Saturday, October 22, 2011

Morning everyone, time to tell the story of the great Arkansas motorcycle road trip,

Let me go back in time a few days a do a little foreshadowing (big word, see I got book smarts)


Our original plan was to leave around 12:00pm Friday and meet up in a small town in Arkansas called Pine Bluffs. Here is a link of the trip…
RIDE MAP
 
Well as you might have guessed it did not happen…AS PLANNED!!



I guess around Tuesday I came down with a bad cold we had been passing around the office, I ended up getting a fever and missing Wednesday at work.

I sent my ridding buddy Walter an email and told him we might need to move the ride to Saturday due to illness. About this time, Walter had sent me an email saying that the town we had picked for our first night was ranked as one of the highest crime spots in Arkansas,

not good when you are ridding easy to steal motorcycles. So a new location was picked, Star City was the new destination. Woke up Thursday feeling better…RIDE BACK ON AS PLANNED!!! Well so I thought, I was packed and ready to go Friday morning,

and then I get a text message from Walter telling me he had come down with something and asked could we move the ride to Saturday morning. (See lots of foreshadowing)


Woke up Saturday ready to go, I had around a 300 mile ride ahead of me, my buddy Walter around 400 mile ride. I decided at the last second that I would like to get a new full face helmet (due to the cold weather),

so a quick trip to Hattiesburg Cycle would be needed on my way out of town. (I’ll do a review on the helmet in a post soon)

I guess I was on my way around 10:30am.


The ride started out beautiful, I have to admit I spent the first hour or so fiddling with my new helmet, pushing and pulling buttons trying to figure out how to raise and lower the shield while ridding. Once I entered into Louisiana, I really started getting into the ride; I crossed through huge cotton farms in the middle of picking. I did run into one small shower, not even enough to get my jacket wet, lasted less than a minute, then sky’s turned bright blue again. Oh yea this is what ridding is all about…then came the ARKANSAS STATE LINE SIGN………

Check back soon, the best is yet to come.


Big Al