Well, yesterday was an absolutely cracking day for a ride. We had organised to meet a a cafe on a local bike road and all I knew was that several guys from my delivery centre were going as were a couple others from a neighbouring d/c. Upon arrival I discovered that we would be riding with a group from northriders so all up there were about 40 bikes!
It had rained the night before so the roads were a little damp first thing but the sun was out an it promised to be a good day weather-wise. We had a little meeting about the ride and various other safety related issues and we were off. I thought with a group this size that the pace would be somewhat sedate but not far into the ride I realised it would be similar to our smaller group rides of five or six that it was flat out.
I was right up the front of the group and my regular riding mates were a little further back. I was hooking along nicely and then things just started to feel wrong. The bike was not holding a line and it started to feel a little heavy around corners. At first I thought it could have been the wet road or a million other little things but as it got progressively worse I decided to pull over and investigate.
Damn.
Air was pouring out of the tyre and I knew my participation in the ride was over. I gave the thumbs down as one of my mates went past and he pulled up to see if he could help. It was a fairly big cut so we knew patching it was not going to help so he went to catch up with the group as I organised a salvage. We have various bike recovery companies and I wanted to find out how much they charged but when he quoted "about $250" I reconsidered my options!
My ever suffering wife was called into action and several hours (and about a million bikes riding past having fun) later she and her father showed up with a bike trailer in tow (total cost $49). Tied the bike down and made the miserable drive home lamenting on what sort of ride I was missing.
A mate rang me later in the evening to make sure things went OK only to tell me about a fairly average ride day. He said that the group was too big and that every stop turned into a major drama. He also said that once he left me to catch the group that about 15 KM's away from me a young fella had thrown his ZZR250 into a guard rail so he stopped to lend assistance there and put the poor kids bike back into a reasonable condition so that he could limp it home as he had only sustained "a bit of a sore knee" but was right to ride.
Later in the ride a bloke that occasionally rides with us went into a corner a little hot and dumped it on the side of the road. He was fine but his GS500 suffered some scratches on engine covers etc. All in all things sounded a little reckless and I am somewhat glad that I missed most of the drama.
I will get a new tyre put on tomorrow that I had thankfully decided to replace this week anyway. It was down past the wear indicators so I saw this ride as a chance to thrash the tyre one last time and then replace it.
Oh well, it could have been worse...
