After my first run in with HSTA riders I have decided that I would much rather ride with bikers.
First off I pull into the parking lot with the NASTY LOVELY tone eminating from my bike. I circle into a clear spot and the wife hops off. I hit the front brake and set the line lock to keep the brake nailed. Keeping her in first gear and nail a good burner at about 6 grand, and pop the line lock which made the bike do something that was more like a dry hop at the drag strip rather than a burn out. I then jockey for a parking spot and park right in the middle of the pack. I pull in and park. I flip out the rubber foot thingy I put under my kickstand to keep it from marking it territory.
Now we head off for registration, we are stopped before we can even get there by some woman who organizes part or the whole thing. Talking in the school teacher tone she told us like we were dumb "We dicourage doing burnouts -it is a sure sign of a noobie", "Maybe you should look at our website to get a better feel for what we are about", "To ride with us you have to have full gear" and she started to list all the gear. The whole time she is talking I am doing little more than grunting ahuh, yep, ahuh and I can here the Crazy Frog doing his burn out to the point where I could nolonger hear her.
I did not say a damn thing to her really. But afterwards I was thinking about how annoyed with her I was. I did continue to chew on this for the night. I thought about the intense dissapointment that would have been coming to this TINY ride (like 30 people) missing any of the expensive gear. BTW, thier web site has none of this "information" she spoke of. As a matter of fact the website does not have too much info on it at all.
I register and go meet and greet. As the meet and greet progressed I realized that I was in a crowd of enthusiasts and owners. Not a biker in sight until I looked in one of my mirrors cleaning it. It was not a friendly crowd, it was more akin to being a doctors seminar and not being doctor. And like I expected it was the "plastic fantastic pageant". I then inspected the ride path on the map. These are all roads that I ride quite a bit. I also know these roads to be riddled with deer, other animals, farm equipment, and true crap on the road in the corners where the manure spreaders come onto the road on thier way to somewhere else
. It appears they just looked for twisty roads and not the #$%* on the roads. Kind of a dumb path really, as you look on the distances 90% of the rips between hard right turn/left turn were no more than .8 miles. Just looked like a bunch of beat your brakes to death.
It was a waste of my $35 bucks but I have wasted $35 on worse things. But I can tell you I am going to ride today but I will ride in true form. I will ride ahead of them about 1/2 mile and they can suck my exhaust all day or until I get bored with them. Keep in mind that I am NOT riding as one of thier members, but rather a disgruntled one. I will ride in a pack of one.
In short HSTA is a bunch of owners - NOT bikers. Owners SUCK
