The Saturday just passed was the first day of what I would call great weather for 2009. After a winter like the one we’ve had, there’s only one thing to do – go riding. So Pam and me blew off the gym and headed down to Long Branch Harley-Davidson for their annual open house. As H-D dealerships go, they’re a good bunch of folks and I’ve been known to take my business there even though they’re out of the way.
The local traffic was heavy. Gas prices have dropped to less than half what they were last year so hitting the road isn’t quite the expense it was. But soon we had filled the wallet with cash, tank with 93 octane and left the local roads for the freeway. I settled into an easy cruise, about 65-70 MPH, and stretched my legs, one hand on the throttle and the other on my leg. I usually like to be moving a little bit faster than the prevailing traffic – it’s less stressful to be overtaking traffic than the other way around – but this felt great and I wanted it to last.
Way too soon we were off the freeway and into the local traffic stream in Eatontown, which absolutely sucks in the best of circumstances. There’s this several mile stretch of route 36 between 18 and Broadway that’s full of traffic lights, timed such that you hit each one – several times. It’s always choked with traffic and it can literally take 20 minutes to cover two miles. It’s a moneymaker, too. I’ve never NOT seen police in the area, lights a flashing. We sweated our way through it. I mentally calculated how many degrees I might lose with better fuel management, perhaps an oil cooler, while cursing the EPA.
We parked right outside the dealership and joined the fray. Wow, what a crowd! It was lunchtime so we queued up for a couple of sodas and footlongs while the band played. The guy manning the grill was obviously a graduate of the r.plav school of incineration! Say, wasn’t that one of the parts guys playing bass? I chuckled to myself. The Harley crowd’s an older crowd, mostly aging Boomers. The songs being played were probably written before most of the band members were born!
We wandered the merchandise inside and out, but neither of us found anything to buy. That’s sort of unusual; we usually come away with at least a t-shirt or two. I didn’t feel too bad about it though because the lines to each register were quite long. There was very respectable amount of business being done. You’d hardly think that the economy was in the toilet.
After a while we hit the road again. Our next stop was the Northeast Motorcycle Expo in Somerset. We worked our way back through that stretch of hell – er, route 36 – and got back onto route 18. Again, we took it easy. We’d get to Somerset soon enough.
