Road Rogue: Arkansas

I was invited to join some friends on a bike trip to the Ozarks. Some pretty nice riding there. This was a "group" ride with a total of six riders, three I knew and two are now new friends. I haven't been riding with more than one or two for years and had to learn some group etiquette.

For instance, did you know that all road-kill must be pointed out by foot, but it has to be in the travel lane. Same for gravel. Jumping up and down on one foot peg doesn't count. You're exempt if you're the last in line.

Then there's the Slinky effect. When leading on The Big Highway, I set the cruise control to the speed limit and sailed along. Only when I was bringing up the tail did I understand what the last rider had to contend with. It's impossible for any following rider to maintain an exact distance to the rider ahead; even the slightest digression is amplified by each rider. That means if the leader is running 65, the tail gunner is swinging between 50 and 80 MPH. Yikes. Now I know why those parades of cruiser bikes are so perpetually slow - to keep the rear from having to swing so far over the speed limit to keep up. Duh. It's not their fault, unless you blame them for parading in the first place. I always thought it was because of their flags.

We rented a nice cottage three miles back on a steep twisty gravel road near Jasper. The two of us with GS's had a heyday, the others not so much. The week in the cottage was book-ended by two travel days punctuated with motels. Motels? Yeah, for only a week of travel, my expandable saddlebags were in retract mode and my duffel so empty I had to use extra straps to keep it in place. Nice. The unsuspecting observer would never notice the espresso machine. Not sure suspension pre-load was even necessary on the way down but I had to crank it up on the way home to reduce sag from a week of junk food binging and stops at the Ozark Cafe.

We rode Ozark roads every day and in the evenings watched MotoGP races or skanky ~~C-grade~~ D-grade biker movies featuring the likes of cross-dressing, bikini-clad biker gangs.

The grand finale was a stop at the National Motorcycle Museum in Anamosa, IA. I've wanted to go there for years but never remembered when I was pondering places to ride. AND I saw the real Roadog!!!