The Daily Riders

I don’t know that I would necessarily consider my daily 9 mile commute from home to work an adventure, nor the slightly different route taken home anything worthy of blogging about. This short passage of time is infinitely more enjoyable on my motorcycle than it is in my truck, but day-in, day-out there is really nothing that lodges itself onto the synaptic nerves and forever in my memory. On thing that does make an impression on me are the other daily riders whom I work with. There are a lot people who ride their bikes to work, from time to time – and some more than others. But there are 4 “Daily Riders”, four of us who pretty much ride just about every day we are at work weather permitting – or not… About the only thing I have noticed that keeps one of the four of us away is rain, snow, or if one of us has to drive because we need our alternate vehicle for some other purpose that day. For the most part you can figure that the motorcycle parking area is going to happily accommodate two Honda scooters, a Harley and a Beemer.

That’s right – two of the daily riders are scooters. So any of you out there who do not think the scooter crowd are not hard-core riders, think again. They may not be riding cross-country, but from the since of riding every day, and in just about all weather I can tell you that the oldest most beat up bike of all of the daily riders is Perry’s Honda scooter and he probably wears the crown of the daily riders. That bike is pretty much out there, rain, shine, 115 degrees or 15 degrees. The other day was one of the coolest so far this year. For some reason Perry did not ride. He saw me in the hall and told me that when he saw my bike that morning he thought “oh shit, Eddie’s gonna think it was too cold for me to ride this morning”. I just told him that he was more hard-core than any of us.

The other scooter is a little lady on her yellow Honda Metro. For some reason we tend to pull into the parking area around the same time a lot of mornings. Her from the south side, me from the north, so I get to watch her leaning her yellow machine around the corner into the parking lot in what can only be described in a cute, no-nonsense sort of way.

Warren is the Harley rider, and he works in the maintenance shop. Like most Harley riders he has customized his bike and takes a lot of pride in it. Unlike a lot of Harley riders, he rides his almost every day, not just on the weekends. Warren is one of those lucky guys who works a 3-day week, so you may not see is Harley in the parking lot every day, but if it is one of the days he is working, you can pretty much bet it will be there.

So here’s to all 3 of my fellow daily riders. Enjoy your daily adventure. My 18 daily miles may not be as much fun as it was when it was 60 miles each day, but I know that there are at least 3 others I share the parking lot with that are enjoying the ride.