Last Ride Of The Season....

[Bill_Rockoff]

....so I might as well make it a good one.

Let's see, what would be a good ride?  I like long-ish rides.  I like autumn, if it's not TOO cold.  I like riding the Blue Ridge Parkway.  And as much as I like riding my FJ1200, I really enjoyed riding Dave's Ducati.  (He brought one of his two GTS-1000s to the East Coast Fall Rally, but he also has a 25,000 mile Ducati 916 that he bought nearly new.  He let me ride it to lunch one day over the summer, and it kind of changed my life.)  Also, I sure enjoy riding with Andrew, and as much as I like a Ducati 916, he likes them just as much, maybe even more.  I used to have a Ducati 916 poster, and he took that to hang in his dorm room at NC State.  So, much as I would enjoy riding one, I'd probably enjoy it even more if *he* got to ride it too.

Well, thanks to Dave and his serious eBay habit, I got to do all those things.



Dave bought this track-prepped 916 from a guy in Watertown, Connecticut.  He thought about having Andrew fly up and ride it down, but apparently kids these days actually attend their Friday classes (things sure have changed since I was in college)  so I took half a day off and flew to New Haven with Dave's Eclipse soft luggage to meet the seller and ride it back to Atlanta.  It was perfect Indian Summer last week, 70F all day with beautiful fall colors up through Friday, and it was a glorious ride from New Haven to my sister's house in the NY suburbs.  

Great  to see my sister and her boyfriend and my niece and nephew, and then I took off early Saturday morning.  It was cool but not cold, exactly, high 50s and cloudy as I left pre-dawn.  Andrew got up early and finished putting a new chain and sprockets on the EX500 (made a HUGE difference apparently, the chain at the Fall Rally was beyond used up) and set out to meet me.

The Ducati was a bit of an unknown - lots of questionable track mods, and I didn't really know what to expect for mileage, functionality, tire duration, etc.  Also, the LeoVince pipes are loud, possibly attracting attention to the fact that it had no tag. (Mississippi lets you do that for seven days between buying something and registering it, so I'm sure it was technically legal.  I had the signed title, a bill of sale from the seller who was a different guy than the title-signer, and a printout of insurance coverage in Dave's name, but of course "Dave's not here, man."  It would have made a long story if I had gotten pulled over.)  But it turns out that I kind of like the riding position, and the 916 has a nice easy gait at fast-highway speeds.  Yeah, I could rock one of these.

Andrew and I planned to meet in Virginia, 3-1/2 hours from his starting point and 7 hours from mine, where the Blue Ridge Parkway meets VA 56.  We texted each other to keep up on our whereabouts and it looked like we'd be pretty close to getting there at 2pm.  I filled the Ducati tank at a gas station off the highway (needs to be done every 160-180 miles) and headed to the meet-up point, getting there at 2:10.  Hmm, no Andrew.  I pulled off the road and did a U-turn to park someplace visible, and literally before I could get the bike stopped on the shoulder, who should come around the corner but Andrew.

I briefed him on the quirks of this particular Ducati (needs the clutch bled, needs the front brake bled, sidestand isn't spring loaded, won't quite idle, steers a bit stiffly) and I swung into the saddle of his EX500 for the first time.  His grin was visible from inside his helmet as he thumbed the starter and shook the earth with the Ducati exhaust.  We clicked into gear, eased up the ramp, and headed south on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

As the day warmed up, we were headed higher in elevation, so at this point it was still in the high 50's on the higher parts of the Blue Ridge, but it warmed to the low 60's where the road dropped down into valleys.  The trees had turned and all the leaves were brilliant orange and yellow and red, but the grass was still bright verdant green.  The picturesque villages and towns and farms looked like backdrops, like painted sets, almost artificial in their perfection and beauty.  

We stopped at overlooks to take photos, and Andrew discovered why most bikes have sidestand kill switches.  Fortunately, the resulting scrape sent him only partly off course, so it could have been much worse - the only casualties were the sidestand, Andrew's pride, and possibly a pair of underwear.  We rode to Buena Vista and stopped for late lunch.  But of course, those of you lucky enough to have ridden the Parkway are familiar with the blessing and the curse of the place - it's so pretty everywhere that stopping to admire everything worth admiring, or to photograph everything worthy of remembering, can stretch a 100-mile ride across an entire day.   We scooted 20 feet beneath the clouds, looking down on perfect valleys bathed in late afternoon autumn sunlight; we carved graceful arcs through open meadows and leaned into corners made brilliant and golden by all the leaves; there was the smell of tannin and wet pavement and the sound of that Ducati.  At higher elevations it was cool bordering on "too cold" but never quite getting uncomfortable.  It was hours and hours of perfect riding, into the Roanoke area.

