Wild Week

Where to start? It’s been a whirlwind week. Let’s talk about the kitchen for a brief moment and then we’ll jump into the motorcycle stuff.

Kitchen: Can you say progress? Yes, we are starting to see the light at the end of the cabinets. Flooring is out, as are the flooring contractors, for now. The cabinet guy has hung all of the cabinets and is making some final tweaks. The counter guys came and measured for the countertops. I never thought I’d see these days and here they are in front of us. I spent the day on Saturday washing dishes and trying to minimize the dust around the house as well as cleaning the dining room. You can only imagine what the amount of dust when 60% of the flooring on your first floor gets ripped out….yuck! Enough of that, let’s talk Bike.

The week didn’t really get started until Thursday night when I went to Quaker Steak and Lube for Bike Night http://www.quakersteak.com/Sheffield_OH/ The night started off at about 6:00 p.m. or so when Jeff and I jumped on the machines and headed towards Sheffield to participate in our first ever Bike Night. I’ve been by places when they had Bike Night, but never actually participated in it. Jeff had also never been to one, so this was going to be a learning experience. We zigzagged our way through the western suburbs and headed north, it was an awesome 80+ degrees, even at 6 p.m. at night. If you’ll remember from one of my prior posts, I said that I didn’t like going north because of the traffic, but this is an exception to the rule. We had a destination. Crossing over the I-90 you can see out onto the parking lot of Quaker Steak & Lube. It was a sea of two wheelers and barely a “cager” to be found. On bike night, bikes rule and the whole parking lot gets blocked off for bikes, and they (correction, we) needed the whole parking lot. At first glance, it was a little overwhelming; I started thinking, “what if I stall while cruising through the parking lot at 2 mph? Where in the hell are we going to park? Man, some of these dudes look rough. Happy to say, I didn’t stall, we found a parking spot and the rough guys are not that rough. So, let me set the scene, 1500 bikers, alcohol flowing, band playing and not one misbehaved person. This is what amazes me about bikers, everyone gives us a hard time and really we’re just law abiding citizens that just happen to ride on two wheels instead of four.

Some random observations on people at bike night:
Non-Harley riders all park in one area….do they feel inferior or do they choose to separate themselves?
Most Harley riders are sensible people. By sensible, I mean that they wear long pants, boots and a t-shirt from their travels to other H-D dealerships. Why do the others wear shorts and dress urban?
There is a difference between a “rocket” rider and a Harley rider, both in attitude and look. Harley dude or dudette is laid back, 35+ and minds their own business. Rocket guy (notice I say guy) is under 35, loud and always seems to want to make trouble.
Many people wear things that they should not be wearing…I’ll leave that up to your imagination as to what they were wearing.

Jeff and I threw down some grub and a drink and took in the scene, lucky enough to get a seat in the center of the action. As I observed the different walks of life, who all share the same passion, motorcycles, I started thinking about the Sturgis trip and wondered if this is what it was going to be like. This was a gathering of 1500, Sturgis attracts crowds of up to 500,000, am I going to be ready to take on all of that madness? We’ll see, I plan to do a lot more of these outings and gain the confidence needed.

Friday was an off day from the bike, but a full day of kitchen crap, enough said.

Hold onto your handlebars….Julie took her first ride on the bike Saturday night, May 23rd. It was a beautiful night, mid 70 degrees with a clear sky. You could feel a little bit of apprehensiveness, but she eventually settled in and liked it. We rode down West River Rd. into Valley City and over to Brunswick. I love this road, it has a little bit of everything to challenge any rider, especially one that has just now put his wife on the back to ride bitch. I have to say, we did pretty well, she leaned when she should’ve, didn’t take her feet off the pegs at stoplights and I was able to keep the bike balanced at stoplights. All in all a good first ride. Now I need to convince her to head out a little more often so that we can both enjoy the ride.

Sturgis Update:
The Chip (http://www.buffalochip.com/) is continuing to update their music line-up while Glencoe is not doing anything, maybe their waiting to announce all at once?

They’ve now added The Guess Who as the last band to play Sturgis 2009; they’ll play on Saturday night, August 8th. RED has been added to the lineup to play Friday Night, August 7th with Buckcherry.