Thank You Ben

While I was riding from San Francisco to Portland with my new friend Jeremiah I had a little run in with the police. Shortly after crossing the Oregon border and happy to have ridden some of the best roads of the trip, I was really having a good time.

Steinbeck mentions in "Travels with Charlie" how every state seems to know what the best speed is for a certain road and they rarely agree. This was a case of a drop in the limit with no perceptible difference in the quality of the road.

Jeremiah flew by an off-duty cop going the other way faster than he could turn on his radar. I didn’t have that luxury, by the time I passed the cop it was too late. He only caught me going 81 mph, which wouldn’t have been a big deal on a 75 mph Interstate. However, here the speed limit was 55 mph. The ticket was for a whopping $242. After 6 years without a ticket (I did get pulled over in Holland for looking Dutch, but that’s another story), my streak came to an end, or so I thought.

In Portland I stayed one night with my friend Mari’s sister, Sara. It turns out Sara, her husband David, and Ben (David’s twin) are all lawyers, so I took out my ticket and asked if they had any ideas. Ben spotted a technicality that was worth investigating. He wrote a letter to the county judge to contest the validity of the ticket. He had the thought that if it works, the ticket will go away and if it doesn’t, I would be in exactly the same position. I liked his thought process.

After a couple of weeks I heard from Ben that the judge had accepted his demurrer, making the ticket go away. So I want to say "Thank you Ben" a bunch more times.

More GS adventures

Yesterday as I drove through Buena Vista, Colorado I couldn’t decide whether or not to stop for lunch or continue, but when I saw another red GS, I pulled a U-turn and parked next my bike’s twin. It just happened that my neighbor also had a Florida license plate. Inside the burger and burrito joint I met the owners of my bike’s twin, Prior and Mary. Prior rode the bike out and picked up his daughter in Denver. Now the two of them are taking a tour of Colorado. We had the usual gear and "what have you done to your bike?" conversation which seems to happen any time two bikers get interested in a bike. In the interim, Mary mentioned that she’d spent a year at the business college at UNF before going to a school closer to home. Prior switched from an BMW RT because he wanted a bike that was better for nonpaved roads. While I was in Santa Fe, Ira told me a statistic that I forgot but I think he said that there are as many unpaved roads as paved ones in the US. So a dual purpose bike can really open new horizons.