Valentine's Day Ride with a friend of ours-small ride, her first long rpretty dang cold, but satisfying the URGE to get the hell outta Dodge and RIDE!

For this ride, if you didn't have some sort of cold weather gear on, such as thermals under the jeans, thermal turtlenecks, cold-weather specific gloves, leather (or ski-type) jackets, chaps, thermal socks, and a full face helmet, you would have been COLD. I wore about 3/4 of my cold-weather stuff as I could because on days like this, it's good to get out almost all the stuff you have and try it out, see if it works, if you're cold-cold, or if you're cold but it feels good, or if you're comfy. Today was comfy-ish. Cold, but doable. Bub didn't have thermal bottoms on so he felt it a little thru his chaps.

Slept in until 10 AM surprisingly (time flies when you're tired) and I decided a day or so ago that I wasn't going to waste a non-rain day. I had done some prelim route and temp calcs (which I seem to be FAMOUS for) and decided against the Banning/Beaumont/Oak Glen ride and opted for a little bit closer & warmer but not as interesting a ride. WARMER? Yeah, by MAYBE 5-10 degrees. But sunshine and those 10 degrees could make the difference between pleasant and unpleasant, so since Bub invited a friend of ours, Jessica O'Neill to go with us who hadn't ridden on the back of a bike for any distance (around the block does NOT count), I went for the safe warmer route. Jess kinda hemmed & hawed until we just flat out told her to get her butt ready, we'd be over at 12 noon. It was a non-technical ride being that it was her first time on a longish ride (if you can call this long).

My original plan was going over Ortega Hwy from Lake Elsinore to the south OC side, up Antonio Parkway to Santa Marguerita Pky then Trabuco/Santiago Canyon, then home. I decided to go reverse, Santiago over to Santa Margarita Hwy in case the cold wasn't as bearable as I thought or if the time factor was getting kind of close. That was a Good Call-due to the time available after stopping for coffee and the temps, I decided against the Ortega ride because it would've been colder. (that ride tops out, I believe, 3500 feet elev. Yup, definitely Colder)
Went over Santiago, stopped at Cook's Corner (Jessi had never been there), picked up a special pin and patch for my vest (below), stopped at Starbucks at the Albertson's at Plano Trabuco and Santa Margarita, came back again up thru Trabuco and stopped at O'Neill Park (because our friend was Jessica O'Neill, got a cute pic of her in front of the entrance), then dropped her off at her home at 4, came home, talked to my sister who came in from Vermont last night, and decided to ride our bikes to Super Mex in Cypress to meet up with her for dinner in Cypress (which at 6 PM was 50 degrees, Brea and Garden Grove were 53.). SO THAT TEMECULA/PALA RIDE THAT WE DID ON JANUARY 29TH WAS BELOW 45 DEGREES AT LEAST. SHIT! When we got home to Brea at 8 PM after dinner, the temp was 48 degrees, quite doable considering I brought that full head balaclava that had that 'turtle' neck gaiter type of fuzzy thermal protection that goes under the jacket. BOY OH BOY did it work. It was also 48 in Cypress. The freeway was pretty comfy, as soon as we got onto Brea surface streets the temp seemed to go down. (I'm starting to check temps as we ride, to compare how the temps are and how they feel to us with what we have on)

Shit, just realized I broke another nail. Dammit. That makes 3 today.

Some fundamental truths gleaned upon this particular trip...
· 55 degrees at 4 pm in Brea isn’t that cold: 53 degrees in Santiago Canyon at 3 PM isn’t that cold either, UNLESS you don’t have thermals under your jeans, or chaps. It could be cold if you had to ride longer than 1 hour, and/or in canyons with shade that blocked the sun.
· Men do not have to take off their chaps to pee. Women, on the other hand…
· Cook’s Corner always has neat shopping stuff, and ‘interesting’ people.
· I always end up breaking 1 or 2 or 3 nails, PLUS the gloves make under my nails dirty. Dirt likes me.
· I keep forgetting to put my hair under my jacket; it gets such knots in it when it flys out from under the helmet.

· The symbol for ‘cop ahead with radar’ is making a motion with your index finger on top of your helmet in a circular motion, like the old ‘bubble gum’ cop cars.
· I FEEL that the universal signal for ‘motorcyclist needs help’ (besides laying on the side of the road in a non-moving, supine position) is the helmet on the ground, on the left side of the rear tire. That way other bikes coming up can see the helmet, can see the situation and pull over. If it's on the right side, it won't be seen. If it's around the front, it'll be seen but after the fact, after the other cycle goes by.

·On another note, I think I'm going to keep some crackers or lollipops or something like that in my tank bag, in case me or someone else gets hypoglycemic, weak, faint-y, yucky. I've felt that way twice that I can remember, and I just remember thinking that I had to get some carbs or something into my body DAMNED QUICK or else I would faint. The first time, ice cream worked in line at Wal-Mart; the second time, on the way to my friend's house for lunch, I jammed into the parking lot of a grocery store and bought a big think of crusty french bread and ate half of it.

·If you're in a rental car and the GPS 'beeps' for no reason, that means there's a red light camera intersection (GPS Tom-Tom).

Over to the right is the patch and the pin I bought at Cook's. You can see the patch but you can't quite see the pin. It's an acronym, "DILLIGAF".

It's not a motorcycle club-related acronym like STAR or FBI or CIA or USPS or GMAKOOS, but I felt it was cute.

I bet they'll LOVE it on our next official ride. NOT.

Tough shit-I mean, do I look like a person who gives a f**k?