ride.
My leisurely pace took me to the inn by 0830, which gave me a half-hour to look at bikes before my friends were due. My arrival put me near the end of the second line of bikes across a very large parking area. I’d guess that each line held at least 100 bikes (next time I’ll count!) so there were already 200 bikes there by 0830. The bikes were comprised of many varieties but I was surprised to see that there were more Gold Wings than anything else, followed by Harley touring bikes. Thankfully (after my recent black-leather-and-loud-pipes overload at Daytona), I saw only one chopper. There were three Concours in addition to mine and they too were understated in their farkle-ization. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorcycle_farkle).
I was quite interested in the various touring beemers (see http://www.bmwccbc.org/misc/tech-and-trivia/bimmer.html) but there’s something that isn’t quite right about the newer models.
My friends arrived shortly after 0900, by which time there were another three rows of bikes in the parking lot and we went in to breakfast. The restaurant was set up perfectly for this. All we had to do was walk in and pick out a table, then head for the buffet. After we were seated, a waitress came around for drink orders. The buffet was very well done and despite the large number of people, there was plenty of room and no rush. We spent more than an hour and a half at our breakfast table, catching up on the news.
After our breakfast, the front portion of the parking lot was starting to thin out but bikes were still rolling in at the back. I’d guess there was something on the order of 700 bikes there, pretty impressive for a regular Friday morning in rural PA.
I was also very struck by the riders. Many of them were older than me. I didn’t see more than a two dozen or so twenty-somethings and only a small number of crotch-rocket bikes.
After the meal, we took a look at the latest set of incoming bikes and then prepared to go home. I said goodbye to my friends who were heading home and took off, not knowing exactly what I wanted to do. As I got to Lewisburg, I found myself behind a very large oversize-load truck pulling half of a modular home and taking up both lanes of traffic. I turned off at Route 45, thinking I’d take a look around there and then probably go into Lewisburg proper to look around. But the open road pulled me on and before long I was out among the strikingly-clean farms of Buffalo Valley, heading toward State College. I came upon an espresso shop built into a home-decorating business and stopped for a café-mocha and to figure out how to get home. While sipping, I plotted out a trip on SR235 through part of the Bald Eagle State Forest and connecting up with SR 322.
That was a terrific route. The roads had no traffic to speak of and wound through very pretty rural scenery. I’ll have to try that route again in the Fall.
Once to 322, I rode only one exit of the superslab before turning off at Millerstown and following the back road to Newport, then took 849 to Duncannon, all nice, twisty and smooth roads perfect for a motorcycle. At Duncannon, I came out in an unexpected place and took a wrong turn. I found myself crossing the Susquehanna so decided I’d go on over to Boyd Big Tree Conservation Area for a little jog before heading home. After taking off my protective gear and changing to my sneakers, I started my slog down the East Loop trail. That trail had me working hard very quickly since it was just one almost-continuous gentle uphill. Actually it was good for me since the trail would be steep enough to get me huffing to the point where I thought I’d have to stop, then would level off enough to let me catch my breath, then another hill. I followed that trail past the powerline and was getting comfortable as it looped back to the powerline. But at an intersection with the pink-blazed trail, my green-blazed East Loop led downhill and I wasn’t yet ready for that. I turned onto the pink-blazed trail heading up the powerline and it wasn’t long till I had to walk. But before long I crossed the powerline and re-entered the woods on a nice, flat slate jeep trail paralleling the ridge. It led me to a short downhill, then another jeep trail running parallel to the ridge and blessedly level. I followed it around to the pond, and then back downhill to the bike for a total jog time of an hour.
At home that evening we watched ‘Good Night and Good Luck’, the outstanding film about Edward R. Murrow’s role in bringing down McCarthy in the Fifties.