Riding

This is Sgt. Maj. Jeff McLochlin. He was an Army Ranger and a member of the Indiana National Guard and he was killed July 5 in Afghanistan. He's shown here in his uniform as a Plymouth, Ind., police officer.
I participated in a Patriot Guard Riders mission to support his funeral in Rochester, Ind., on Sunday.
It was beastly hot - a humid 94 degrees by the time we escorted the hearse from services at Rochester High School to the cemetery - but I'm glad I went because he and his family deserved the recognition.
Riding up to Rochester that morning, I found myself next to a young guy on a sportbike at a stoplight on U.S. 31 at the south edge of Kokomo.
The kid was pretty much at the other end of the motorcycling spectrum from me - sneakers, jeans, t-shirt, North Carolina baseball cap, no eye protection, no gloves, no jacket and an array of tattoos on his arms that made it clear he had spent a shitload of money trying to look stupid. Oh, and he was smoking a cigarette while riding.
I experienced enough painful spark burns from smoking in an open convertible when I was in my teens to tell me that smoking while riding a motorcycle involves several layers of idiocy.
I pulled up in the lane next to him on my '03 BMW K1200GT, wearing boots, gloves, BMW AirFlow jacket and a fullface Schuberth helmet. He glanced over and I nodded in greeting.
That was apparently all it took to trigger a flood of testosterone in the poor dope. When the light changed, he felt compelled to pull a wheelie and rocket up the road - a high-traffic commercial area lined with restaurants, motels and retail businesses.
I accelerated like a normal, rational rider and naturally, I caught up to him at the next light and the one after that. Each time, he whacked the throttle to stand his bike on its back wheel, startling the shit out of the car drivers around us. He did some highspeed weaving through traffic that was guarantee to alarm and enrage everyone around him before he finally made a right turn and sped off on a frontage road.
All I could do was shake my head in amazement.
I'm often tempted to offer to race kids like that - to Denver or Seattle. They disgrace motorcycling by using it as a form of masturbation. They also do real harm to the image of motorcycling.
That said, I'm taking a brief blogging break here before I plunge back into the frenzy of getting things squared away for my ride to the BMW MOA national rally this week in Burlington, Vt.
I plan to leave early tomorrow morning and hope to make it to somewhere east of Buffalo, N.Y. before I bag it tomorrow night. That should make for a relatively short ride on Thursday to the rally site.
This will be the first time I've ridden a motorcycle in the Northeast and I hope to be able to put my tires in every New England state, plus New Jersey, by the time the ride is over. That would let me boast that I've ridden in each of the 48 contiguous states.
I'll take my Treo and keyboard and will blog from the road whenever possible.
Now, it's off to the bank to shuffle some money around to cover bills that are due in the next week.