Off and Crawling Like a Herd of Turtles

March Break.
Speed Week.
Bike Week
8-way.
Z-Team.
Sun.
Beaches.
Lots and lots of Beaches.
Motorcycles.
Lots and lots of Motorcycles.
No Snow.
Two weeks with my Honey.
Did I mention Beaches?

How many reasons do you need to go to Florida in March? Any one of the above
would do it, add them all together, and there really is no choice.

"Go South Young Man." She said. "Take the Bikes with you, and I shall meet
you there!" Well, that's not really what she said, but I have enjoyed
telling people that Nathalie is sending me ahead with the toys so she can
just fly down, get on her BMW, and ride off into the sunset. Truth is I
volunteered.

I'm leaving a few days early, dragging a trailer with the bikes on it, and
will drop them in Skydive City before picking the Redhead up at the airport.
The only luggage she is bringing with her is a purse, I'm bringing
everything else. 6 Days cruising on two wheels through Florida and the Keys,
4 days jumping with a carefully selected 8-way team, 4 days with Z-team, and
then drop the Girl at the airport before I begin my drive back home.

There will be a minor detour on the return trip. Deals Gap, "Tail of The
Dragon", rated the Best Motorcycle Road in North America. 11 Miles, 311
Corners. As long as I'm passing by (It'll only be a few hundred kilometers
out of my way) and I happen to have my Bike with me, it would be a shame to
pass it up. Check it out on YouTube.

There's a few problems with the plan. The first one is the idea of doing
60-ways. That is 56 more people than I'm usually in the air with. I figure
the level of complexity and the stress and danger level increases
exponentially every time you double the size of the formation. But that's
not the big problem.

Problem number two is towing a trailer loaded with a pair of motorcycles all
the way to Florida when the only thing I've ever towed was a wagon with my
little brother in it behind my first bicycle. It ended badly. There are no
brakes on a wagon. Come to think of it, there are no brakes on this trailer.
I swore at the time that I would never tow anything ever again. That's also
not the big problem.

Another problem is my bike. My FZ6S, my lean, mean, high-performance,
high-speed machine, capable of accelerating fast enough to reverse the
direction of a persons blood flow. Even sitting still it looks like it's
going 200 km/h.

Or I should say, it used to. To prepare for this trip I made a few
alterations, most of them minor and not readily discernable, like the
addition of a gel seat and a slightly higher windshield better suited to
highway driving. And saddlebags. It's now sissified, turned into a geek by
the addition of the saddlebags. They look as out of place as a roof rack
would be on a Ferrari. A necessary evil for this kind of trip, but at what
cost? My Street Fighter has become a Commuter Sport. We're going to arrive
in Florida at the height of Bike Week, the entire state awash in some of the
fastest, coolest, most up to date customized one-of-a-kind motorcycles on
the road, and me with my Geekmobile. It's like taking one of the cool kids
and sending him off to his first day at a new school dressed in a shirt and
tie, wearing a pocket protector and carrying a briefcase. I can picture it
already. The other motorcycles will surround us as soon as we arrive,
teasing and taunting like a crowd of children at recess. "Who dressed you
this morning? Your Mommy?" Before I know it I'll have a "Give me a parking
ticket" sign stuck on my back.They'll probably make us park with the Mopeds.

I spent last summer learning how to lean that thing over so far in the
corners that I had started scraping the foot pegs (they make those things
spring loaded for a reason), the more you lean, the faster you can go. If I
tried that now I'd be grinding on the luggage long before I got it over to a
decent angle. I know I'm probably reading too much into it, but the first
Harley that looks at us sideways is going to have a problem on it's hands.

Needless to say the saddlebags will be removed by the time I show up at
Deals gap.

But that's not the real problem either. The one thing that has me more
worried than towing a trailer to Florida, Big-Ways, or the state of my Bike,
is getting across the border. I'll be driving my truck which is registered
to my business, a numbered Ontario company, towing a trailer registered to
me, loaded with a pair of motorcycles one of which is registered in Quebec
to someone who isn't with me. I'll have four ownership slips with three
different names on them. This shouldn't raise any red flags at all with a
guy who has the power to order me to submit to a body cavity search and have
all the vehicles with me disassembled. The icing on the cake will when the
border guard asks the purpose of my visit. They never seem to believe me
when I tell them I'm travelling thousands of miles to go skydiving. "You're
goin' where, to do what? Who owns this numbered company? Al-Qaida? And you
say the other Motorcycle belongs to your girlfriend? Would that be the
imaginary girlfriend I can't see with you? Pull it over there sir, step
inside to room number 3 and strip." he'll say as he snaps on a pair of
rubber gloves.

Every trip brings a whole new adventure.

Just in case I have brought every single piece of paperwork I can think of.
My passport and drivers license, photocopies of Nathalie's passport and
drivers license, ownerships and insurance slips for everything, a printout
of Nathalie's plane ticket, and a note from her giving me permission to go across
the border with her bike. I'd have gotten a note from my mom saying I'm
allowed to go on a field trip 'cept she's on a field trip of her own and
can't be reached.

I promise to drive slowly and take no chances on the drives down and back,
but once I'm there I make no promises. I will keep in mind that there are
two miles of ditches for every one mile of road. Except in the Gap where
there are no ditches at all, just rocks and trees. I really do need to buy a
full set of leathers.

The thing I can't get over is that I finally own half a trailer and I can't
even sleep in the damn thing!

Wish us luck!
Larry (and Nathalie, in a few days)