05/02/09 - Soggy Fish

Sadly I’ve reached a point in my life where I simply do not have time to ride my motorcycle. Oh I ride to work all the time, or to church, but for pleasure, rarely. This is pretty much about the same as sending me to prison for crimes I did not commit. There’s no point in blaming anyone, because no one person caused it, it just is. So when that rare day comes along in which I am free to ride it’s especially disturbing to see the weather not cooperate. On this particular day I wanted to once again try to get to the steak house in Moulton. The last time I tried this, my motorcycle blew up. When I awoke this morning it was pouring like rainy season in the Amazon. The ride had been posted for 10:45AM so I had time. The radar indicated that the northern half of the state was blanketed with rain and the southern half looked clear. So when I met the Southern Cruisers (all three of them) we decided that once again we would have to forgo Moulton and head south. Someone came up with the idea of Reds Catfish Cabin in Clay County so off we went. It sprinkled on us slightly for a while as we headed east on I-20 and just a few miles short of where we were supposed to jump off the interstate it started pouring. I pulled off and got under a gas station canopy. We discussed cutting it short and going to the shack, a popular BarBQ near the lake and just a few miles away. But Joy, our lone female rider wanted to stay the course; perhaps we would run out of the rain. She was wrong, we did stay the course, and though Reds seems close when you look on the map it is a shockingly long ride to get there. We pushed through wave after wave of torrential downpours until we didn’t care anymore. We finally arrived in between storms at Reds and were treated to their usual quality food and peanut butter pie. While we were there another storm moved over and ended. We circled westward through Clay county and eventually got back to 77 and stopped for gas. At the station we learned there were tornado warnings everywhere we had been. It seemed the devil was on our tail this day, but he missed his mark with us as we finally outran the storms up 77 and I enjoyed our one and only dry stretch from I-20 on in. At Leeds I stopped to pick up something and took off all the rain cloths and enjoyed a beautiful dry 20 minute ride home.