Ninjas, Cats and Gyros or where I rolled on the first nice weekend in Chicago

With the weather finally getting warm I was able to actually able to get some great riding in without trying to cram in what I could while the weather held so I made the most of the weekend.

On Friday there was a meetup of the Chicago Motorcycle Meetup group at The Twisted Spoke in Chicago.

 The Twisted Spoke is a motorcycle themed bar and grill which had this cool skeleton spinning around on top.

 The also had a nippon rust garden.



The meetup was supposed to be a launch party for the guy who started the groups bike parking app called Parkninja but it was vaporware so the party got cancelled at some point day of apparently.  So it was just a meetup at a motorcycle themed bar that had no motorcyclists except for the handful that were there for the meetup.  It was more of a hipster joint which was a bit of a letdown.  Personally I would have designated the rust garden bike parking in an effort to get actual riders there but that's just me.  The meetup was pretty low key so I decided to cut loose and take a spin through the city on my way out of town.

 Here's the skeleton lit up at night.

There was one free parking space between 2 loading zones that luckily was occupied by a cobalt so I was able to squeeze in.

After my hooning of the loop I hit 90 home and the Diet Cokes I drank at the spoke required a defueling stop at the Des Plaines Oasis.


On Saturday the Motorcycle Enthusiasts of the Western Suburbs of MEWS meetup group had a ride to Lake Geneva that I wanted to go on because of my familiarity with the area would make up for my inexperience with group riding.  We met at the Harley dealer in St. Charles at 64 and Randall at shot up 47 to have lunch at Gordys in Fontana.

A rare shot of myself in the middle with 2 MEWS members I copped from the Meetup photos.

Here's some of the group.

Here's the rest as we started to saddle up after lunch.  We wanted to head to downtown Lake Geneva but the group lead wasn't familiar with snake road so I ended up riding second and leading for the bit we were on Snake Rd.   After we got to Lake Geneva the group pretty much scattered as everybody had different places to be.  I had to backtrack to Lawrence to run an errand and then visit a BBQ in Poplar Grove. 

On the way out of town I hit Yerkes to grab a driveway shot.

Compare it to my bike last fall shortly after I bought it.

On my way from Lake Geneva to Lawrence I got stuck behind a tanker/sprayer of some sort that smelled awful.  After passing I realized I could still smell it on my bike and that the dust it was kicking up was not your usual dust.  I made a turn and came across more of it's handywork.  Turns out it was spraying some sore of manure or wastewater from the hogfarm on the right of the picture.  The mud tracks on the road I had to drive through were not mud.

The BBQ ended up being a bust so I cruised to my brothers in Belvidere and Supervised his struggle with a faulty balljoint and then headed to Rockford to find some dinner.

I wanted to try a local place so I decided to try Uncle Nicks Gyros and headed to the location in front of the Pep Boys on State St.   I forgot that it was an old Rallys and had no inside seating and I wanted to relax so I hit the Tom and Jerry's next door which is also a Rockford Gyro restaurant chain.  For $7.50 the gyro plate was decent.  The gyro meat was moist and good but it was cut really inconsistently and was mainly small bits so they lose a point but not bad after a long day of riding.

I then shot down to Cherryvale Mall and back to Crystal Lake on 20. 

It was about 290 miles which added to the hooning around solo I did put my at about 500mi total for the weekend.  I also hit 2500mi since I bought the bike last fall so I changed the oil, filter and switched the primairy to 75-90 semi syn.



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