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That would be the Murphy that wrote "Murphys Law" that is.
It had started out to be four riders going on a small local sort of poker run but that Murphy feller invited himself along.
First of all we were informed pretty much at the last minute that two of the bikes would not be attending. One of them (Zook) had become immobile due to the lack of a drive chain (I had forgotten what those were but apparently Zooks need them work properly) and the other (Harley) had come down with the swine flue or some other type of indigestion and would not run.
This left myself on the Fire Dragon and Poppa Smurf on his Royal Star Venture. Not ones to forgo a trip just because of a lack of people to share the misery with, we (accomanied with the Murphy guy) set out to do the poker run.
Problems surfaced almost immediatly. First, the area we live in has a fairly large population of Mennonites. If you are not familiar with them, they are a religious/farming sect that has as their main form of transportation, horse drawn buggies. This type of transportation has a couple of drawbacks, at least to those of us who do not use them. One-no matter where you put a horse drawn buggy, it is in the way. They apparently do not drive them anywhere except in a no passing zone, at least I do not think that I have seen them anywhere else, They for the most part seem to be unwilling to even try to pull over a little to let you pass either. Two-after a short while the road becomes covered to a degree with "residue of horse"!
Here is a picture of horse residue for those of you that are still trying to figure the term out:
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Horse residue has the irritating habit of sticking to your front tire just long enough to make about one half of a revolution, from there it gets flung forward and upward. At this point it developes the capability of foating in the air until it is removed, usually by either your face or your windshield. Somewhere in all of the dodging of buggies and residue, I picked up a small piece of metal in my rear tire and it started to go flat. We pulled over to repair the tire and found it covered with-----you guessed it--------residue of horse. I once brought it up to one of my Mennonite neighbors that perhaps if he did not feed his horse as much as he does he might get better mileage and less pollution out of it. He said that it had been discussed before but running a horse in the "lean" format causes them to foul their plugs and develop other problems. I was going to help him on the program but as I don't even know where the carburator is on a horse I was not of much assistance.
The next event involved a demented red squirrel that could not make up its mind which side of the road it wanted to be on. After a very near miss from the Fire Dragon it got itself wound up in the rear wheel of the Venture. It did not stay there more than a revolution or two before the Venture spit it out, but as Poppa Smurf said later, it is the sort of thing that REALLY catchs your attention.
By this time we had covered all of ten or twelve miles and it was beginning to feel as though we were not going to have enough day to do what we wanted. We were also noticing that not only were there a lot of the Mennonites on the road, there were an inordinate amount of deer and turkey on the road also. At times we could see as many as four of five deer at once as far as we could see down the road. This has a tendency to slow you down some but we at last made it to our first card stop.
From there things smoothed out quite a bit until we were about half way done with the run. While inquiring about the location of one of the next stops we were given directions to a "short cut". This worked out about as well as most of these things do. Here is a picture taken from the road we should have taken looking toward the road we took (or maybe it was the other way around, but the fact that we got on the wrong road was a fact):
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Like I said I was standing on one of the roads and you can see the other just to the right of the house in the background. It should be illegal to put two roads that close to each other. Actually, at this point I had checked the Google map application on my PPC and it showed both roads starting at the same point so we made the innacurate assumption that we were on the right path. WRONG!!!!
It turned out to be a right nice road at first, fairly smooth surface and a lot of fun little turns and sweeps. Then right in the middle of one of those turns the blacktop ended,-------------- ABRUPTLY.
Here you can see the road leading into the turn:
[IMG]
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And here is the same turn with the picture taken about 50yds further down the road:
[IMG]
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In the second picture you can just make out that the blacktop has turned into what is loosely termed "gravel", the problem is that normally gravel is made up of small rocks and some sand and other material. Obviously the road crews were not able to get some of that stuff and instead had constructed a road out of small boulders. The smallest of these were about the size of softballs. The other problems that were occupying my mind at the second were, one-I was going way too fast for the current situation, two-Poppa Smurf was bearing down on my tail light with that huge Venture, three-there was only one sort of rut or something that looked as though it would offer enough traction and stability to get me stopped without dropping the Dragon, four-that part of the road was at the time occupied by a deer. One that showed no particular interest in getting out of my way, either that or it had traction problems of its own. Well, we did get the whole disaster train stopped without damage to anything except our underwear and our adrenalin overload valves.
After a short break to allow the overload of adrenalin to attain normal levels and snap a couple of pictures we returned to the intersection and took the proper road.
Things went a lot smoother for a couple of more stops until we only had two left. Thinking that Murphy had maybe been in the restroom when we left one of the stops and had gotten left behind we had assumed normal operating speeds when I was attacked by either a LARGE insect or a medium bird, I have calculated that it weighed around seventeen pounds given the amount of impact that I received on my left shin. Said impact can only be described as "interesting" for lack of better words. Actually there are many better words to describe it but they are all of the shorter type and the moderators most likely don't want me using them here.
I escaped with only a colorfull bruise and a lack of more words to use. That is because having run out of all the words I knew and having to make some up on the spur of the moment had depleted my supply of profanities. That cut my vocabulary by about 60% and I had to wait for it to recover.
The remainder of the trip was without incident and we made it back home where I attacked the beer supply with intent and malice afforthought(or one of those legal terms).
Still, in all it was a succsesfull run, the poker hands turned out to be lousy but we did not do it with an eye to make a lot of money, just an excuse (like I need one) to go for a ride.
We would do it again on a seconds notice!
It had started out to be four riders going on a small local sort of poker run but that Murphy feller invited himself along.
