04/22/07 - Saints and Saban Weekend

Its been a while since I’ve been on a trip so this weekend I had both days planned. Saturday was Alabama’s annual A day game. I and some friends rode our bikes down to Tuscaloosa, we sailed right past the folks holding up $20 signs for parking and found a nice shady tree next to the stadium. There were 92,000+ folks in the stadium that day, and they estimate they had to turn away 10,000 more at the gate. For an A day game that’s a 9.5 on the Richter scale. But enough about that. The next morning was Sunday and we had a special biker breakfast at the church planned. This ride would have guys from the church and guys from the Southern Cruisers. This was a bit weird to me since the church guys are.. church people, and the Southern Cruisers could drink themselves out of a beer filled pool before drowning with a cinder block tied to their waste. Plus the Southern Cruisers have gotten more and more into long distance touring while many of the guys at church are relatively new to the hobby. I thought about it for a while and came up with a route that circled North East Alabama around I-59 so that anyone who got tired could drop out when they wanted. Plus to make matters more complicated, the preacher wanted to meet up with us after church. So I got there Sunday morning and expected maybe 15 or 20, Try about 40 bikes. I was glad I brought the Goldwing since I knew I would need the radio. We had a great breakfast and we were off. Many of the Southern Cruisers had radios so they were a great help keeping everything together. We had to make more stops than normal just because of the different tank sizes etc, but I was dragging my feet anyway hoping the preacher could catch us. We eventually stopped in Mentone and Rodney the preacher and a few others caught up with us there. We left there and went some way over to the top of Guntersville lake I had not done before. It was a beautiful day with 80 degree temps and partly cloudy sky. Everyone was enthralled by the lake side road along Guntersville lake and as we approached within half an hour of Guntersville I was actually ON TIME. We stopped at a gas station for one last fill up and that’s when things got a little weird. We followed the GPS to the right of the gas station. The GPS said this road went to Guntersville but after about 5 miles. It just freaking stopped! Right in the middle of nowhere. I’ve never had the GPS be wrong before, this was a first. Anyway, what can you do, we turned around and went back and took the left fork which did take us around to Guntersville State park. As we came out of the park in Guntersville the GPS told me to turn left to get to the Top of the River fish house. In front of me was this really REALLY steep hill. I went up to the top and as I approached the top I let off because I couldn’t see where the road went. Well surprise! Error number two for the GPS, the road ENDED! The other side of the hill was dirt. And it was every bit as steep the other way too. I screamed into the radio to stop, don’t come up the hill, thankfully most never made it to the steep hill because if they had tried to stop on it they would have surely fallen over. As it stood about 6 of us went over the top and wound up down on the other side a bit. We all just sat there clenching our handlebars for a few minutes trying to figure out how we were going to get out of this. Finally we all got turned around and back up the hill. I was pretty darn exasperated at this point having had my trusty GPS try to kill me, but we continued on to the Top of the River. We had some issues getting seated as their was an old ladies convention going on and there were more blue hairs than you could see at the Ford dealer after a recall on Lincoln town cars. Finally were were seating and had some good food, the sun was going down as we left and the familiar cold began to creep back in. We had to stop twice for one couple who actually wore t-shirts, they didn’t even have a jacket! Gosh, was I ever that unprepared? I’m sure I was, which is why I am prepared for any weather now. You tend not to forget those things. Mental note, Don’t follow your GPS through Guntersville.