PBP

This past Sunday (yesterday), we hadn't found a charity run going on in the near vicinity, so we came up with a fantastic "Plan B". We were going to check out the Pot Belly Pub, in Millville, MA. The rally point was changed to my house for this one, and the invites were extended. Matt was lighting up the phone and text lines, trying to get as many folks involved as possible. For you see; Matt had scoped the route out on Saturday, he'd made friends with our soon-to-be benefactor (more on him, later), and had assured said benefactor that there would be a ton of us showing up on Sunday. Poor Matt. He should have known better, for we Riders are a fickle bunch.

So there we were; 10am (the designated rally time) and it's just Matt and I, sitting in my driveway and waiting for the throngs of bikes to begin showing up. But the only things that began arriving were cancellation texts and phone calls. Ahhh yes, this is more like what we've come to expect. At 10 after 10, we cracked our first beer and settled in for the wait. Danno was due at some point in time, and said he may even have other riders with him. Ok then; we wait. Besides, not all was lost; we had our other friend to keep us company. Our other friend; Bud Light. And fortunately for us, he'd brought 29 of his brothers and sisters with him. So I guess you could say we had quite a crowd going, after all.

By the time Danno (and friends) arrived, Matt and I had managed to put quite a dent in Bud Light's family tree. Danno and company, having apparently already been introduced to Bud Light previously that morning, had no trouble making the transition to our gathering, and more blue-tinted cans were left in our wake.

The day's heat was beating down and we realized that we should really hit the road if we were to make any progress on the day at all. So with that, the bikes were fired, the kickstands were raised, and off we went.

A nice smooth ride, a fair amount of sweeping turns, a too-short tease of helmet-free Rhode Island, and we were pulling into the parking lot of what is now my favorite bar around. I present to you, the Pot Belly Pub!
Here, bikes are lined up and we're getting ready to rock and roll..

And now for some background info. The guy running this shindig is called The Mayor, and is one hell of a great guy. He normally doesn't start cooking until 1pm, but he'd shown up early for us, expecting an early arrival on our part. Despite him having showed up (for nothing) two hours earlier than our actual arrival time, he was in great spirits, was genuinely happy to make our acquaintance, and set about to getting the food ready for us. Oh yeah; did I mention that he gives the food away? Burgers, dogs, pasta salad, potato salad, chips, cheese, dip, etc. All free! He does it because he loves the biker lifestyle, and loves giving bikers a fun and biker-friendly envronment where bikers can come and relax. Frikkin' sweet!

Here, Danno and The Mayor exchange stories.
Here, the Mayor and our new friend Mark hang out and share laughs (all while the evidence piles up around us...)

As mentioned previously, the day's heat was blasting down on us pretty hard, so we decided to go inside and get some shade. Well the Mayor came through for us again; "I've got a pool table downstairs" he says. Turns out it's more than just a pool table, it's a function room. He only charges people $50 to use it for any kind of function they want. Where the hell can you get a function room that has a fully-loaded bar, a pool table, juke box, etc...all for only $50?? I tell ya, this place keeps gettin better and better. But back to our day; he says we can go hang out there and play pool if we want. Hell yeah! So off we went.

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On the way down to the room, I see this sign posted above the stairs and just had to snap a pic. In case you can't make out the words, it says;

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THIS IS A FUND RAISER

"I'm only staying for a few minutes"......."Sorry; $10"

"I'm not eating."........................................."Sorry; $10"

"I forgot my ticket."..................................."Sorry; $10"

"I just have to talk to someone.".............."Sorry; $10"

"I donated food."........................................"Sorry; $10"

"I just want to use your phone.".............."Sorry; $10"

"I'm just running in for a quick drink."..."Sorry; $10"

"I know the owner."..................................."Sorry; $10"

"I'm Billy's friend."....................................."Real Sorry: $100"

"If I forgot anything."................................"Sorry; $10"

Here's the bar area - nice, huh? I wonder if it's too late to change my basement around...

The pool table...

Looking up, we found that not only was it tolerated for folks to graffiti the ceiling with pool chalk, but that it seemed encouraged.

Not to be outdone, I left my mark as well (what you can't make out is that I wrote this right above a ceiling fan. With the fan turned on, my note made sense.

Another thing the locals seeme to enjoy doing was using the palm chalk to whiten their hands and then slap them against the beams. Of course, I had to add mine to the many others that were there.

