This weekend was spent at the Basic Motorcycle Riders Safety Course. Now, I was a little intimidated from the class - essentially, there is a lot of material covering what could go wrong when you are on a motorcycle, that you are essentially invisible to most motorists, and very vulnerable. Saturday morning was our first time on the bikes, all 250cc or smaller machines. We worked through the basics - parts, operations, safety, learning the slip zone on the clutch, basic movement and maneuvering and so on. It was a bit warm, but my new helmet is surprisingly well ventilated, and I was warm, but never overly so. After lunch, it was back into the classroom to complete the work from Thursday. The program is well designed, with the classroom material presented in three ways: the written page, verbally from the instructor and visually from a video. I found this interesting, as it covers the common ways people learn in these situations. A quick written "evaluation" and we are done by 3:30 PM.
Home a bit earlier than expected Saturday, though I am thoroughly exhausted from the riding portion of the class. The rain comes in heavy late in the evening and things finally cool off completely.
Sunday began a bit earlier, as we didn't quite get through all of the exercises on the bikes Saturday. The whole day is spent fine tuning and developing our skills. We had two people leave the class today. The first had witnessed a serious bike accident the night before on the way home from class and while she had seemed to have shaken that off before she arrived, after about 20 minutes on the bike she couldn't continue. Quite understandable. The second rolled his ankle under the bike during an exercise, and while it wasn't serious, he felt that he was done - this was a shame really, as he was the shakiest at the outset, and had really developed well, becoming more confident as he went.
At the end of the day, we go through our riding skills evaluations, and all pass. By the end of the day we were all having fun, and even with the stress of being "tested", we all were having a blast. Afterwards, I went with a couple of the other riders for a celebratory beer at a local. The class population was very interesting: about half of us were older and had no riding experience, and the other half were mostly young dudes with some experience, a little showy in some cases but generally good. One of the women in the "older" group (we were all late 30's to early 40's) was really funny (and a bit of a horndog). It was fun watching the mild discomfort of a couple of the dudes when she was hitting on them. A good time overall.
Home, and find that the circle meeting is canceled for tonight, so some quiet time at home. Scrounge a bit for dinner and end up going shopping for some basics.
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It's sad as I look back on this week - I've spent very little time with the guitar.
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