Destroyed Bikes! Frozen Clay! Beer! Its Another Lost Weekend!

Took a while to piece this one together, mainly because we actually have tons of photos and it took a bit to get through them all. Early in 2009 while it was still icy cold out we managed to get back to Georgia for another lost weekend at Durhamtown. This would be the biggest one yet, attended by me, Max, Jay, Marcus, our non-vintage mounted friend Bill, but most importantly George, who was finally recovered enough from his foot mangling to join us for a big get together. It made for a pretty good pile of bikes,

The modern mochine on the trailer is Bill's, but you might also spot a Rickman Zundapp on there. Max had recently picked this up and decided to bring it along to play with a bit. Which was a pretty good bit of forward thinking, as it turned out. The ride was uneventful, punctuated by stops for chicken strips, which is always a good thing,

as well as what turned out to be crappy firewood that refused to burn, which is a bad thing. But we didn't know that yet, so we arrived at a chilly Durhamtown and got unloaded. The usual suspects had brought their usual long suffering bikes, Jay on the Field Pig, me on the Stomper (which I believe was still stomping AJS's at this point), Max had Smoky Bacon along with the Rickman, George was on his Tr5t, Marcus on his BSA B-something, and Bill had brought a Kawasaki of some description and a sandwich press.

Did I mention it was chilly? Screw that, it was cold.

Not that it dampened our spirits at all. So we headed out for a ride, where after about 5 minutes our spirits were promptly dampened by Max blowing up his bike. Properly. Dead. He had just launched his bike over a mound/jump type thing on the access road when something cut loose in mid air seizing the bike solid. Musta been a fun landing. At the time we didn't know how bad the damage was, but later we'd find out it was pretty extensive. No Worries Though! Max had a spare bike! So he trundled on back to camp for the Rickman, leaving the Triumph to apparently drink beer while we were gone,

Our first main goal was to find the funky, red clay WWI battlefield we'd stumbled across the first Lost Weekend called Redlands. We took a wandering, ragged way that was semi successful,

So a map was resorted to,

And we managed to stumble across it,

Redlands is a lot of fun. The scale is pretty impressive, with a number of lines, drops and climbs. Plus, this being Friday afternoon, we had it completely to ourselves,

So we could take our time and play to our hearts content,

Now, this was fun and all well and good, but we had only broken one bike at this point, which just wouldn't do. So we left Redlands and ended up on one of the many "MX" courses hidden in the woods called the Moonshine Loop. This wasn't a cleared field typical MX course, it was a prepared circuit laid out through the woods, which meant you couldn't see where you were going....which was bad. We all nearly died. One spot in particular nearly did us all in, a sharp climb that dropped off immediately on the other side. Despite the fact that the course to that point had given fair warning that some caution was warranted, I was movin' pretty good, came over the top of this one and suddenly found myself waaaay above the ground. I may have mentioned this before, but on these old bikes this is, again, bad...bad, baaadddd. Bike and rider landed after a seeming 36 minutes with a solid, brain rattling "Whump!", somehow managing to not break the bike or myself in half. This was apparently the same result for each of us in turn as we all went over that spot. The whole course was like that, which finally took its toll: Marcus' bike's rear chain and tensioner all came a' cropper, leading to searching the ground back down the trail to find missing pieces, and attempting to get mobility restored to at least make it back to the cabins.

Look at poor Bill on his Kawasaki on the right. This is the second time in less than a couple hours he'd had to watch something like this occur. I'm sure he was very impressed by the virtues of old bikes. We managed to get the poor BSA going, but it was pretty clear that the damage had extended to the gearbox, and that ended play for the day. With two bikes in the bag, we headed back to camp to drink beer and learn the firewood we'd earlier bought was crap. But! Among the best things about Durhamtown is that the place has bike rentals (good for Marcus), and it has cabins (good for staying warm in winter), so our crap fire wasn't such a disaster considering it dropped into the 20's that night. The cold did have an interesting side affect on our riding, which would allow us to experience a wholly new surface the next morn: frozen red clay. I'm from Florida, people. I don't ride on frozen Anything, so I can't tell you if this is better or worse than other forms of frozen surfaces, but it was sketchy. On the way into the trails we got to pass one sad individual who got caught out, and it nearly bit us in the ass a couple times as well. Luckily, Jay's bike started ackin' da' fool, so we got to take a break.

This was nice, for us, because we got to stand around,

I got to tighten up my footpegs, loosened up the previous day by the gravitational infarction on the Moonshine Loop,

 And Max could ham it up because his carb hadn't started falling off yet,

Finally, by staring at the bike intently, Max and Jay managed to get the Field Pig revived,

This was a mixed blessing, because after we got under way we headed to the far end of the trails where there is a "swimming hole", a hill climb, and mud...lots of mud...squishy, slimy, horrible mud. It was nasty. It took forever to go a couple dozen yards. With much slithering we finally arrived at the "swimming hole" to reattach Max's carb again,

and generally state our dislike of mud. Nice tires, Georgie,

I have no idea what's going on in this next pic, George is apparently throwing gang signs, and I'm clearly just an idiot,

This pic says sooo much about my bike,

And with that we were off to our next breakdown, which would be the last stoppage for the Field Pig that weekend. Bill again looks on, confused by our attraction to these things,

The bike was carefully diagnosed with Chronic Terminal Mystery Sulkiness (or just CTMS as its called by those in the know),

Which gave George a chance to take pics of the other bikes which were momentarily running, like these specimens,

or this sunny day, cheery little T100,

The Pig was limped back to camp, another loop or so was made by the survivors, and then it was back to the cabin for more beer, drier wood, and the awarding of the "Trophy For What We Deem Worthy This Time"...which went to George for his transformation from cripple to Triumph dirtbike rider.

And then the books were closed on another Lost Weekend.