A beautiful morning and an impending new members ride for the local HOG chapter got me out early to pick up the Road King, fill it with fuel (14.69l @ $20.29) and set my son some homework goals to complete in order for him to join in.
On getting the bike back home I noticed that it's been quite a while since it was washed and it was showing it. I wondered if there was an etiquette among HOG members that bikes should always be clean at the start of a ride. I don't recall noticing anyone's bike being dusty or bug splatted at the meeting places before. A deep question requiring some research I suppose. Anyhow, before I left it got the quick once over sans polish for today.
We turned up at the local dealer to the tail end of the sausage sizzle, ate briefly and chatted to a few familiar faces. The destination was discussed, Caves Beach Hotel, but the route was unknown to the people I spoke with. We left a little late and I took position a little further back in the reasonably large group than I had before. We took a winding, stop start route to the destination, unfortunately the bike two in front of me (that should have been directly in front) seemed to have trouble maintaining a proper distance with the lead group and maintaining a line to the left of the lane, which I found quite frustrating, but not as frustrating as the rider immediately in front of me.
The formation made sense now, with the gap "two in front" cars were able to force their way into the line, breaking the group up, limiting visibility to the front and forcing the rider, and everyone behind him, to brake to create a safe distance between him and the car. At the destination, everyone was too polite to say anything about it, but I'm damn sure that where possible I won't be riding behind that guy again. Note that the order changed so the photos attached to this blog entry do not necessarily co-incide with the order that caused the issues.
Anyhow we arrived at the Caves Beach Hotel, by a round-about route, but probably a little too short for me and had a nice social time until we pulled the pin and left for home by ourselves. All up for the day only 80k's travelled. I'm already thinking I'm going to have to get the bike out again tommorrow.
