248/365 (Sept 5, 2011) – The Sea to Sky Highway is a fun ride, we do it often on a whim for a coffee since we live pretty much two lights off of the highway down Capilano Road. However, the drivers are aggressive and the police tend to target the motorcycles rather than the speeding cars. This was the second group of riders in the past couple of weeks to try to ride the highway at the posted speed limit and not above it, a difficult thing to do when the cars are flying past at 30-50km/hr over and it sometimes feels like they are trying to kill you in the process.
I usually shun group rides, but this one was in our backyard and although I didn’t want to be in the middle of it, I was hoping for a good turnout. We were going to join in fully, but I bailed at the last minute and instead we rode ahead and stopped at an overpass on the highway to see if we could get some photos. Nothing particularly great, but I loved that we were noticed and a number of riders gave us a wave. When they’d all passed (about 30-40 of them, or so) we ran back to our bikes, stowed the camera, jammed the helmets and gloves back on and did anything BUT the speed limit to catch the group. It took us until Furry Creek to finally get past all the traffic and tuck in at the back of the pack for the remainder of the ride into Squamish.
I’m normally somewhat shy (read: anti-social) towards strangers, particularly being a woman who generally rides alone on a sportbike, but it was nice to meet a few of the other riders and I have to say that I opened up just a little to some new aspects of riding. I’ll be picky, but I may see myself join in on another ride if it’s the right one… the egos weren’t quite as large as I had assumed they would be. Sometimes it’s nice to be a bit wrong. We had some great conversation with three fellows, one of whom turned out to be the organizer and gave me a demo of a cooling vest for wearing under leathers in the summer. Tres cool (pun intended).
When Kirk and I left for home we pulled in behind a rider on a GSXR600…I’m slow, but he was slower so we ended up passing him but before long several other bikes materialized from behind and ended up behind us. I kept expecting them to pass but they never did. As I said, I don’t do group rides and it was disconcerting to be at the lead of one, unintentionally, all the way from Squamish to our exit. I ended up assuming they were other new riders, slowpokes like me. As we pulled off the went by and I saw that they were, in fact, some of the veterans, including the ride organizer and a moderator for the bcsportbikes.com forum, the fellow who’d given me the hydra-vest demo. Kirk was having a good laugh at me when we got home, knew exactly that I’d be muttering inside my helmet the whole way “why won’t they pass, I’m only doing 10 over the limit….. why won’t they PASS?!?!” I suppose I should be flattered that they stayed with us, I suppose….. Shovelhead (pseudonym – bike in the lead in the top photo) wrote on the forum that we were traveling a ‘dare devil’ish’ 10+ over on the way back. LOL! I suppose it couldn’t have been that bad or they would have left us in their dust.
