You Can Get Anything You Want

Yup that's me. In the motorcycle jacket. Beside George the Elder's toy. Standing in front of Alice's Restaurant. Can't ya just hear Arlo in the background? I probably could have too if that parking lot wasn't filled with the sounds of much larger and louder motorcycles than can be seen in this photo.

Drove down Skyline Blvd on my very first long motorcycle ride. George the Elder has had the toy for nearly a year. This is the second time I have perched myself on the back of it. This is the first time I have gone over 35 miles an hour. This is the first time that I may have constantly thought about brush burn over 90% of my body for longer than 10 consecutive minutes. But, once I relaxed I realized that if I did fall off the back, I would be more likely to be run over by the car behind me before I could experience the pain of the brush burn. That made it so much more fun.

No really, it was a grand time. Did you know that motorcycle drivers wave to each other? Yup, just like people out on boats. It isn't exactly the same, since when you wave to each other on boats there's lots of smiling and waving. Smile and wave, smile and wave. We're happy to be on the water and you're happy to be on the water and we're all happy to be waving at each other cause we're Boaters! With motorcycle drivers the wave is more of a very brief hand flip palm side down to the road. No smile because as we all know - motorcycling is serious business. The wave seems to be more of an acknowledgement that you are both on the road with asses vibrating simultaneously. Or, it could be that the wave needs to be brief since one handed driving of a motorcycle may be akin to asking nicely to go sliding down the road with the motorcycle on top of you instead of vice versa. It also occurs to me that the whole smile thing may be a skosh risky given the possibility of eating insects (I wasn't so worried about that since I do have experience - ha ha ha).

We took the shorter road down - about 40 minutes there. And then the longer road back connecting with Highway 1 that runs along the ocean. Scenic I tell you. Just damn skeen-ic. Still, after an hour of riding back, my ass was completely numb and I couldn't tell if my arms were still attached to my body. It appears that sitting on the back of a throbbing engine isn't a passive activity. There's much leaning and squeezing and holding to be done.

When we pulled up to the house, I was absolutely unable to nimbly alight from the bike as I had done earlier in the day at Alice's (But really, how damn embarrassing would that have been? Could someone please come and help the old lady down from the ducati? She's stuck). In our driveway my disembarking could have better been described as "slithering" off the bike hoping upon hope that my missing legs would somehow still be operational. I came inside. Read the paper and promptly took a nap.

When I woke up and wiped the drool from my chin and ruffled my helmet-headed hair, I realized...Granny will live to ride again. My ass, unfortunately, may not.