As I was wrapping up this, my latest round of mishief, I returned to the table to find another round waiting. Another new friend of ours (Slacker) had found time to bring this round down to us.

When asked why she was called Slacker, she said it's because she does so much around the place. At first we thought she was being serious, and that folks had tagged her with an appropriate name, but as the day wore on and we saw everything she did, we realized the nickname was facetious in nature.

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But this brings me to something else very cool about this place; how many bars do you know of that will let you walk away with capped beers? Sure, back in the day it was common practice, but now, with all the various alcohol rulings on the books, most bars have to uncap the beers before you step away from the bar. Anyway; this place lets you not only leave the caps on, but order as many as you can carry. God I loved this place!

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Here, Danno lines up a shot. At his feet were the makings of a large canopy, complete with support poles and everything. This must be how the bar tests your state of inebriation; if you can make a shot without stepping on these poles (and wiping out on your ass), then you're ok to have another beer. (Danno almost failed this test immediately following the snapping of this pic...)
Here's a shot from the parking lot, looking through the gauntlet that leads to the dungeon...er...function room.

We were having much too much fun for a Sunday afternoon and soon realized that we should probably head a bit closer to home before we continued our revelry. And what better place to head to, than the Sharon Legion! (Some of the group peeled off towards their respective homesteads, but a few of us die-hards kept the day's theme moving forward.)

We settled in and picked up where we'd left off at the last place. During conversation, I remembered that Danno was quitting smoking today! In fact, he had with him the very last cigarette he'd be smoking. He lit it up proceeded to enjoy it...wait...what the hell?? Oh well, I guess smoking them this way will help reduce your odds of lung cancer.

At one point, we found ourselves with an extra, unclaimed soldier once again. And once again; it was Matt to the rescue...

In summation; we had a fantastic day. And I think it's safe to say that we will be making quite a few repeat appearances at the Pot Belly Pub. Thanks Mayor!!

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Oh yeah; as a parting bit of advice, don't leave your camera on the bar when you go outside to make phone calls to New York to see how your buddy is doing. Thanks Danno! LOL
Ride Hard, Take Chances

Capital None

“What’s in YOUR wallet?” the humorous barbarian asks me from the TV. Well I’ll tell ya what’s NOT in my wallet any longer; a lousy piece of plastic with Capital One’s logo on it.

But first; a bit of history, shall we? Check out my post from August 4th…2008. Go on, the link is right there on the right. Just click on the little grey arrow next to 2008 to expand it, then click on the little grey arrow next to August, and then click on "Customer Service at it's...Finest". (Yes, 2008! I should have taken the warning signs then, and run!)

Anyway, the latest saga involves my May and June statements from Capital One. Each of them claimed that my prior payment had been late, and that I therefore owed them late fees and interest. (I mail my payments 7+ days in advance, just to try and avoid this kind of nonsense.) At any rate, both times I called up customer service and had the late fees and interested removed.

In an attempt to avoid this BS from happening again, I mailed my most recent payment check 12 days before the due date! TWELVE DAYS! So imagine my surprise when I opened my July statement just now and found Capital One claiming that I never sent last month’s payment at all! So now there’s late fees, penalty, AND a black smudge on my credit report! Assholes!

I called my bank, confirmed that the check has not been cashed (I’m sure it’s sitting in someone’s drawer out at Capital One) and placed a stop payment on it (which I have to now go to the bank this afternoon and sign some paperwork on that). I then called Capital One, got transferred to a supervisor and cancelled my account. She had the courtesy to tell me that I had 7,000 ‘bonus points’ available to redeem. Excellent, what will that get me? A $25 check. Frikkin’ whoopee. I asked if this could be applied against their BS penalties and fees and she said yes. So I was transferred to the “promotional” department to take care of that. Only to then be told that I cannot redeem my points because my account is ‘red-flagged’. When I asked about that, they said it’s because I missed my last payment. (At this point, I’m beginning to get dizzy from running in so many circles.) So I transfer back to the supervisor and said forget the bonus points, I just want this account ended so that I can close the horrible chapter of my life that included Capital One, and begin my wonderful post-Capital One existence.

I got my payoff amount and will be going to the post office at lunch, where I will send this payment by Certified Mail/Return Receipt. If those F*ckers at Capital One try claiming that my payment didn’t get there in time, I’ll shove the proof so far up their ass that I’ll be able to stick my fingers through their eye sockets and wave their eyeballs around like lobster stalks.