First of all we were informed pretty much at the last minute that two of the bikes would not be attending. One of them (Zook) had become immobile due to the lack of a drive chain (I had forgotten what those were but apparently Zooks need them work properly) and the other (Harley) had come down with the swine flue or some other type of indigestion and would not run.
This left myself on the Fire Dragon and Poppa Smurf on his Royal Star Venture. Not ones to forgo a trip just because of a lack of people to share the misery with, we (accomanied with the Murphy guy) set out to do the poker run.
Problems surfaced almost immediatly. First, the area we live in has a fairly large population of Mennonites. If you are not familiar with them, they are a religious/farming sect that has as their main form of transportation, horse drawn buggies. This type of transportation has a couple of drawbacks, at least to those of us who do not use them. One-no matter where you put a horse drawn buggy, it is in the way. They apparently do not drive them anywhere except in a no passing zone, at least I do not think that I have seen them anywhere else, They for the most part seem to be unwilling to even try to pull over a little to let you pass either. Two-after a short while the road becomes covered to a degree with "residue of horse"!
Here is a picture of horse residue for those of you that are still trying to figure the term out:
[IMG]
[/IMG]Horse residue has the irritating habit of sticking to your front tire just long enough to make about one half of a revolution, from there it gets flung forward and upward. At this point it developes the capability of foating in the air until it is removed, usually by either your face or your windshield. Somewhere in all of the dodging of buggies and residue, I picked up a small piece of metal in my rear tire and it started to go flat. We pulled over to repair the tire and found it covered with-----you guessed it--------residue of horse. I once brought it up to one of my Mennonite neighbors that perhaps if he did not feed his horse as much as he does he might get better mileage and less pollution out of it. He said that it had been discussed before but running a horse in the "lean" format causes them to foul their plugs and develop other problems. I was going to help him on the program but as I don't even know where the carburator is on a horse I was not of much assistance.
The next event involved a demented red squirrel that could not make up its mind which side of the road it wanted to be on. After a very near miss from the Fire Dragon it got itself wound up in the rear wheel of the Venture. It did not stay there more than a revolution or two before the Venture spit it out, but as Poppa Smurf said later, it is the sort of thing that REALLY catchs your attention.
By this time we had covered all of ten or twelve miles and it was beginning to feel as though we were not going to have enough day to do what we wanted. We were also noticing that not only were there a lot of the Mennonites on the road, there were an inordinate amount of deer and turkey on the road also. At times we could see as many as four of five deer at once as far as we could see down the road. This has a tendency to slow you down some but we at last made it to our first card stop.
From there things smoothed out quite a bit until we were about half way done with the run. While inquiring about the location of one of the next stops we were given directions to a "short cut". This worked out about as well as most of these things do. Here is a picture taken from the road we should have taken looking toward the road we took (or maybe it was the other way around, but the fact that we got on the wrong road was a fact):
[IMG]
[/IMG]Like I said I was standing on one of the roads and you can see the other just to the right of the house in the background. It should be illegal to put two roads that close to each other. Actually, at this point I had checked the Google map application on my PPC and it showed both roads starting at the same point so we made the innacurate assumption that we were on the right path. WRONG!!!!
It turned out to be a right nice road at first, fairly smooth surface and a lot of fun little turns and sweeps. Then right in the middle of one of those turns the blacktop ended,-------------- ABRUPTLY.
Here you can see the road leading into the turn:
[IMG]
[/IMG]And here is the same turn with the picture taken about 50yds further down the road:
[IMG]
[/IMG]In the second picture you can just make out that the blacktop has turned into what is loosely termed "gravel", the problem is that normally gravel is made up of small rocks and some sand and other material. Obviously the road crews were not able to get some of that stuff and instead had constructed a road out of small boulders. The smallest of these were about the size of softballs. The other problems that were occupying my mind at the second were, one-I was going way too fast for the current situation, two-Poppa Smurf was bearing down on my tail light with that huge Venture, three-there was only one sort of rut or something that looked as though it would offer enough traction and stability to get me stopped without dropping the Dragon, four-that part of the road was at the time occupied by a deer. One that showed no particular interest in getting out of my way, either that or it had traction problems of its own. Well, we did get the whole disaster train stopped without damage to anything except our underwear and our adrenalin overload valves.
After a short break to allow the overload of adrenalin to attain normal levels and snap a couple of pictures we returned to the intersection and took the proper road.
Things went a lot smoother for a couple of more stops until we only had two left. Thinking that Murphy had maybe been in the restroom when we left one of the stops and had gotten left behind we had assumed normal operating speeds when I was attacked by either a LARGE insect or a medium bird, I have calculated that it weighed around seventeen pounds given the amount of impact that I received on my left shin. Said impact can only be described as "interesting" for lack of better words. Actually there are many better words to describe it but they are all of the shorter type and the moderators most likely don't want me using them here.
I escaped with only a colorfull bruise and a lack of more words to use. That is because having run out of all the words I knew and having to make some up on the spur of the moment had depleted my supply of profanities. That cut my vocabulary by about 60% and I had to wait for it to recover.
The remainder of the trip was without incident and we made it back home where I attacked the beer supply with intent and malice afforthought(or one of those legal terms).
Still, in all it was a succsesfull run, the poker hands turned out to be lousy but we did not do it with an eye to make a lot of money, just an excuse (like I need one) to go for a ride.
We would do it again on a seconds notice!
Glad no one was hurt (except for the bug/bird bruise), and you both completed your trek. Thanks for sharing that, and great pictures!
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