March 22, 2014
First ride of the season!
Bill Motsenbocker sent some of us an email saying he was going to ride today and asked who'd like to go with him? Well, that would definitely be me. My brother Dave said yes too. With a bit more finagling, Grant Collins showed up as well. The first thing we needed to do was sync up our Sena headsets. We had all updated the firmware and it was quite a sight. Four grown men pushing buttons, holding their helmets to their ears and listening to see if it worked. Honestly it didn't seem to work but we had roads to ride so we finally just gave up. So the four musketeers hit the road about 11:45am and headed south.
I put my GPS on my bike, not because I might get lost, but rather to have a track of where I went because Bill was leading and we were meandering our way toward Palouse Falls. With a high of about 50 degrees we were all dressed warm and those of us with heated grips had them turned on. This also turned out to be a good experimental day with my smart phone and the Sena. I have put a bunch of music on my SD card and after a bit of fiddling around, I have music through the phone into the headset via bluetooth, intercom with my friends, and phone calls when I need to. The bonus with the music is that it's louder than I get with my ipod wired in. So I'm quite pleased.
Anyways, back to the riding. Cold. Yes it was. I had my silk scarf on, but not placed around my neck very well so I ended up with some sore spots by the end of the day. Still, the sun was shining, the roads were clean (for the most part) and empty. It was just a great day to ride. We left Bill's house and took the old highway through Rosalia then turned right to ride through the small town of Malden. We stayed on the Pine City - Malden road and then connected up with Sunset Road where we quickly passed through St. John, home of the Wildcats! From St. John we continued south on Lancaster Road which follows Downing Creek for quite aways making for some pretty nice country. Passing mostly cattle but a few deer and one nearly suicidal squirrel (it was a close call), Downing Creek connects up with the Palouse River and Lancaster stays with it too taking us into Endicott. We turned right on the Benge Winona Road and continued on into Benge.
We stopped to rest a bit in Benge, which Bill tells us has the smallest high school in the state of Washington - 13 kids! We got off the bikes and warmed up a bit in the sunshine, gabbing the whole time. About 30 minutes later it was time to move on and we got to Washtucna which was about 30 miles down the road where we pulled up to Sonny's and had lunch. We were the only ones there at first so we got our order in right away. Let me tell you, the broiled chicken and jojo's are worth getting so if you drop in there, that's what you should order.
Tom Clark
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Intellitect, living in Spokane, Washington. I also do a little development work on the side. And I love riding motorcycles all over the country with my friends.
