Me and two of my club brothers made a run down to San Diego today to do a poker run one of our MC’s chapters was throwing. We’ve made the run down to San Diego together quite a few times before but I don’t think I’ve ever done it faster. It’s 140 miles each way and we hauled ass today — we left Burbank at 7:30 and got to San Diego at 9:30. That’s two hours from start to finish, with a gas stop and cigarette break along the way. We were balls to the wall, boy, lemme tell ya. I don’t know how we didn’t get a speeding ticket.
Traffic was pretty light for the ride down. We left Burbank early enough that we beat a lot of the weekend traffic, so we didn’t have to deal with much lanesplitting. Instead, we just pegged the throttle and slalomed around what little traffic there was and we beat feet. We held it around 90-95 mph for most of the way, but I clocked 105 for a quick minute near Camp Pendleton when I was trying to chase down E.E., who got a wild hair and kicked his up to 120 for a little bit.
E.E. and I left C.T. in San Diego and rode back together in the afternoon, and traffic had gotten heavier by then. It was still light, but there were enough cars clogging the road that we couldn’t ride in our standard side-by-side formation and keep a good speed, so we played follow-the-leader as we split lanes and leapfrogged each other for the lead. We had agreed to keep the speed down before we left because we knew the cops would be out in force for the holiday weekend, but that plan was history five minutes after we hit the freeway because we were running 90-95 again most of the way home. My favorite part of the run was when we were parallel lanesplitting at 95 miles an hour on opposite sides of the same lane, so we were bracketing cars as we blew by them. I think maybe we scared the crap out of a few suburban families out for a Sunday drive that way. It was a blast.
By the time I got home I had ridden about 330 miles on the day, most of it at speeds and in conditions my wife would not want to know about. But hey, what she doesn’t know (and hopefully won’t read) won’t hurt her.
I just can’t seem to ride slow, especially when I’m riding with my brothers. It’s too much fun to go fast.
