Back in the Saddle Ride and Birthday surprise!

The ride on October 29th was supposed to be Bev and mine’s back in the saddle ride. It turned out to be much more.

Meeting in Moorpark on a beautiful Sunday morning, Bev and I hooked up with Larry and Raymond and hopped on our bikes for a nice ride out to Action where we met up with my son Doug on his Marauder and headed up Angeles Crest for lunch at Newcombs Ranch.

Lunch was great, the weather was perfect, and I had never seen so many bikes on Angeles Crest in my life. While we were at lunch, Larry mentioned that Beth wanted to have a ride to the Sagebrush Cantina for my birthday- he suggested that we all ride there, and he was meeting a ‘friend’ there too. So we hopped on the bikes and headed down the hill towards Calabasas. While we were riding, I noticed that Larry, who was tail gunning, was riding way back, so I slowed my pace down and let him catch up. When we got to the 118, we entered a huge swarm of big black bugs. I had about 10 of them commit suicide on my windshield, and one decided to fly up my right pants leg and bite my thigh. It hurt like hell. I pulled off the freeway and got to a gas station and checked out the bite. My thigh was all red where the bite was, I cleaned out the bug guts from inside my pants and came out of the bathroom. Funny thing, no one seemed too concerned about me, they were all on their cell phones.

We talked about the route to take, no one was in a hurry to get there- so I decided we go Box Canyon through Santa Susanna. Larry again kept lagging far behind. Hummmmm

We arrived at Sagebrush and it took Bev and Larry 10 minutes to park their bikes. Hummmmm

We got inside and ordered drinks and nachos…. No one was real hungry except Bev… about ½ hour later after Larry had gone looking for his ‘friend’, and Bev went for a ‘walk’, did she say, I want to show you something. At that point the jig was up; I knew she was up to something. We walked around to the back and found Rick and Penny, Jim and Norita, Ed and Barbara, Randy and Patty, Bruce and Connie, and later Scott and Sherry showed up. Bev pulled it off, a surprise birthday party. It was a great party, I got some wonderful 50+ gifts….. to my friends that were there, payback is a bitch :)