After our excitement the night before we were slow starters and spent the day riding around checking out what little there was on display for the rally.
someone’s buddy on their motorcycle:
I’m pretty sure someone rode this into the HD dealership – I didn’t see any support vehicles, and it moved around during the time we were there!
there were some great paint jobs out there, and this one reminded us of the iconic three wolf moon shirt:
Although I don’t wear a leather vest, I love seeing the people set up to sew patches onto them. Mike and I are going to get one of these heavy duty sewing machines one day!
For those who have never gone to a rally, well, you might wonder what it’s for. really, I think it’s for walking around, looking at vendors, and checking out bikes. it’s nice to be in a place with a zillion other people on motorcycles, but that gets pretty weird when they don’t wear helmets (nutty south carolina!) or worry about safety gear in the same way you do! also the vendors at myrtle beach were pretty much all different versions of the same t-shirt guy, so it wasn’t that great. There were a lot of pretty bikes there, and of course there are the old hold-out vestiges of “biker culture,” like  suck bang blow, which is a bar where people do burnouts on old tires (no burnouts, poor turnout). There’s a bar called the rathole but we couldn’t find it at it’s new location – this is a more typical “biker” crowd with wet t-shirt contests etc. THAT part of the rally really ticks me off, to be honest, and I was glad to miss it. While there are a lot more women riding their own than there used to be (our group is really stellar in its equal representation) there are still a lot of dudes who need to prove to everyone else how tough they are by objectifying one group or another.
This was also the day that my very favorite photo of myself was snapped:
After noodling around, we all went back to the hotel to pack up. We had a long trip ahead of us! On the way back, I stopped at the store and bought some 2L bottles to try in my sweetcheeks –
And I even put them (empty) into the freezer before capping, so the ideal gas law would make them firmer to sit on. the next day I strapped it onto my seat and it turns out that… it wasn’t that comfortable. Maybe a 1L bottle would be better, this made the seat way too wide for me. So I went without on the whole trip.
[[check out the summary post with lessons learned, and a full index to this ride report post.]]
