Cites are congested. Now while I could give a rat’s ass from a “the sky is falling and we all have to stop breathing so the CO2 emissions don’t cause polar icecap melting” perspective (which is absurd by the way), it is still inconvenient from a “there are too many people trying to get around in too many vehicles with too many empty seats” perspective. All of this is really neither here nor there with regard to riding motorcycles, because in every society but ours (save for California, which managed to at least get one thing right…), filtering between cars stopped in traffic is perfectly legal for motorcycles. However, at least we are still allowed to park as many bikes as will fit in a space (in most places), and still occupy less space on the road while riding in groups due to tighter spacing than most car drivers are comfortable with.
And I told you all of that to tell you this: I did manage to go for a ride today, and I even took pictures! Well, three pictures really, and two of them are just bikes parked in the same spot before and after lunch (there were some other bikes in the way so I couldn’t get a good ‘group shot’… but I digress. One of the local Tucson guys put together the event, an 8-bike run from Tucson down to Sonoita, around some backroads near Elgin, then over to Patagonia for lunch. The little coffee house that’s there was unfortunately closed 🙁 which is a shame because they have great sandwiches. So we ate at the hotel dining room instead, which turned out to be just as good. We all had some variation on their basic cheeseburger, and they were great. Oh yeah, pictures… When we rolled up there was some space next to a group of Harleys who were, while still 2 to a spot, not as tightly packed in as we ended up being:
After they left, I was able to take another shot showing a bit more of the bikes ‘as a group of bikes’, at least from my hack-amateur photographer point of view. Believe it or not, the following bikes were all parked in approximately the same space as my truck would have occupied: a Yamaha R6, a Honda CBR600RR, a Suzuki SV650, three Kawasakis (a Z750S, Z1000, and ZX-10), The Deerslayer, and a Buell 1125CR:
Of course, it being 1 Jan and all, I remembered to take a photo of my odometer with my fuel slip from my fill-up before we rolled out so I’d have a starting point for the BBO 2010 mileage contest:
‘Zero’ for the year’s odometer is 36313 miles. My goal is to surpass 10k, which if I can manage to commute as much as I’d like should be very, very easy. At 500+ miles a week, 25,000 miles for the year isn’t actually out of the realm of possibility, especially considering that doesn’t count weekend road-trip mileage.
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