2009 British and European Classic Motorcycle Day at Butlers Orchard

William and I rode down to Gaithersburg Saturday afternoon and evening, May 16, via Delmarva peninsula and US 50. We had nice weather except for the Biblical rain for the last 30 miles. The only hiccup was the "new" used gas cap decided to lock itself, but fortunately we discovered this at the gas station a mile from my house, so we rode back home and I drilled it and put a screw in it.

Sunday, May 17, we rode from the motel in Gaithersburg to Butlers Orchard. We entered both bikes (my Commando and my R90S) in the concours. This was the first major outing for the R90S since I had the tank repainted by the kids at the Ocean County Vo-Tech in Jackson.

The flea market was pretty sparse, but I did pick up a new set of BMW petcocks, and some nice machined aluminum fork caps for the Norton.

The organizers had announced that if you were going to win something, they would hang a tag on your handlebar. After hanging about a few hours, we decided to leave since it didn't look like I'd be winning any trophys, since no handlebar tag. So we packed up and got suited up, and then the Norton wouldn't start.

There were no shortage of kibitzers, but one bystander offered a voltmeter, and Chris (mumble), Norton expert (and husband of Steve Atkinson's widow, Loretta), offered to help debug the problem. We eventually discovered that both a wire had broken (inside the insulation, so it was invisible) down at the Boyer pickup plate, AND the Boyer module itself had died. I'm still don't understand how we got TWO failures at the same time. (I *do* have a piece of foam rubber holding the wires down at the pickup plate, I already know about that trick.)

Chris sold us his spare Boyer, and we were ready to go, finally.

Meanwhile, during the debugging, I heard the announcement that my R90S had taken second place in the German 1970-1985 class.

We saddled up around 4PM and hit the road, and taking 2 lane roads for the first few hours, got back to Jackson around 11PM.