A splendid Fall weekend

This was a most satisfactory weekend.

Friday night, my landlady who loves motorcycles, Susan, and I met motorcycling friends Todd & Christie Sudda for grog and bison burgers at Silver Spring's Piratz tavern. We made plans to ride to Deleware for Sunday's "Pumpkin Chuckin" contest. Saturday had a very slow beginning due to the grogg of the night before. Grogg, our waitress dressed like a pirate wench explained to us, is basically rum, rum... more rum and a touch of ginger beer. She explained what real grog used to be and we were glad that we were enjoying the modern-day variety.

The cats were glad to have me for a Saturday morning. By noon, however, I had to ride. So, I had been inspecting the roads around Mercersburg, PA and happened to run into a couple who lived there via the StumbleUpon (SU) social network. We ended up meeting for bugers a Murphy's tavern then went next door to Buchanan's Birthplace Restaurant for desert. I had met the owners of the restaurant on a previous ride through there and wanted to check it out. We enjoyed cheesecake with blackberry sauce that they made on-site, along with New Orleans coffee, something I acquired a taste for years ago at Adams Morgan's now defunct Franklyn's Coffee Shop and Restaurant (once the center of my universe). As we enjoyed our desert we got to spy on what was arriving at the tables of other diners, and we agreed to return soon for more visiting.

You never know what you might find, meeting strangers you've met on-line. This encounter was a testimony to the strength of being able to find some with whom I had a surprising number of things in common. Brian is a motorcycle safety instructor and has a collection of over a dozen guitars and other stringed instruments. He lived in Billings Montanna and is one of the few people I know who knew who Kris Kristopherson is. He was able to tell me some of the story of Johny Cash discovering him and bringing him to fame -- something I had not known.

Sherrie and he have been married only since last Summer and it was obvious that they had done a good job of finding each other over a long distance. An Internet success story.

Pumpkin Chuckin was pretty awesome, also. There was some drama as my bike developed some brake problems. A warning light came on and it took me a some time after pulling over to realize it was not the oil indicator and to determine that it had to do with the brakes. The rear brake light wasn't working and if I used the rear brakes, all power assisted braking would fail. It took some observation to figure out that I could get by if I only used the front brake. Inspection tells me that the culprit is an improperly routed wire from the brake switch that got too close to the cylinder heads. There are some recent graduates working at my dealer and perhaps they were in too much of a hurry when my fluids were recently refreshed.

The bike has over 76,000 miles on it, almost 77,000.

A visit to the Chromeheads web site shed more light on the problem and the likely fix. So, the bike is at the dealer's as of late last night and I'll have to get by until Wednesday without it, given my work schedule, teaching Microsoft classes Tuesday & Thursday nights, and needing to meet Todd for his initiation into the masons at lodge, tonight.