The Ride Report

I took my daughter out for a ride with my club this weekend. One of the guys has a connection with the organizers of A Day in the Dirt and could get us in for free (which is exactly how much I think everything should cost), so he was speaking my language. We met up at Bob’s Big Boy in Toluca Lake and then rode the twisties through Angeles National Forest to get to the racetrack in Palmdale.

My club as a group tends to ride pretty fast, especially in the twisties. One guy said once, on one of his first rides with us over this same route, “Jesus Christ, are we riding or racing?” We were just riding, but he’s from Texas where I guess you mostly go straight, so I suppose his confusion was understandable. Another guy earned the road name Slider when he, uh, slid on a ride through the twisties with us. He couldn’t hold his line through a tight right-hander and slid off the road and across a driveway until he finally hit a mailbox that stopped him. Amazingly enough, he walked away unscathed and his bike’s $3,000 paint job didn’t get a scratch — he just bent back his crashbar.

Anyway, my point is that we go fast. But I had my little girl with me, so I took it easy. I told the guys I’d ride sweep because I didn’t want anyone in my mirrors breathing down my neck, and I rode “safe and sane” for a change. I kept up pretty well at first, but the group slowly started pulling away as they hammered through turns that I eased into after them, and after awhile they were far ahead of us. At one point we were able to look across the canyon and see them flying along on the other side. I took it so easy that a friend who was following us in a car caught up to me.

We finally caught up to the group when they stopped to wait for us, and I asked my daughter how she was doing. I thought she might be a little nervous with the speed or the windy conditions that were making the ride a little squirrely. I wanted to make sure she was having a good time.

She was not having a good time: I was going too slow. She didn’t like that everyone had to wait for us. She especially didn’t like the part when we looked across the canyon and saw the rest of the group far ahead of us. She was very emphatic about what we needed to do:

“Go faster, Dad.”

So for the rest of the day, I did.

It’s pretty sad when your own daughter calls you out in front of your friends. I’m just sayin’…