A Quick Ride
Well, it’s been one of those weeks where nothing goes as planned. The planned ride to New Orleans was no exception, but in retrospect it was probably for the best. I found I was more fatigued from the previous week’s activities than I realized and spent a lot of time resting.
The original plan had Andre, one of my riding buddies, leaving Tucson, AZ with a 2002 Honda VTX 1800 he had just bought from a friend out there. The bike is great and he got a great deal. He was supposed to leave Thursday for Florida, but waiting just wasn’t what he wanted to do with the new bike so he left early… like Tuesday early. This had an obvious effect on the schedule and when I talked with him Thursday evening he was 100 miles west of Tallahassee and driving through weather that most of us wouldn’t take a car through. I checked the radar for him and saw bands of red in the thunderstorms and told him he was crazy if he rode through it. The certification wasn’t necessary as he landed in Lake City, FL about 9:00 PM that night.
With fewer than 325 miles left on his trip it was almost senseless to meet Andre for the ride down, but he needed some moral support and I had already taken the day off from work to make the ride. So, at 5:00 AM I rolled the Harley Davidson Electra Glide that I had just purchased out and started north to have breakfast. The motorcycle that I had bought with just 700 miles on it a week earlier would finish the day with nearly 2,150 miles on the odometer.
Our ride was pretty basic boring Florida coming down I-75 and the Turnpike as I had done just a week earlier. The only difference was a quick slip into rain gear as we went through a 5-mile thunderstorm. We kept them on for the rest of the trip, which may have alerted a lot of bikers of upcoming weather as we passed a lot of them heading north to Biketoberfest in Daytona Beach, FL.
I’m still evaluating the ride of the Electra Glide and continue to be impressed at some elements and disappointed in others. Probably the worst part of the Harley was the same as the worst part of most stock bikes: the grips. There’s nothing worse than crappy grips on a bike and it seems all manufacturers go out of their way to produce the worst possible construction. They are invariably too narrow and have nothing to absorb the energy of the ride. This isn’t a Harley problem. It seems to permeate the industry much like putting crappy exhaust on bikes. Makes you think, doesn’t it? I will be replacing these with my personal favorites, Kuryakyn Iso-Grips. There are many good grips out there and if you’re experiencing numbness in your hands after a couple hundred miles you should check them out and get something to make the trip safer and more comfortable. It isn’t a good thing when you can’t feel your fingers or have to take your hands off the grips to get blood and feeling back into them.