Whether folks are trailering ‘em down, putting ‘em the backs of pick-‘em-up up trucks, or <gasp!> actually riding them down, Bike Week is in full swing at Daytona Beach.
Bike “Week” is a bit of a misnomer. The event is actually 10 days long and this year’s Daytona Beach Bike Week officially started on Friday the 4th of March.
Ms. Deborah, my long-suffering personal assistant, and I were planning to ride down to Daytona Beach on Saturday. Saturday dawned, the weather was beautiful, and she couldn’t make the trip because a client of hers was flying in from out of town. Unexpectedly. With little notice. Sigh.
So ol’ John spent a glorious Saturday tinkering with his motorcycles, rather than riding one of them. The legendary Robomantis, my venerable R1100GS BMW is getting its mid-life makeover, and that project is falling behind schedule. By months. So the day wasn’t totally lost, and I love working on the bikes, but still …
It pays to have a backup plan.
Monday rolled around. The skies are bright and beautiful, and the weather is the warmest that it has been since last Fall. And it’s time for us to ride to the annual picnic with our vintage motorcycle club in the infield of the amazing Daytona International Speedway.
There’s only one problem. Ms. Deborah still can’t go because that pesky client of hers is still in town.
So ol’ John tinkers a little bit more with the Robomantis. Just remember folks, when playing around with mechanical devices that shake and rattle that Loctite (an adhesive that causes bolts to bind together firmly, but we hope not permanently) is your friend.
Finally, there is no getting around the obvious. Deborah’s not going to be able to make the trip and if I want any food I’d better boogie. So it’s on the spare GS and off down I-95.
There are a ton of folks riding southbound, and even more trailers and trucks hauling bikes. There is a little bit of something for everyone here. Kids on go fast bikes, old phartes like Yours Truly on touring bikes, and zillions of unique individuals with more or less identical cruisers. There is some really flashy stuff and some really old and nasty stuff that is still running strong despite the age and appearance. And you see an amazing number of grizzled riders who look like they have been living on the road for years and Daytona Beach is just another stop along the way. Bike Week draws ‘em all.
You know what my #1 pet peeve is while riding? Trucks and cars that block traffic by being completely oblivious to the other vehicles backing up behind them. Thankfully I-95 is now a 3-lane Interstate from Jacksonville until well past St. Augustine, but at some point it reverts back to being a 2-land highway. And that’s where the underpowered diesel trucks get into that all too common slow-speed drag race with housewives in minivans. You know the type. The ones who are distracted by the 5 screaming children they are hauling around and their only salvation is to chat on the cell phone. Let me give both parties a hint: Someone needs to slow down in order to let the other one pass. A lot of trucks only go so fast. And then everyone, truck and minivan alike, needs to get into the right lane and not impede the rest of traffic. It really isn’t that tiring to take your car out of cruise control for just a few seconds.
Anywho, ol’ John buzzed on down to Speedway Blvd. in Daytona Beach where he ran across a few friends who were also heading for the picnic. Keep this in mind just to demonstrate that your author wasn’t the only one who misjudged this gig.
The Speedway is beyond being just an impressive facility. It’s huge. Old man France had quite a vision and his vision put Daytona Beach on the map. And during Bike Week scores of vendors and motorcycle manufacturers set up displays and tents outside the entrance to the Speedway. In addition, this year is the first time that the Buffalo Chip Campground (a fixture at the Sturgis Bike Events) was set up in the infield at the Speedway and the Buffalo Chip (a/k/a Kickstand City) has been promising some great music (Travis Tritt, Steppenwolf, Twisted Sister, and Dave Mason are all scheduled to play this year). Let’s hope that the Buffalo Chip does well and returns, but no matter how you slice things this is one busy place during Bike Week.
During the winter the Speedway made millions of dollars worth of improvements, and one improvement that they made was to build a new tunnel underneath the track. The old tunnel dropped dramatically as you went underneath the racetrack and then forcedyou to ride or drive back uphill in a equally dramatic fashion as you exited the tunnel. RV’s and trucks could not use the old tunnel and used to be required to wait until the track closed when they were then allowed to drive across the track. Not this year. Some day you youngsters will forget the hardships that us olde phartes used to have just to be spectators at the International Speedway ;)
Being contrary, I took the old tunnel rather than the modern news tunnel and quickly found my group in the infield. That was the good news. The bad news was that I was starved to death, and the food was all gone.
Now, last year we had plenty of great burgers and hotdogs left over. And we requested that everyone RSVP this year so that we could get a head count. I know, because I was the contact person for the head count! So what happened? Well … it seems that a lot of folks showed up without giving any notice, and they ate all of the food. Sacré bleu!
It pays to have a backup plan.
OK. So there were a few handfuls of leftover peanuts, and I figured that I could last for an hour or so before I absolutely have to find chow. No problemo.
Needless to say, I ran into a lot of old friends. There were a lot of jokes and a lot of wisecracks, and smiles all around. And this year the vintage races were pretty entertaining. Last year most of the excitement seemed to occur when race bikes broke down. This year there were a few spills (no injuries, thankfully), and one unlucky rider managed to have his bike catch on fire pretty much in front of us. Maybe it wasn’t as entertaining for the rider as it was for us spectators - after all, how often do you get to witness a Ducati flambé? – but admittedly that’s not a sight that you see every day.
