[CR]Dan's vintage ride

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Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2005 16:33:48 -0400
To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
From: "Larry Osborn" <losborn2@wvu.edu>
Subject: [CR]Dan's vintage ride

Greetings campers

First time to Dan's bash for me, due in large part to the distance I have to travel, and always something else more urgent that I need to be doing somewhere else. But well worth making it the priority event / destination this year. Great company and plenty of it, gracious hosts, nice ride (hills were kinda wimpy, but it is only eastern MD. Sometimes I forget how flat the rest of the world is.) an assortment of stunning/interesting/funky bikes. Everybody brought a terrific sense of fun with them. A fine way to spend a day. A small gathering, yet I still manage to not connect names I know with faces I don't. Still working on it. And always new people to meet.

Slightly embarrassing being lapped by a guy on a 3-spd, but I can always claim I was saving some calories for Sunday. And 30 years ago when I was younger and healthier and as fit as I've ever been, I was passed by a one-legged guy, so I've been pretty hard to embarrass since then. (Take your best shot.). Before Phil 3-SPD dropped me he asked about any Raleigh / Dunelt connection, and having no answer I did my best Cliff Clavin imitation, cluttering his mind with a probably unanswerable and certainly unimportant question about the significance of the squirrel on the Dunelt headbadge, which is about all I know about Dunelts. Always fun messing with other people's minds.

And always fun to observe CRers in their native habitat, and discover what other personality quirks are lurking there. In this case I discovered that Dan (and also Wayne B) are also woodworkers. As things were breaking up there was an off-topic discussion about how to transport a large heavy cherry burl or two without damaging the vintage bike already safely inside the vehicle, but no consensus was reached so the burls had to stay behind. For now. Maybe next trip. MMMMMmmmm burls.

Constantly hassled Paul Raley about riding what I hope may someday be MY Jack Taylor in the rain showers, while feeling somewhat smug about having the foresight to bring a bike that was already dirt and rust colored. Little victories. But those turned out to be the only shower I got because the power was off when I got home, compliments of mother nature or some drunken bozo driving into a utility pole again somewhere up the line. Wellll, so what. Just going out for another ride tomorrow. Too many opportunities for fun. So after a few hours sleep, already tired and aromatic, and not enough hills on Dan's ride to meet my weekly quota for self abuse, I put my water wings back on and "led" a club group over Mighty Mt Davis a couple times in southwestern PA. One of my favorite rides, and it was time to expose a new group to it. (People from a PA club. People who didn't know me, and my neighborhood terrain. 15 more people who know me now, and will never ride with me again.). Nobody from my usual WV gang showed up so I guess the word is out there. Perhaps it's time to adopt an alias for use in the ride schedules. But I digress. I relate this story because after that ride a couple survivors were discussing some of the fancy bikes they saw, and I hadn't seen the bikes they were talking about. I hadn't seen ANY of the bikes. I realized then how immediate and complete the shift had been, going from being totally tuned in to everybody's bikes at Artley's on Saturday, to being totally tuned out to everybody's modern bikes the next day. Definitely trying to function in parallel dimensions. Every day is a new mind warp.

Thanks again to Dan & Barb for fun-filled day.

Larry "thrills & hills, with no spills" Osborn Clean and fluffy again, in Bruceton Mills, WV