My Ride, By me.
The trip was organized. With the usual suspects out of town, I decided to hook up with a few unusual suspects. So I put out the word, and the word was Akaroa (known hereabouts as the GP, except we’ve only ever done the warmup lap b4 the long arm(pit) of the law turns up and the forum posts get a little heated after that).
The day dawned fine and sunny, except for the clouds.
I arrived at the designated point of departure. And waited. And waited. Finally, TheManWhoNeverCame (not to be confused with The Invisible Man or TheManWhoSoldTheWorld) arrived on his 2006 Cthru 999 (don’t let the brochures fool you, they look great in not quite off-white), followed soon after by ThemWhoCantBeAssed, on new ThinAir 600’s, complete with aftermarket whatsits.
And so we departed, down the long straight straights, the short straight straits and the slightly bendy straights with the risey-fally bits. The birds whistled and danced, and twirled, as they hit my radiator.
TheManWhoNeverCame lead at a good pace, and I stuck to his line with the everpresent whine of ThemWhoCantBeAssed behind me. The new underseat exhaust on the 2006 model sounds distinctly different than the round-the-wheel exhaust from last year. More like a gap toothed hag whistling “Sweet Child O Mine” than a dyson with a suction problem.
With the time being a youngish 7:15am, we met AlmostNobodyOnTheRoad, and it’s a wonder TheManWhoNeverCame held his line so well, with all the waving he did to them.
With the landscape starting to become more up than down and more bendy than straight, we settled into a fine rhythm, accelerate-brake, accelerate-brake, until the rythym became accelerate-brake when ThemWhoCantBeAssed ran real wide on a tightening radius left hander collecting the rider of a buell of some sort (nobody i know, the only buell rider I know was winning some sort of prize 400km to the south- still you’d want an award after spening 12 hours with the guy on the guzzi right?)
It was at the hilltop pub I learned that TheManWhoNeverCame was actually the winner of Round 1 of the NZ Road race champs at Ruapuna, he quit the rest of the series when Bruce Anstey was awarded the chequered flag as TheManWhoNeverCame crossed the line some 5 seconds before-hand. Hard done by eh!
The rest of the journey went without a hitch, except for the mass pile up but I suspect the mongrel mob are insured.
Nice bunch of chaps, waved a lot from the scene of the accident and probably would have stopped in for a cuppa with us at the next café if their Harleys hadn’t become even more unrideable than usual.
Tata
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Originally Posted by skidMark
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