Here's a little story that Bill Lewis has sent in....

MAY MEETING RIDE

It was still dark out when the alarm buzzed on the nightstand. I was up early for a ride down to Anaheim with Willie Buchta to the Gear Grinders May meeting. A rare pleasure it is to ride with the busy guru of Willie's Tube & Tin in Modesto, and it's also my first ever ride with him. The clock hands move fast in the AM when the scheduled departure from Modesto is, "No later than 7", and an hour away by bike. Mitchell's Harley-Davidson provided a Road King with only nine miles on the electronic odometer for Willie to ride. Willie's job is to break it in before it goes on the rental line at the dealership. I get my own '07 Softail Deluxe to ride. The sun is peeking over the tops of the Sierra's as I depart for Modesto and I arrive at Willie's shop at exactly 7AM. My foot pegs are coming loose from the typical Harley good vibrations, so I tighten them up and we're off and running down I-99. Willie does his own brand of break-in on a new Harley and it doesn't have much to do with the owner's manual recommendations. He starts out easy for about thirty miles with varied power settings, then cranks it up to freeway speeds, still with varied power settings. Because of that, he sends me out in front so that I won't be bothered with any of his fast/slow antics.

Now I've had faster bikes than my ninety-six inch Softail. The bike I owned prior to the big Deluxe was a Yamaha RZ-350, called a "RIZ" by my old cafe racing buddies. Cafe bikes were the Limey equivalent to American choppers. They were most often Triumphs, Nortons, AJS, Vellocettes, Vincents or BSAs. Americans often adapted Japanese bikes to cafe racers, and that's what I did for affordability and due to the astonishing speed of the 350cc water cooled, two stroke, twin. I stripped the weight down to around 350 pounds dry, dropped a tooth on the transmission output sprocket, recut the intake ports to provide more gumption through the Yoshimura exhaust and installed some big old Yamaha RD-350 Mikuni carburetors. The bike would top gear redline at a ton (That's cafe speak for 100mph.) and I only weighed 155 pounds back then, so the RIZ was quick. How often do we ride around clocking over a ton anyway? From zero to the ton mark, the RIZ would clobber most street Harleys. Cafe peg dragging be damned, these days I want a ton of torque to haul my 200 pound bulk down the freeway. The 96 inch, Harley, Twin-Cam, affectionately known as a "Twinkie", suits me just fine, but I can't just leave it stock. Hot cams, big intake, low restriction mufflers, and a hotter fuel injection controller give it more than a ton of go. You may know that on a motorcycle it feels safer to run down the freeway about 5 mph faster than the ambient speed of surrounding cars and semi's. That means 70 or 80 mph on most California freeways and hours on end at that speed would have killed the little RIZ.

It was darn cold on the way down to Anaheim as we pulled into the Betty Ave. exit in Goshen, CA for fuel and a visit to the Visalia Harley-Davidson dealership. The dealerships offer free coffee and I swiped a jelly donut from the employee stash, a guy needs to keep his weight up somehow. Later I was chatting it up with one of the employees, unaware that the yellow lemon jelly and powdered sugar was still stuck on the ends of my mustache. Willie checked the parts department for one of those rare collectable license plate frames the dealers bolt to every new bike they sell. I guess Willie has a ton of them from all over the globe. Back on the road, and after waving to a trucker hauling a load of live porkers, (Get it? Hogs...) it was on down to the Grapevine and a stop at Flying J for fuel and lousy food. Then up and over the hill into the L.A. freeway maze. Tempers and temperatures go up considerably as we roll down the Santa Ana Freeway during the 1PM rush. People tell me that the traffic is lighter at mid-day, but that's a bunch of horse crap. Traffic is never light in the L.A. Basin. We were able to utilize the commuter HOV lanes, but whenever you lock into one, the normal lanes always speed up and fly faster than the HOV lane.

Eric Ross had offered to put us up for the night so we stopped at his place first. Eric calls around and manages to thumb a ride to the meeting with Joe and Amanda Taylor, because his Ducati Monster is still festooned with racing plates from a year ago, while Willie and I ride down to the meeting on our bikes. We impress the locals by parking in the doorway so they'll trip over the kickstands when they exit the building. Gear Grinder meetings are the usual gentle conversation and warm story telling typically found at any gathering of friendly racers. You know, it's amazing to me that these "go fast" types don't have more of a competitive edginess to their personalities. They're so mellow, one would think that the rules of conduct enforced by the officers are probably unnecessary at their meetings. (Enough of that Disneyland horse crap fantasy, we got through the meeting with no gun play, knifings or bloody noses.)

After the meeting we met Eric back at his place. When Willie threw a sleeping bag on the floor, Eric's savage dog, Spike, claimed it for his own. Now, the savage little Spike is a Jack Russell breed and only weighs in at about 10 pounds, but it's the most vicious ten pounds of dog flesh I ever saw. When Willie politely asked him to move, the vicious Spike immediately leapt into action and Willie limped away from the encounter bearing flesh wounds on his leg and a pair of torn corduroy pants. Ah, but they were Eric's cords, on loan while Willie's leathers were out for emergency repair. I had no idea that Willie was such a good dancer, evidenced by his high stepping dance moves to avoid Spike's savage canine incisors. My excuse for not intervening in the melee was that I was already wrapped in my own sleeping bag, neither Eric or I had the intestinal fortitude required to manhandle the mighty mutt in any case. We resorted to yelling at him a safe distance, while the savage Spike interpreted the chaos as a vocal call for more violence toward poor Willie. After a few seconds, seemed like a few hours, the savage Spike relented and sulked off with shards of corduroy still hanging from his fangs.

Willie and I were up at 7AM on Friday, off to breakfast by 8 and on the road by 9AM. We never even saw Eric, but the savage dog, Spike, was growling at Willie for his doggie breakfast. That dog can say, "Feed me or I'll kill you", in a doggie language that any earthling can clearly understand. We rolled back up the I-5 in miserable 9AM morning rush traffic. Over the Grapevine with a stop in Gorman for prohibitively expensive fuel. Then down to Bakersfield Harley-Davidson to search the parts counter for another valuable license plate frame (no luck) and then on to Bravo Farms in Goshen, Ca. If you've never stopped at Bravo Farms on the northbound I-99, you're missing an interesting little place. The food's good, they offer shopping for the little woman, ice-cream for kids and expensive, 91 octane, liquid crack for your vehicle's fuel tank. There's a petting zoo, a huge tree house, a pool table and much more. Check it out.

Willie and I split up in Merced. I ran on the back roads to Sonora and Willie continued up I-99 to Modesto for another 30 miles. We managed to survive the cold on the way down, heat on the way back and the homicidal drivers weren't quite able to zero in on us. I guess you don't always meet the nicest people when you're riding a Harley. All the same, it sure is a lot of fun cruising along on a HOG. What Gear Grinder member wouldn't agree that the fun had at the meetings makes the 700 mile round trip worth every mile we rode.

Buckskin Bill