Freezy rider: biking for men of (rusty) steel
AS a man who rode a Road King from Chicago to Los Angeles on Route 66, I never fail to be stirred by the sight of a big Harley ready and waiting in the early light.
Even if the early light is punctuated by the steady drip of rain from everything in sight: me, the bike, the soggy blackbird singing heroically on a branch, and the packed lunch of Cate's sandwiches that I was loading into the panniers along with a flask of hot coffee and some apple pie.
And even if rather than heading off down the road to Amarillo in the rising heat of the day, I was setting off with 999 other masochists to ride 500 miles around Ireland.
In truth, I had nobody to blame but myself. Two months ago, I was sitting in the kitchen with a bunch of mates about to set off for a ride up the Antrim Coast when we realised that we didn't have a name for our biker gang.
"What about Sons of Santa?" I said.
"That only works for dyslexic journalists," said Paul, who is 6ft 6ins in any direction you care to name. "What about Big Lads on Bikes, or Blobs?" .
"Listen," said Gerry, "I've been trying to lose weight for the past year, so a Blob is the last thing I want to be. Also, if we walk into a bikers' caff wearing sweatshirts saying Blobs on the front, what self-respecting babe is going to cast admiring glances in our direction? What about the League of Adventurous Gentlemen?"
"Sounds a bit too much like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," said Paddy Minne, the world-famous Franco-Belgian motorcycle mechanic, helping himself to another slice of toast.
"What about the League of Extraordinarily Adventurous Blobs?" I said.
"What about Wildly Adventurous Gentlemen, or WAGs?" said Cate, who was passing through on her way to prune the roses.
"The woman's a genius," I said. "WAGs it is."
"Aye, except we never do anything more adventurous than ride up the Antrim Coast, have a bacon buttie in Carnlough, and ride back," said Colin.
"Well, we can change that," I said. "There's this 500-mile, 1,000-bike ride around Ireland coming up in a couple of months to raise money for the Air Ambulance..."
I should have kept my mouth shut, I thought as we rolled into Bangor on a Sunday morning to find hundreds of bikers standing by their machines and looking at the leaden sky with the familiar look of bruised disappointment which proved, not for the first time, that the Irish are a Mediterranean people constantly betrayed by the weather.
At Hillsborough, the drizzle started. By Banbridge, it had become a torrential downpour, and I stopped to put my trousers outside my boots just too late to stop them filling with an inch of icy water.
Still, if we wanted sunshine, we'd live in California, and by the time we stopped at Balbriggan for fuel, the rain had eased off to drizzle.
"Anyone seen Gerry?" said Paddy as Colin handed around the Werther's.
"Good question," I said, hauling out my phone and ringing him.
"Gerry, where are you?" I said.
"I'm back at home," he said plaintively. “My leather jacket got soaked in the first downpour, and by the time I stopped and got my waterproofs on, I was already wet through.”
“Right, that’s it,” said Paddy. “He’ll have to be officially de-WAG’d and have his WAG stripes torn off.
“And his motorbike set on fire,” said Paul.
“And a burning cross on his front lawn, with his jacket draped over it,” said Colin.
There. Having sorted that out, we set off for Sligo, Ballybofey, Donegal, Derry and Coleraine, a last stop outside Joey Dunlop’s bar in Ballymoney, and home.
I walked through the front door 12 hours after I'd left, and told Cate she made the best sandwiches in the world.
“You must be knackered after that,” she said.
“Actually, neck and shoulders are a bit stiff, but otherwise I'm grand,” I said, picking up a jerry can of petrol and a lighter and getting back on the Harley to ride over to Gerry’s.
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Weather for Belfast
Tuesday 14 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: 6 C to 9 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: North west
Tomorrow
Cloudy
Temperature: 5 C to 10 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: North west
