Day 1 – Tuesday March 11, 2014

What a way to start the trip.

 

Finally, departure day. I’ve been counting the days for the approach of this vacation and it arrived so fast. But, it’s here.

We spent the night at David and Annette’s house so that we would be close to the cruise port this morning.

 

The ride to the cruise port started out fine. It was a bit cool but not horrid. I usually won’t ride below 40 degrees and it was almost 45 so the temps were good. The skies were a bit overcast but I like that…no sun glare. David and I left first on the bikes, with Barbara and Annette following us in the car with all of the luggage. We made our way through the back streets of South Plainfield and the surrounding towns to Rt. 78, the major highway that would take us to Bayonne. There were a lot of pot holes and the roads were covered with massive amounts of sand and salt leftover from the harsh winter that we had had. We hit 78 and were finally able to open it up and make some time…not! We were cruising along at 70 mph through heavy rush hour traffic when we hit the first obstacle. There was a lane merge, two into one. That slowed things down and challenged us to stay together as the drivers in this area don’t give a crap about much, especially bikes. We worked our way past the merge and took off again only to have a small disaster hit. As we were working our way through heavy traffic my shift linkage decided to let loose.

A biker’s biggest fear is having something, anything, go wrong with a bike while you’re zipping along at highway speeds. We were trying to slow down a bit and as I tried to shift my foot shifter just flopped around. At first I thought the securing hardware for the shifter had loosed up but when I looked down I saw that the shifter linkage was flopping around. I’m blessed with the ability to keep my head when the ‘shit hits the fan’, the worse the problem the cooler I stay…sometime too cool. Anyway, I tried flagging David down to stop but he didn’t see me so I hit the gas, accelerated to about 90 and caught up with him to signal that I had to stop. Here we are on a very busy multi-lane, NY area highway pulling onto the median with two bikes and a car.  I surveyed the issue and decided that I could secure the shifter linkage with the right materials. The ball joint on the end of the linkage decided it just didn’t want to hold on any longer so I needed a way to keep the socket on the ball but remain flexible. I dug around in my Tour-Pak and found a few small wire tires. I looped the wire ties around the linkage head together and with a length of Barbara’s yarn, secured the fix in place. Done…one of my better optional engineering fixes if I do say so myself.

We got back on the backs, back into the car and forced our way back into traffic…another harrowing feat on its own. We didn’t get far before the traffic slowed again. This time the set of lanes to our right was stopped. We crawled along until we made it to the hold up. There was a care on fire in the lanes to our right. Fortunately they didn’t stop our set of lanes and soon we were past that obstacle and on our way to the ship. The rest of the ride was without incident except for the asshole maneuvers being pulled by the drivers around us and the terrible condition of the road.

We arrived at the port and were directed to an area right next to the ship to meet up with the rest of the bikes. We were met by Steve, the leader of ETA. Steve is quite a character, a larger than life kind of guy. Unfortunately he has been plagued with horrible medical issues but still remains extremely upbeat and cheerful. Since this was our second cruise with this group the procedures were known. First we parked the bikes side-by-side while we had a pow-wow. While that was going on a drug sniffing dog inspected the bikes. If the dog sits by your bike you are done. There’s always a lot of nervous shifting going on during this. Next we hopped on our bikes and side by side we moved over to a gate to await clearance into the area next to the ship. We were given access and single file, rode onto the dock right next to the ship. Here we opened our gas tanks so they could make sure we had less that ¼ tank of gas and to shoot some nitrogen gas in to displace the fumes.

Now it was time to load the boat. One by one we went up a ramp and into the ship, making sure to shut down the engines before going inside. Once inside we stored the bikes in a hallway, to be moved and secured later.

We move the bikes inside by having the operator stay on the bike while another operator push the bike. It’s a great system, especially when everyone works together.

With that done we went back outside of the ship and re-joined Barbara and Annette at the cruise terminal. They had already checked the luggage so all we had to do was to go through security and check in. They let all of the bikers enter through the ‘Diamond Member’ entrance to speed things up. Check in was a breeze. We got our passes, had our picture taken and waited for a shuttle to take us to the ship. Once on the ship we passed through another security check point and headed up to the Windjammer Café for lunch. Of course everyone else headed up to the Windjammer o it was quite a task finding a table but Barbara came through and it wasn’t long before we were sitting, enjoying our first meal aboard. When we finished eating it was about 14:00 so we headed up to the room to check things out and to see if our luggage had arrive.

There were no bags yet but we were glad to finally be in the room anyway.

We decided to take a walk around and to get my unlimited soda cup filled. The ship looked the same as our last trip but it was still exciting. At 15:30 a mandatory emergency drill was held. That was fun, yawn. After the drill we wandered around until I had to go to the first bike operators meeting at 17:00. Here we were given a briefing by Steve and the security staff of the ship. We were also issued our ‘crew’ ID badges. Because of our bikes being stored in non-public areas we needed access to crew areas so we are issued cred IDs. The meeting consisted of a lot of information and a lot of good natured ribbing. We waited for the ships staff to finish clearing the storage area for the bikes then moved back to the hallway where the bikes were stored.

Working together, we moved the bikes into the storage area, chocked the wheels and put the bikes to bed for the next few days. I will be going back down today to work my shift linkage. Better to do it today than on our first ride day.

I returned to the room to meet up with Barbara who was emptying our first suitcase. The other two had not yet arrived. In the meantime our room attendant came by to introduce himself…Byron.

Next was the ETA welcome aboard party. ETA is the travel agency that runs the bike cruise. It was an open bar and Steve entertained us with some fantastic piano playing.

 

 

We also paid our cash $325 bike fee which is used to take care of ‘business’ on the islands, allowing us to ride there. Steve spoke again, giving us a lot of information and giving some of the operators a bunch of good natured crap.

After the part we went back to the room to find that our luggage had arrived and Byron had moved it into the room for us. We quickly unpacked the suitcases then went to dinner. Dress was casual so everyone pretty much stayed in their biker clothes. A nice surprise was that there was a couple on the trip that was on our last trip and we were at the same table for dinner. There are eight of us at the table for dinner which is nice. Last time I think there were 11. Dinner was good but service was lacking. I only had one drink during dinner. I wasn’t asked and getting that one wasn’t easy. After dinner we walked through the casino, lost $10 the n turned in for the night.