Last weekend, Julie attended the Mid-Atlantic Womens’ Motorcycle Rally in Front Royal, VA. I’d never been before and it was just tons of fun. I took the purple girl.
Not a lot of cargo space on that bike! The saddlebags are probably less than…15L each and were full of my day-to-day stuff and tools/compressor, and then I had the two small duffel bags and my blue work laptop sandwiched between them.
So Wed 6/19 I headed out late (>8p) and stopped at the Sheetz in Haymarket for gas. At the pump next to me was a gentleman with a bumblebee-themed camaro and he came over to look at my bike. He told me that he’d lost his 16 yr old daughter and that her favorite color was purple. We got talking about bikes and muscle cars for a little bit. See, my friends all know that I have a thing about strangers approaching me. It happens ridiculously often and I don’t particularly like it because it’s usually creepy. (I did finally find some self-defense lessons and need to have the time & energy to commit to a class.) But it’s a little different when I’m on my bike. First if all, if I’m out with Jaron, people usually talk to him, even if it’s about MY bike. If he goes inside and I’m by myself with both bikes & its obvious I’m there with someone, people come and talk to me, and then they go away when he comes back — 9/10 times. If someone approaches me when I’m out by myself and is just using it as an excuse to talk to me, I end the conversation. But when they show genuine & knowledgeable interest in my bike I will talk to them about it. I had a guy come up and just look at my bike and not even talk to me once, that was great. Anyway I wear so much gear that I feel much less vulnerable in these situations.
Thursday morning I went on a group ride. We went through the George Washington national forest and it was just gorgeous and fun. The weather was perfect all weekend. Thursday afternoon I was looking in the app that the event used to post maps of the group rides and I picked up someone to go with me on one. She rode a blue Honda Shadow Aero, same as my dad’s bike.
After that I was cooling off in the hotel lobby and got talking with another lady (turns out she’s my soul sister, we had literally 10 uncommon things in common) and I went to dinner with her & her friend. By then my friend was getting close so I went back to my hotel to catch up with her. (The four of us are going to share a hotel room next year.)
We met at a women riders day event at my BMW dealership over a year ago and have been 2 places overnight together on our bikes, and spent the entire day this year after a women riders day event gallivanting around the DC area together. We’re also going to do the Women Riders’ World Relay together in September. She rides a blue Triumph Tiger xRt (newer version of my orange bike), and her name is Diana in honor of Wonder Woman.
Friday morning I went on a longer group ride with a smaller group to tour the Belmont Farm Distillery and get lunch in Culpeper, VA. We ended up with a short stretch of loose gravel road to get there, which is not the purple girl’s thing, but it was straight so it was fine. I used what I have learned from off-road training and doing gravel at slow speeds in 2nd gear really does kick up fewer rocks. The other women in the group were on much bigger and heavier bikes. The parking lot was packed gravel. As soon as people got parked, they got off their bikes to help others back up in the gravel to park, but waited for me to ask for help. It was clearly like a normal thing for people to help each other out that way. I haven’t done much group riding and this was a nice thing to realize.
On Saturday I also talked to and joined the Women’s Coalition of Motorcyclists, an organization that supports women representation in the motorcycling community, especially women wanting to become instructors. We talked about my doing a podcast for them about making your bike fit as a smaller person. In a lot of these lady rider FB groups I’m in, people 5’2” and under ask what they should ride so I recommend bikes and also modifications you can make to the bike itself and your riding skills to make it work. So I’ve been thinking about that outline and working it out in my head.
There were two other notable women riders there. Alisa Clickenger is putting on the Suffragists Centennial Ride next year (2020) from San Francisco to DC and is the author of Boosting your Confidence through Motorcycling. And, Tamela Rich is the author of Hit the Road. I actually got in to a conversation with her at my hotel and didn’t realize she was an author until later. I didn’t get a chance to buy her book so she could autograph it, but I will read it on kindle.
If fact, I used it for the second time ever during the parade. We had a parade with a police escort on Saturday. I’d never ridden in a motorcycle parade before. Usually when something happens that merits a horn honk, I am too busy dealing with a situation to honk my horn. But during the parade, one intersection was missing a road guard (turns out there was some confusion and a minor bike sideswiping involving one of my new friends and that’s why) and a car was trying to turn in to our parade line. There was obviously no space to turn in our parade line, and riders were holding up a “stop” hand, but this is why there are road guards. So as I swerved to avoid this car, I blared my horn.
So group riding is just a different experience. You’re enjoying the scenery, but you are keeping track of everyone to keep the spacing right rather than just going whatever speed you want and being wherever you want to be within the lane, and looking out for each other. If you are not the last person and you don’t have anyone behind you, you are supposed to wait for them, which means you need to keep an eye on them. If someone is dropping back, you split the distance between them and the person in front of you. I got a lot better at hand signals, because a lot is happening during a group ride and it was helpful to have more of a heads up when turning and whatever, so you need to pass them back. The trick is to figure out when to do which signal. Turn signal first, then hand signal. If using your left hand, you have to have to be in gear and have the throttle somewhat steady. If using your right hand, you have to have the clutch pulled in so you can’t be in a situation where you need power from the engine. Using the right hand for a “slow down” signal means that you can’t use your right hand for the front brake so that doesn’t always work out. And using your feet to point out hazards changes the wind drag and your balance. Lane position is hard to remember when behind a trike (which rides in the middle of the lane), which I found out.
This was definitely a cruiser event (95%), which I picked up from the promotional material and I was happy to take the purple girl to her kind of event. It was probably 75% Harleys, and most riders wore leather vests and jeans (and definitely looked like total bad ass bitches). There were some armored jackets, 3/4 and full-face helmets, but I was definitely one of only a few people in full gear and armored pants. But guess what? Nobody asked me if it was hot in all of that gear (validating my theory that it’s just a precursor to making fun of people who wear protective gear — because it WAS 90 degrees during the parade). We all verbally appreciated each other’s stylistic choices on our bikes, and there was no brand rivalry. I feel like this kind of stuff that we run in to sometimes is more of a toxic masculinity issue than a motorcycle community issue, you know?
I was just on a high the entire weekend. It was so much fun. So awesome to be in the midst of similar people, it happens so rarely for me.
The four of us planning to share a hotel room next year all live around DC, so we all rode home together on Sunday. We had a great long breakfast on the way and talked about where people would turn off for their exits to go home. I just didn’t want the day to end and screwed around all day with my new soul sister. We got ice cream and then got some crabs to eat at her house, and I didn’t get home until 9pm. Monday was kinda brutal…but it was worth it!
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