Beer, Breafast, and Bike

Thursday evening, my phone pings.  Hey, someone is texting me!  It's Matty - he's planning to ride to CT to buy beer on Saturday, am I around/interested?  Hell yeah - and my schedule is open too!  Let's do this!   Saturday morning dawned with a bit of a chill in the air, but the sky was pleasant and the forecast was decent.  We rolled out of Matt's driveway with high hopes on the day...   ...just as I'm sure the driver of this car did, when he headed out that morning.  No idea what the back story on this was, but when we got to it, there was a cop car blocking the slow lane of travel, and there were folks standing further back up on the road, so it looked like everyone was safe.  The white spray patter on the pavement under the front of the car gave the impression that a fire extinguisher had been tried, but as you can tell from the pic; the fire was winning.

As we passed by the car, I turned back and looked - the front end was even more engulfed than it looks in the pic.  I think it's safe to say the car was a goner.

Furhter along, we were hammering down Rte 91 and my bike started acting up even worse than it had been.  Really skipping and lurching, even to the point of almost stalling at one point.  Yep - the saga continues, but more on that later.

Ta da!  We made it!!  New England Brewing Company!

This place has some awesome label art for their beers, and they've framed and mounted some of the more popular ones.  I snapped pics of the ones I liked.

The Neighbor of the Beast - the font is done in the same style as Iron Maiden's album cover of the same name - very cool!

I didn't pick up on this, but Craig (our newest friend, and purveyor of beer samples) pointed out that the background on this label is the exact same pattern on the rugs in The Shining.  It's little touches like this that really are impressive!

Imperial Stout Trooper - this is the one I'd had my hopes up for trying, but alas; their stouts (and a fantastic porter, we were told) are done as a seasonal thing.  No problem, we'll just have to pencil in a return trip in the Fall!

Premeditated Murder.  A group of crows is called a Murder.  Here in this label, a crow is thinking (premeditating) about a Murder of crows.  This stuff is ingenious!!

The beer!  We loved the little glasses the samples came in, and the beer wasn't too bad at all.  Being the start of Summer, their beers on tap were all of the hoppy style - not really my thing, but still, the beer was enjoyable.  I really am looking forward to coming back and trying their stout and porter.

They had little shelves on the walls, all the way around the tasting room, and they were lined with cool and funny cans & bottles.  Some were their own beers, many were from other breweries.

Here's where the magic happens.  Craig was off to the side helping someone else when I snapped the pic.  He was a really cool guy.  Laid back, funny to talk with.

We'd tasted all the beers and I figured we'd be rolling soon.  Matty threw a large bill into their tip jar and headed off to the bathroom to prep for the departure.  I strolled outside to snap the obligatory bike pic, and Zig stuck around inside to finish off his beer sample.

But then...what's this?  Zig popped his head out and said Craig said we could have one more - sweet!

Here's the troublemakers, doing what they do...

We shot the breeze with Craig for a bit more and were prepping to head out.  We'd procured directions to an apparent great restaurant down the street, and were going to grab some grub before hitting the road.  Then kinda of suddenly, Craig just turned around and walked into the back room.  (shrug)...ok, I guess we're done here.

But then he came back...and he was holding somerthing...couldn't see what it was, due to it being wrapped in a plastic bag.

He walked up with a surreptitious air about him, lowered his voice and said "Because you guys rode all the way here..." and then opened the bag and then unwrapped some ancient looking paper to reveal two bottles - one was a bourbon barrel aged Imperial Stout, and the other was a Belgian style ale.

He explained that these were "out of print" so to speak, that they'd been hugely popular and that the brewery only had a few bottles of this stuff left and enjoyed them on special occasions.  What a grand gesture on his part, to gift us two bottles of their own private, secret stash!!  How F'ng cool is that!!

You can bet you ass we'll be back in the Fall!!

Jumping forward to Sunday.  Our Legion Riders chapter is putting on a charity run at the end of June, and we needed to lock in a route to take folks on.  We'd pitched some ideas and this morning we'd be doing recon to see how things flowed and see what the condition of the roadways were.

Rally time at the Post was 7am.  7am?!?!  There'd been some grumbling about such an early time, but to our surprise; 7am came, and we had NINE bikes!  That's impressive!!

We ran the route and things went well, overall.  Some of the turns were too sharp, so we made some adjustments and will use a route that is softer and safer for a run.

The only real notable thing that happened was that my bike - acting up even worse than the day before, decided to completely cut out when I was taking a very shap right turn.  Thankfully, my speed was almost nil, but the lean was pretty steep due to the sharpness of the turn.  Well, when you lose power from the engine, you lose centripetal force...which means the bike falls over.  Again, thankfully I was going very slowly, so I managed to plop the bike down gently enough that there wasn't any damage...other than to my ego...and a bruised ego is great motivation for picking a bike up and getting rolling again.

The bike did stall again, later on at a stop sign.  Dare I say I've reached my limit with this thing?  But again; more on that later.

Breakfast!  The other half of this morning's agenda was to grab breakfast after doing the recon.  Our Road Captain said he knew of a great place and off we headed.  The place was pretty busy, but we lucked out and found a few parking spots clumped together and got ourselves lined up pretty well.

Look at all this food!  Only $9!  I think I'm going to have to put this place on my regualr-visit list..

Everyone had things to do so after breakfast we broke up and headed off in our own directions.

My bike was doing an almost-constant skip/misfire and I just wanted to get it home.  I'd done a little more research on-line and I'm now looking at replacing the spark plug wires (even though this (2nd hand) bike only has 50k miles on it).

Have you looked at the plug wires?  They're not like the old bikes where the wires were about 6" long.  These run under the tank and are clipped to the frame.  Wonderful.  Thankfully, unbolting the gas tank at the bottom and jacking it up seems to give enough access room.

Here's a shot looking up under the tank, you can see the clips that hold the rear jug's wire in place.  The front wire is going to be a little tricky - I may need to unbolt the front of the tank as well, but I'm going to see if I can succeed without doing that.

So where does this leave me?  It leaves me very frustrated with a bike that has had a misfire problem for almost an entire year.  A bike that I've thrown about $5,000 into, in an effort to fix the problem.  Granted, some of the work also gave me upgraded performance, but the bottom line is the problem still exists.  I've had the bike at two local mechanics, as well as an official HD dealership.  And no one can find the problem, let alone fix it.

So I've come to the decision that if the new plug wires don't fix the problem, I am getting rid of the bike.

As I said to Matty; I'm not going to lose any more riding time because of an unreliable bike.  Life's too short.

Wish me luck.