As of today (Sunday) the weatherman is promising a pretty good day and it's looking like a good ride.
There's a little bit of a change up this week. Instead of meeting at Spangle's for the ride to Wilson, we will be gathering up at the Red Coach Inn just west of I 135 on Crawford in Salina at 11:00AM.
TIME....................12:00 noon
Here it is.............. Midland Railroad Hotel
414 26th St
Wilson, KS
(785) 658-2284
Facebook page........https://www.facebook.com/midlandhotelwilson/
Web Page.............http://www.midlandrailroadhotel.com/
Map site.............http://bit.ly/1uLkbOc
Wednesday rolled around again and it was shaping up to be another great day for a ride. 10:30 I loaded Leo up and assuming I needed gas, stopped to fill up. Upon reaching the pump I popped the cap to find, pleasantly to my surprise, the tank was almost full. I thought "This is shaping up to be a good day." I headed out for the Red Coach Inn. Crossing the freeway looking for the Inn I was taken aback by it's conspicuous absence. I pulled in and did a slow circumnavigation of the entire building and after a thorough search could find NOTHING ANYWHERE that mentioned a Red Coach, Quality, but no Red Coach. The absence of other bikes further raised my suspicions. Immediately my mind starts racing trying to figure out where the Red Coach Inn might be. Tuesday I verified with Big Jim that it was just on "the other side on the freeway". OMG!! Which freeway?!? I had visions of the Red Coach being north of I70! About this time the smoke from the burning circuitry in my brain was starting to obscure my vision. I searched east on Crawford just to make sure one of those hotels wasn't the one in question. Realizing that I had enough time to check things out, I headed home and did a quick search on line and found the Red Coach and Quality Inn both had the same address. Through my superior deductive reasoning I came to the conclusion that I was right all the time, albeit early. By the time I got back to the inn others had arrived which set my mind at ease, and the circuits cooled down before any serious fuses blew. As I got Leo out to take care of his morning routine others started to arrive steadily. All told we gathered a group of 14 bikes, with several new faces. Welcome to all. This time we were all ready to go about the same time and we had a pretty nice group ride to Wilson. I was warned about a bridge being out in Brookville and that we might need to find an alternate route, but as it turned out it was just reduced to a single lane and we had a slight wait at a traffic light. I think that's the first traffic light that Brookville ever saw. It was slightly cool but the occasional break in the clouds allowed the sun to shin through cast down a comforting warmth. As we rode along Leo was occupied by protecting us from all those nefarious cows with evil in their eyes. Cows have to be the most bored animals on earth. What other animal swallows their food whole, just to regurgitate it later so they can chew it for something to do? Be that as it may, we rolled into Wilson, and never having been into the town further than the highway, was pleasantly surprised to find the Midland Railroad Hotel to be a quaint throwback to the 1930s. A very homey atmosphere with a very comforting air about it. Leo and I made our outdoor photo rounds and counted 37 bikes. I got Leo settled and went inside to get the rest of the shots. I sat down with Arnie and Jean Boyd, of last weeks alternator incident and one of our new faces Vic. We may have had a slightly larger turnout than the restaurant expected as they were putting out quite an effort to accommodate all of us, even though we were within the estimate, albeit on the high side. While I was eating Harold Chase borrowed my camera to get some shots of one of the empty rooms upstairs that they were showing. After lunch there was the usual tire kicking. Emeory and some of the others were going to do a little adventure riding on the way back, but being a little spent I decided to head back home and see if my couch had exploded under Fritz. Much to my relief it hadn't.
All tallied up we had 37 bikes and 41 folks with the high mileage going to Bryon Spurlock form Junction City with 102 miles.
We had riders from Salina, Minneapolis, Chapman, Junction City, Denmark, Culver, McPherson, Lindsborg, Carlton, Great Bend, Tipton, Abilene, Lincoln, Chase, Hutchenson, and Canton.
We were riding Honda, Harley, Yamaha, Suzuki, BMW, Kawasaki, Can Am, And Moto Guzzi.