I spent my weekend in south Mississippi at Desoto State Park at an Adventure Riders motorcycle rally. That’s me on the yellow bike. See how tiny I am compared to our friend Michael?
We very nearly didn’t go. Hubby called Thursday afternoon saying we weren’t, that the fix for his rear brakes was going to take more time than we had. I pouted enough that he relented to try to fix it on Friday and maybe we could go late. He gets the rear hub torn apart, turns out that the seal that his dad thought he had to fix it was the wrong size and the parts store closes at noon on Friday (it was already 1). So then we weren’t going again. Then Dad remembers there’s a spare rear hub in the parts barn, so hubby digs that out and replaces it, refills necessary fluids, test drives it and whee! It works better than the old one. We’re going! Then he makes one more test run up the road and promptly snaps his front brake cable. I should mention that he rides a 1971 BMW R75/5 that’s older than he is. It requires a lot of TLC. So then we weren’t going again. Then he goes BACK down to the parts barn and finds an ancient and kinda sketchy brake cable that he lubes and loosens and says he’ll try. Meanwhile, I run into town to the courthouse to properly tag and title MY bike (which looks awesome with its new yellow paint job). Get back and he’s finishing up, things are working. We’re going again! It’s after 4 by this time. I should mention that Desoto is about 4 hours away. So we race home, pack as fast as we can (which takes an hour since we HADN’T prepped stuff the night before because we thought we weren’t going), then come back out to his parents’ to pick up his bike. Of course it takes another hour there because we had to fix a short and adjust some stuff. We finally got off about 7:30. Naturally he about froze his butt off on the 4 our ride down (with me watching like a hawk as I follow in the truck because I’m starting to wonder if all the stuff going wrong was a sign or something) and we finally rolled into camp at 11:30 to the cheers of the riders still up. By the time we finished visiting, setting up camp, and fell onto our air mattress, it was after 1. We damn near froze to death because we brought the summer weight sleeping bags by accident.
Saturday we went on the big ride–6 hours of roads and trails with a break for a truly superb catfish lunch somewhere around Lucedale (I think)–2 up on hubby’s bike. In the morning we had a little spill (only going about 5 mph as he’d managed to lose a fair amount of speed before we went over). Hubby it the ground, I hit hubby, and the bike pinned us both. He had a bit of a Superman moment, managing to lift his bike off me, from the ground, with one hand. If I hadn’t been so freaked out, it would have been really sexy. But anyway, all was well, just some bruising and no damage to bones or bike. When we got back in the afternoon, we decided to go into Wiggins to pick up a new sleeping bag so as not to freeze that night too. It was my first official ride that wasn’t on my in-laws’ road, with real traffic, real highways and everything. It was really nervewracking, but when I made it to Walmart (15 miles later) without incident or injury, I relaxed a little. On the drive back it was getting dark (I should note, I do NOT like riding in the dark), and we passed this field covered in mist with this gorgeous hot pink, dark purple sunset behind the trees. GORGEOUS. One of those shots that would look totally photoshopped. Naturally, we didn’t have a camera.
At the big cookout dinner that night, all the guys (there were about 40 of us in all) were pointing out me and my bike to their wives (who mostly just showed up for the dinner) and saying “Don’t you want to do that?” Evidently I am an oddity. I’m the ONLY wife who rides and has her own bike, and apparently this makes me the coolest wife. Hubby says the guys are really jealous as their wives won’t come out to play. The whole thing cracks me up.
We took another short ride Sunday morning to enjoy the last of the gorgeous weather, then came on home.
Let me tell you I am GLAD that I got to sleep in my own bed last night! Of course the next several days will be the graduated doing of laundry and household chores that were neglected while we were out of town. Which was a lot since we left in quite a hurry on Friday night. But it was a GREAT weekend. I had a blast, the weather was beautiful, and I got out of town for a much needed, totally unplugged weekend.
Now it’s back to the grindstone and so far Monday has been one of Those Mondays with one thing after another going wrong. But it will be okay. Things will steady out, I will catch up, and I will get back into the swing of things. The semester is winding down for class, so I’m trying to do a big final push to tie up loose ends with current classes and finish the last 3 lectures for Theories of Personality. I would REALLY like to have them all written by Thanksgiving. Which would leave me with December to record them and get all the quizzes, discussion board questions, and tests written. Oh, and somewhere in there, I’d like to get back to my novella. But in the meantime, I have to finish parsing out some missing data for the Evil Day Job.