The Ramapo 500 has become a summer staple for a large group of my motorcycling buddies. This two day event is run by the Ramapo Motorcycle Club and as in the past, they again did an excellent job choosing a wonderful selection of beautiful roads (less traveled) and preparing great cue sheets. This year they added an option of downloading the routes to GPS devices to assist in directions. I took advantage and downloaded the routes to my Garmin Zumo 550 as did everyone else in my group with a GPS. I lead the ride for our group and still had to read the written directions, but the GPS helped to eliminate second guessing turns.
The ride registration is cut off at 400 with a wide range of brands and types of motorcycles. With everyting from sport bikes to touring bikes to cruisers, one of the "rules" is when a faster motorcycle or group comes up behind you, move to the right to let them pass. Every year we seem to encounter some folks that fail to read this section! More on that later...
We meet at the crack of dawn, well not exactly, but when the Brass Ring opens on Saturday morning.
The ride starts up in Rockland County New York and right after a hearty breakfast we race up north to begin our day. Keeping a group of ten motorcycles together is challenging, particularly when you are riding with 400 others. We keep in touch with communication between myself and others in the group via our CB radios, but sometimes, particularly in the mountains, we lose communication. About mid-morning on Saturday we had been passing through other groups of slower riders and got too far in front of some of our own riders.
Here we are discussing where the hell the others could be after waiting over 15 minutes!
The club likes to throw at least one gravel or dirt road into the mix and that appeared on Saturday afternoon (Hell Hollow Road). I saw it coming up on the directions and we were stuck behind one of those slow groups that didn't read the move over and let faster groups pass instruction. I kept riding up to the sweeper in the group and trying to signal him to let us pass; he didn't get it. We got to a fairly straight portion of road and I moved left and began to pass the group in front. Just as I get past the leader of the slower group the pavement ran out and we were in gravel. That made for some interesting passing behind me by the rest of our group. The road was not paved, had lots of huge potholes and at one point was dirt only; but a blast none the less!
There is camping available at the half way point but our group "roughs it" at the Hampton Inn for the night.
All in all a great event and fun 2 days of riding! Pictures courtesy of Joe Holden, thanks Joe!
The motorcycle goes back into the garage now as I need to resume my training for the 2010 MS City to Shore in September. Again this year I'm riding on Team Squash with John Ball. Check my MS City to Shore Website and maybe contribute to the cause.
