11/04/06 - Ride For Andy

This weekend marked the first time I have ever tried to arrange a charity ride. Some folks had suggested we do this for a member of our group Andy Handley. Andy and his wife were in a serious motorcycle accident a few months back. Some absent minded driver pulled out in front of them. Unfortunately Melissa his wife did not survive her injuries and Andy is currently wheelchair bound, but hopes four a full recovery. I guess it was going to happen that an awful lot of the details fell to me. In my attempts to finalize the details of the route there was some confusion about exactly where the stop should be at Warrior. Eventually I ran out of time and had to drive up there. So after work on a Wednesday night before the event I take off in a driving rainstorm to Warrior. I had only rain bottoms and a thin leather jacket. Amazingly despite the many rain bands I went through I never really got wet. But it was a little nasty and my rear tire is a little tread poor at the moment. That day I also learned that my parts for the Cruiser will be delayed another month so I guess I should just get used to riding the GoldWing and find a new back tire. I did find the location and got the map updated and printed by Friday. Fast forward to Saturday morning and we had a beautiful day to work with but it was cold, It was all of 30 degrees when I dressed and left at 7AM Saturday. There are over 120 members in my club and we could barely muster over 20 folks, We got a few folks from other chapters in the area and wound up with about 27 folks on the ride. It was cold that morning but by 9AM folks were stripping off layers, it got pretty warm by lunchtime. I was disappointed in the number of bikers but we did manage to raise $400 which Andy donated to his church mission fund in the name of the Southern Cruisers. The whole thing wasn’t really about the money anyway, it was about us doing something to tell Andy how much we care and how much we will miss is wife Melissa. Hopefully she was looking down on us and enjoying the show. This was my first crack at running a charity ride. Its not as easy as you might think. Bikers tend to have a "herd mentality". They tend to be creatures of habit and flock all in the same direction. So there are some big charity rides that happen every year and bikers will show up there by the hundreds. But getting them to show up to something new is very difficult. So unless you can get some marketing gimmick like hooter girls or some sports hero to show up as a guest your swimming up stream. One positive aspect of all this is I got to continue my ban on watching Alabama football. Which since they were humiliated in their own stadium by a team that fields less talent than Hoover High school it was a good thing. It seems the Shula effect has spread past the 4^th quarter and is pretty much infecting the team from kickoff onward. I fear the only thing to cure this disease is a few empty offices in Tuscaloosa and some fresh resume’s.