Andrew stopped to pee, and we talked about the ride and the bikes.  I told him I was perfectly happy on his EX500 - I was having as much fun as I would have had on the 916 or on my FJ.  

As we suited up to get back on the road, I noticed that I had incorrectly mounted Dave's new Eclipse saddlebags to the 916, leaving one of them to rub against the rear tire and wearing a hole through it - and through his new Eclipse tail trunk and my Heine Gericke rain suit that I was carrying in that saddle bag.

And then it started to get dark, and cold; we were running out of daylight and Indian-summer warmth faster than we were running out of parkway between us and Fancy Gap, our designated exit point.  And then the EX500 clutch cable broke, leaving me to shift Andrew's bike clutchless.  

We stopped seeing other tourist cars and began to see deer.  It got darker and colder.  (Andrew said at that point, just when he would think "Maybe I'm starting to have had enough" he would back off, click the Ducati down a gear or two, and wind on some throttle, thinking to himself in Jeremy Clarkson's voice, "Powaaaaaaah!!")  We finally got to Fancy Gap at around 7:45, well after dark, well below mid-50's.  We filled the tanks shivering in the cold, talking to a guy who was filling diesel jerry cans to feed his generator for the coming storm about our bikes and his bikes (he had an RD350, a 250 Ninja, and a Heritage Something-I-Forget and had moved from Bakersfield CA to be near the parkway.)   He told us "the interstate is less than a mile from here, and it drops 3,000 feet in the first few miles as you head south - you'll pick up about 10 degrees F over the next five minutes if you're headed that way."  Welcome news.

We shivered in the wind as I explained to Andrew some of the finer points of negotiating surface-street traffic on a bike with no clutch release lever, the intricacies of timing and technique, and how sometimes you might still have to come to a stop where you can't paddle it back up to speed and click it into first - sometimes you just have to hit the kill switch until its time to go, thumb the starter in first gear, and be ready for it to catch and jet you forward in traffic.  He said, "I thought I had spent the last money on this thing that I'd need to spend for a while."  (It needed a front tire before the FJ rally, and he had rebuilt the fuel petcock and replaced the chain since then.)  "How much is a clutch cable?"  I told him "Maybe $25."  He asked, "How big a pain is it going to be to replace it?"  I told him, "It's way easier than a chain and sprockets or a fuel petcock.  You'll have this done in ten minutes.  This is a wear item like brake pads."  

He got on his EX500 and I got back on the Ducati for the first time in six hours, and he followed me out to the interstate (skillfully timing his exit from the gas station to allow him to stay moving in first gear) and we hit the on-ramp.  Sure enough, a few minutes later we were dropping down out of the Blue Ridge Mountains and getting noticeably warmer.  Moments after that, I followed I-77 off to the right as he followed I-74 off to the left, he pulled up even with me and waved farewell, I waved back.   There was so much I wanted to say to him at that moment, how proud I was that he had gotten his EX500 fixed that morning and could actually make it out to meet me on this trip, how proud I was that he had bought it to begin with, and how thrilled I was that he got to ride his dream bike and that I got to share that with him, and how I was worried about him but also confident that he'd get the injured EX500 home safely, and how confident I was that he'd fix it and would ride it even better afterward and enjoy it even more, and how pleased I am at the person (and the motorcyclist) that he is becoming.  But the best I could do was a wave and a nod and a feeling of contentment that kept me warm for the next 6 hours.

He texted me at about 10:30, between my next fuel stop and the one after that, saying he had gotten home safe.  I got home at 1:45am, chilly from the rapidly dropping temperatures (probably 50 degrees out) and stiff after a nearly 20 hour day of riding, most of it on a 916 (which is a surprisingly good highway bike.)

I owe Dave Skipper a huge "Thank You" (in addition to a sidestand, a set of Eclipse saddle bags, a tail trunk, and about $25 in unused gas money) because this was an incredible adventure that he totally made possible.  A lot of you have met him at the ECFR, and he had a good enough time with you all that he'll probably hit the ECSR as well.  

Aftermath: Dave came by to load it into his truck Sunday and showed me the idle adjust screw and the adjustment for the steering damper, which had been set rather stiff. I rode it around the block and its a different bike, an even sweeter one, agile and flickable.  If only I knew anything about motorcycles, Andrew would have enjoyed it even more.

[The General]

Thanks for that Bill...Truly enjoyed.  Doug

[rktmanfj]

Well done, Bill!      

[racerman_27410]

Sounds like a great road trip Bill!  Its been fun watching Andrew's "progression" and i dont blame ya for being proud of him.

KOokaloo!

Frank

[Firehawk068]

Very nicely done!
With your writing skill, who needs pictures?
I am seeing it all in my mind vividly, as you described it..........