If any of you have a Capital One card, good luck and pay close attention to your statements. To those that do not have Capital One cards; congratulations! Stay as far away from these thieves as you possibly can!!

TEP Tornado

I forgot to post a couple of pics that TEP sent me last week. Remember the pics of Carol's poor trees? The weather pattern that spawned that tornado, also kicked out this beauty.

In TEP's words;

Photos of the tornado that hit Mayville & Dewittville last Saturday at
4:45 pm ........

One photo was taken from Chautauqua Lake Estates in Dewittville as the tornado was crossing the lake after hitting Mayville and approaching the Estates. The docks & boats in the photo were trashed when the tornado hit plus several walls & roofs were taken off at the Estates and the Sword & Shield Restaurant & Golf Course Club House, next door to the Estates, are no more...

The other photo was taken from the old Sea Lion Marina across the street from us, as the tornado hit the boats & docks in the 1st photo.

Frikkin' exciting photos, wish I'd been there to see it myself (but not on the bike - riding through the Bristol tornado was enough for one weekend).

Coming and Going

This thing has been sitting at the corners of Maple St and Mechanic street in Bellingham for as long as I can remember. And every time I’d ride by, I’d think “I gotta remember to grab my camera one of these days and get some pics of this thing posted.” Well that day finally arrived; it was this past Saturday, I was on my way back from the Wine Nation place and Ta Da! I had my camera with me and I had some extra time to work with, so I pulled over and got to snapping. (Pictures, that is. Snapping pictures.)

At first glance, your mind realizes there’s something not quite right about what you’re looking at…
Hmmm…maybe if we looked at it from the other side? Nope, something is still amiss. Let’s look at the front end of this vehicle…

And if we go to the other end, we find we’re looking at the…front end? What the…

That’s right; it’s two front ends, welded together. Not too shabby, eh? I did some research on-line to figure out the make/model/year info and what you’re looking at are two Hudson Commodore front ends.

This is a 1949 front end…

And this is a 1950 front end...
You really have to look hard to find the seam along the top. Granted, the rusted condition helps to hide it, but it looks like they laid the top of the ’50 over the top of the ’49 and riveted them together. (You can see the line running kinda jagged across the top here.)
Judging from the remnants of white paint seen here in this pic, the seam was originally painted over. Would have been great to see how this thing looked way back when it was first created.

I tried getting the hoods open but no dice. I wonder if this thing ever ran? Imagine if you could drive in either direction? Probably not, though, as the steering would have been a mess. Fun to think about, though.

Shot of one of the side mirrors – now that’s sharp. Literally!
Here are some more shots...

Looking through the car, at the dashboard of the '50...

And from the other end, here's the dashboard of the '49...

Lastly; a name from so many years ago...

And there you go. A classic example of Americana. I'd love to know the history on this thing, but wasn't able to find anything on-line.

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Next up; planning on checking out a different bike night on Thursday. I'll try and get a post up on Friday with some pics.

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Ride Hard, Take Chances

What A Weekend...

Friday night found me deep in my basement, working on a top-secret project. My buddy Todd showed up and we delved deeper into the task at hand. What is this top-secret project? Why, to build a still! We’d started on this project many years ago and had made some decent progress, but things had stalled (as is often the case around here) and the whole thing was shelved. Well, I’d been moving some stuff around recently and happened to come across the box of parts and figured why not get things moving again. A phone call to Todd, and we were off and running once again.

Tools in hand, we went to work on the cooling tower aspect of the project, complete with wrapped copper tubing, compression fittings, welding…you name it. Ok, so we didn’t exactly get to the welding part because we began running into some serious setbacks with the initial design. After many variations, and even more failures, we finally looked at each other and said “Maybe we should just look into buying one of these setups on-line”. Needless to say; the project has been shelved again, and the rest of the evening was spent reducing the beer stock in my fridge.

Saturday found me doing some stuff around the house and the TV was on for background noise. An ad happened to come on about a store that had just opened up and claimed to have “the largest beer and wine selection in the state”. Now how the hell am I supposed to pass up something like that?? I noted the address, googled some directions, and I was off.
Wine Nation was the name of the place, and it was a mere hour away, in a town called Millbury. Ta Da!

I brought my camera inside but didn’t really feel comfy snapping pics so I just busied myself with perusing the various offerings. I was on a quest for stouts, and I managed to find almost a dozen different ones that looked like they would be worth checking out. I also picked up a banana bread beer, as well as a bottle of mead. I almost topped things off with a bottle of saki, but figured my wallet was going to be crying enough as it was, so I didn’t.

