Lunch at Helen with John. Some hilarious discussions with John – mostly about politics and the virus.

Great time!!

Today we rode our motorbikes together. For the first time.

I think it was more than two years back when I had run into Greg and his wife Colleen in Alpharetta Green Way after my morning run and I found out that Greg is a motor biker too. I always knew him as a great colleague and an amazing runner. He and his dog runs about twice the distance in the same time as I do. (Here is a previous encounter with his dog). He and Dan Parzych were the first ones, I remember, who had encouraged me to run a marathon.

That day we had said that we should ride our bikes together sometime.

Fast forward a couple of years. This Tuesday, I ran into Greg again while running in the Big Creek Greenway. In fact, I ran about half a mile with him… at his pace!! He suggested that we should go out for a bike ride this weekend. I was so out of breath, I would have agreed to anything 🙂 Just kidding! Of course, I was excited by that. And I could not believe that we had not done it already.

This morning, Greg Jones and myself went up to Dahlonega for a great breakfast and a 100 mile ride! Turns out we are both Honda brethren. He is on a Honda 919 and I am on my CTX 700D!!

This is a snippet from a road about 15 miles from home.

I was on my motorbike – and Ballground is often a stop for me. It is a nice, small town and has a good coffee shop. Ran into Nikita and her friend Sidney there!

Went to Pig Tales to grab lunch with John Moore.

Reached 13 thousand miles in the 31st month of motorbike riding. Other than the cool inverse relationship of the numbers (13 and 31) themselves, here is another relationship – their squares also share a inverse relationship (169 and 961 respectively)!!!

This is what happens when I feel good on a motorbike. I think of math 🙂

John and I had not gone for a motorbike ride together in a long time. We fixed that problem today with a 100 mile ride. I met John for the first time in Sep 2017. We were in the same motorbike safety class. We bonded well since we were the only two over 50 years old in the class. (The rest were 25 and below). Also, we were the only ones without any visible ink on our skin.

For both of us, it would be the first experience in riding a motorbike. Turns out we bought the same make and model of motorbike (different years). I have stuck to my good old 2017 Honda CTX 700 DCT from the first day I rode it. John, in the meanwhile, has gone thru about four motorbikes, one three wheeler and a scooter. Finally, as of two months back, he has come back to our original model. He has the 2018 version. But as you can see the bikes look near identical. Of course, John being John, his motorbike has been heavily accessorized with all sorts of gizmos and gadgets. Mine is still pretty much the same as it came when we brought it home in Nov, 2017.

It was a great ride together. The feelings that come over you as you cut thru the heavy breeze in the gently winding rural roads of Georgia on a motorbike with a friend in tow cannot be possibly described; only experienced!

Dropped by an outside bar to grab a refreshing gin and tonic towards the end of a two hour motorbike ride…