Your author was walking around taking some great crowd shots when his fancy Sony 8- megapixel camera died. Died dead. As in “the battery was flat.” Which was a bummer because I had had that sucker sitting on the charger at home before I left. Oh well … time to whip out my old but faithful Olympus. I’ve done this for too long not to pack an extra camera <crossing my fingers>.
It pays to have a backup plan.
Your Humble Servant left the Speedway and thought that I’d see if my pal Bill was at the Tir na nog. Tir na nog is Gaelic for “Land of the Young” or, literally, the afterlife. And while this place is merely an Irish pub in Daytona Beach it was once the home of the raunchiest wet t-shirt contest that I’ve ever seen, and that is pretty close to Heaven in my book. Alas, that was years ago and well before Bill bought the place ;)
(For the tale of that particular illustrious event check out http://members.aol.com/Warp12Sys/Jsolton.html )
Bill doesn’t usually open the Tir na nog until 5PM or so but he’s often working about the place and always lets me in. There’s no food at the bar, thanks to Florida’s no smoking in a dining establishment laws, but the pizza place next door delivers and they do some killer strombolis. So this has potential.
The good news was that Bill was there and happy to see me.
The bad news is that Bill had a doctor’s appointment and couldn’t leave the place open. Drat.
Time to get back on the road, and to find some lunch. And it dawned on me that it was almost 3PM and that means happy hour at the Matanzas Innlet.
Once again, it pays to have that backup plan.
So I went riding through the V-twin crazed congestion of Daytona Beach and northbound on A1A. Admittedly there were plenty of places that I could have stopped at to have food, but the list narrows tremendously when you want to find a nice place that is just off the beaten path enough to have a relaxed meal, shoot the breeze with strangers, and just in general have a good time.
And that ride along A1A is enjoyable in and of itself. A1A runs along the coast as it winds northward through Flagler Beach, Palm Coast, Hammock (which is one of the very few “old Florida” areas left along the coast), by the old and hopefully soon-to-be-renovated Marineland park and finally to the Matanzas Innlet at the base of the Matanzas Inlet bridge.
The Innlet restaurant (http://www.oldcity.com/sites/innlet/ ) is always a comfortable place for me. Good food and a great view (the cover of my book on Northeastern Florida was shot there) make this one of my favorite stops. The mussels in garlic are to die for. I also got a plate of fried oysters. I know, I can hear you oyster connoisseurs bitchin’ now about how a fried oyster should be illegal unless it is an ingredient in a po’ boy sandwich, but I was hungry and didn’t have the energy to order a bucket of steamed oysters and sit there and shuck those suckers. At this point I needed food, and I needed it now!
The only riders in the Innlet were locals; a Harley rider and a Gold Wing rider. Even some of the non-riding ladies in the place were kidding the Gold Winger about “how big that thing is” (normally something that every guy likes to hear but in this case a reference to the size of the bike) and I was stringing him on by pointing out that Gold Wings are so big that Honda has to install a reverse gear. Of course, at the same time that I’m giving him some good-natured grief I’m mumbling in my beer about how Ms. Deborah and I also have a monster bike, the BMW competitor to a Gold Wing, that also has a reverse gear. Ahhhhh, yes … it’s sad, but when you get older and have to carry a passenger around those Winnebago-sized motorcycles with all the electronics start to look better.
The Harley guy leaves and in walk 4 guys from Vermont who <cough, cough> trailered their BMW’s down. OK … it was snowing in Vermont when they left and one of the guys has ridden in Alaska several times, so I guess that I can let him slide. Even if he has chrome crash bars and chrome protective bars over his driving lights. Bleech. There’s no accounting for taste even though he assures me that the chrome crash bars were actually supplied by the factory in a final run as the R100GS Paris-Dakar bikes went outof production. Could have happened, I guess, and if I had ordered chrome crash bars for my bike when God intended for them to be black I doubt if I’d admit it either.
‘sides … these guys are buying my beer so I figure that they cannot be all bad ;)
We have a typical guy’s BS session, shooting the breeze about riding in Alaska vs. Mexico, Vermont vs. Florida, the perils of moose vs. ‘gator, that sort of thing. We agree that St. Augustine and the Matanzas Inlet area have tremendous history and are fascinating to visit. And wimmen. Lord, does everyone in this group have an opinion on wimmen, or what?
We conclude our business, swap business cards and promise to look out for each other on down the road, and they ride south while I ride north. For a few miles.
I run down to a place on the beach in the heart of the one-stoplight town of Crescent Beach and look up my pal Jimmy. Jimmy used to be the lead bartender at the Matanzas Innlet and is now the evening manager at an upscale place called the South Beach Grill. No, this isn’t South Beach as in Miami, this is South Beach as in ‘south of St. Augustine.’
http://www.southbeachgrill.net/index.html
Ordered an excellent steak with béarnaise sauce. Yum. No doubt my cholesterol-counting MD would have a heart attack if she could read this, but the steak was great. The view was great. The beer was great. And seeing Jimmy again was great.
So all in all a nice, warm and sunny day of Bike Week went completely different from the way it had been planned, which was originally to take Ms. Deborah down to some of the restaurants to the south of Daytona Beach. But y’know what? Monday was still a great day, and despite seemingly nothin’ going according to plan it’s hard to argue with success when you get in some great riding, hang with old friends and meet new friends, and just marvel at times that the World can be as much fun as it is.
Adventures seldom come to you when you are at home, watching the television, or sitting at the computer. The weather’s getting warmer, and it’s time to get outside!
No comments:
Post a Comment