Here, lined up and ready, are the aforementioned stouts. I’ll do a quick blurb on each one as I work my way through them.

Saturday night found a bunch of us out and about and many beers met their fate that night.

Sunday was a charity run for family members of riders who have been killed while riding. We met at Danno’s for some of the usual pre-game libations before we headed on out to the rally point. Danno even had the foresight to pack a little travel case for us thirsty riders…
Upon arriving, we took our place in line. And there were many lines – turnout was estimated at over 600 bikes, maybe even 700. Nice! A nice day, too.
We had some time to kill before the run started and fortunately the open bar helped us kill that time in a very enjoyable fashion. But then the call came in; head to the bikes! We finished off our libations and headed back outside. But once there, we found a dilemma; we still had a few minutes of waiting! Dammit, why did they kick us out so quickly? We could have enjoyed another round of…hey, wait! We’ve got road soda’s, courtesy of Danno! Sweet! (Those poor blue and silver cans never stood a chance...)

No sooner had we put those cans to rest than the bikes started firing up and we were off. Here are the obligatory action pics…

Off to the side at one point, there were 3 huge horses who were running back and forth, tossing their manes and tails into the air. Pretty sweet.
Uh-oh, suddenly we were all braking, slower…slooooower…slowwwwwerrr…annnnd Stop. We could see everyone way up on front of us was easing over to the side and shutting down. This is never a good sign, and sure enough; a few minutes later and we could see the flashing lights of police cars and ambulances (seen over the people’s heads in this pic).

Word came back down the line that one of the riders had crossed over from his side of the lane and bumped into another rider, sending them both off into the woods. Both riders were allegedly ok, nothing broken, just bumped up a bit and were headed to the hospital to be checked out. Good, glad to hear that it wasn’t anything serious. Now, about us getting moving again? No? No. Not going anywhere, huh? Well, we can’t go forward…and this was the scene behind us...

Hmmm…we’re not going anywhere soon. And remember the condition of the road sodas we’d brought? Yeah, so that option was out. We were stuck. Fortunately, one of Danno’s buddies that was with us knew where we were and said he could get us out of there and back to the bar in short order. Sweet! We fired things up, u-turned it and headed down a side road, a few lefts, a few rights, and bammo; we were back at the bar. And just in time, too! Look who decided to join us! It’s the Captain!!

All too many of us were willing to show our best Captain pose.
Matt even found a Captain Morgan cut-out and then we had TWO Captains!
The real Captain then started handing out plastic shot glasses.
Hey Captain, these are nice and all, but how about filling them with something? Yay! Free samples!!
And look; the natives are restless and want us to drink more!
Hey, Mike is here! (He’d had problems with his bike and had missed the run, but he got things running and showed up.) And he’s got beer! (We'll let it slide that he left his lights on and that we then had to push start him when it was time to leave. We'll let that slide...because he's got BEER!)

Things were rolling along very nicely, especially since the Captain was doing his level best to get rid of the free sample stuff. He was pouring the shots as fast as he could and giving them out to anyone that wanted them. We took turns going up and grabbing shots for the entire group – 7, 8, 9 at a time! That stuff was great!

As the afternoon wore down, the parking lot had begun to thin out and we realized it was time to mosey along, ourselves. We finished our beers and started cleaning up our area when we suddenly realized there was one full soldier still with us. Matt grabbed it and pounded it in about 30 seconds.
From there, we headed to a house party that was a lot closer to home. Pulling in, we were handed beers, burgers, dogs, etc. Man, this is great!!
Uh-oh…we were missing someone. Checking my phone; I had a text from the missing party. Zig had a flat! I gave him a call to see how he was doing and they were waiting for one of Crissy’s friends to swing by with a trailer and retrieve them. A few hours later, when I texted to see how he was making out, he said ‘great’ and texted a pic of an empty beer, so I think it was safe to assume that things were back to kinda-normal.

Before too long, it was time to head on back home. Man, what a long day it was. Wish I was doing it all over again today. But alas, I’m at work today. And here at work, there are way fewer beers (and way fewer laughs) to be found. Oh well. The weekend is coming…

Oh yeah; on my trek out to the beer/wine store on Saturday, I too pics of something pretty cool. I'll get those posted up later in the week. 'Til then...

Ride Hard, Take Chances.