The official Thursday night ride was cancelled...

due to the weather forecast. The weathermen all got together and predicted showers, sometimes heavy rain, and thunderstorms for the afternoon and early evening, and for once...they were right. With this in mind the Road Captain called off the ride. I woke up in the morning, pulled the bike out and headed to work, the rain was light. Around noon a thunderstorm rolled through, then the day went back to being..foggy with showers, at about 4pm another thunderstorm rolled through..then fog and occasional drizzle.

When 5pm rolled around I locked up the shop and hit the road, after a short ride I arrived at David's Place , with the fog settling in around the restaurant I went inside for supper. The weather was keeping everyone away, bikers and cagers, Socrates wasn't making a killing today...

After eating (around 6pm) I went outside , sat on a bench and waited to see if any one else would come by. After a while the parking lot began to fill with Club members..

We held the riders meeting about 6:20pm, went over the hand signals, picked out the Road Guards and set a sweeper, and decided to pull out bar to bar.

Road Guard #1

Road Guard #2

(Sweeper)

I have to say, out of all the times we have pulled out of anywhere, this had to be the smoothest bar to bar departure I have ever seen, no one, absolutely no one went to the wrong line, and there was no jostling of positions.

The rain held off for the entire ride, although there were times the fog made seeing the road ahead difficult, and I had to occasionally wipe the moisture off the windshield.

We headed up route 85 to Salem Four Corners then picked up route 82 and stayed on that to Moodus where we picked up route 151. My bike was acting up, I was receiving a banging feeling through my left footplate but couldn't see anything, and the bike was refusing to up-shift, taking two or sometimes three attempts before it would choose a higher gear. Cruising along looking down I could see nothing wrong and neither Road Guard could see anything hanging or loose.

In Moodus proper we picked up route 149 and took that to route 16 in Westchester. We proceeded west on 16 to the Salmon River crossing then turned onto Comstock Bridge road. For those of you who are unaware of this, there is no Comstock bridge at Comstock Bridge road, the covered bridge has been taken down. Turning onto the road I called for a stop and we pulled over to see if anything wrong could be seen with the bike. What I found was the heal shifter had loosed up and was half off the shaft and flopping around.  I grabbed an Allen socket to loosen the bolt, reposition the shifter and re-tighten it only to find that I had no ratchet to work the socket. A little more digging in the saddle bag found a standard Allen wrench and the repair was made. From then on the bike was fine. We got back under way, and followed Comstock Bridge road to Bull Hill road, ran up through the switchback then up through the sweeper and over the hill. At the stop sign we took S. rd down to river road and followed that back to route 149.
   We turned left onto 149 then right onto Old Hartford road which we took to Broadway then Main street and South Main street through downtown Colchester to route 354. Picking up 354 we continued through some really heavy fog down to it's end at route 82. From there we crossed onto Old Colchester road and took that to Moxley and the Clubhouse arriving in time for the meeting and some light sprinkles.

I can't say the ride was longer than the meeting but it was better.

klay


I have to say the only thing that went wrong with the ride is when we arrived at route 82 from route 354, I indicated I wanted one Road Guard to go right and one to go left to hold traffic while we crossed 82, but neither deployed, instead the sweeper pulled up alongside of me and gave me an incredulous look.  I guess the guards do need more training.