The Best Way To Mark A Transition Is To Set Stuff On Fire!

With Barber in the bag, racing came to an end for 2009. For all his hard work Max was rewarded with the Classic Intermediate Championship, which is not too shabby. His bike was well and truly blown up, but thanks to the Carolina boys, he learned that there was a Tr5t lurking in dark recesses of the "Parts Department". The PD, actually called Rusty Rides, is the domain of a certain John French, one of those low key guys with a stack of neat bikes, a ton of parts, and is capable of pelting a bratty kid with a dead fish like no one else. He's helped a good many of us out on numerous occasions. The Tr5t in his possession was described as "having spent a good bit of its life in the bottom of a pond", but the price was right, and since we're generally Brit-bike bottom feeders, we're used to horrors and cruddy piles as starting points. A plan was therefore hatched to head up to Jay's one weekend, pick up the bike, and generally hang out with everyone. As usual, you can't put this many goons in a field on a sunny day with a ton of beer and not expect them to turn into 14 year olds, so we decided the thing to do was to set up a dirty trials course through the "critch" (recipe: take equal parts creek and ditch, then stir) that runs behind Jay's ol' farmhouse. But! introductions, first:

That's Mister French holding the machete, vital for Critch Trials Set-up. Jay, Max and Marcus (walking away) fall under the "usual suspects" heading. Alex and Chad were there, along with a man who goes by many names, but you can call him Pat...because that's his name.

Pat runs a 500 Triumph in vintage road racing, though his poor bike has currently got a rod sticking outta the cases so these days he mostly just hangs out at races stealing our snacks. Also present was all around good guy and current owner of Jay's old Field Pig, Hippy Jim

Niceties outta the way, lets get to some Action! I've seen a lot of action packed dumb things you can do in a field, but only a few of them have been more action packed than Critch Trials. That's why I highly recommend you find the slimiest, likely disease infested-est critch you can and give it a go. Like Max,

Or John, who brought along his Greeves, an excellent Critch Iron

Though this might be a slight dab,

Jay's attempt, you can print these out and make a decent flip book,

As you can see, Max did the important thing and rescued the bike, choosing to leave Jay to his own devices

Alex decided to miss the drop back into the critch altogether, that's probably a 5

Then there was some general purpose tomfoolery in the big field beside the house. Here's Marcus, showing the world that a Bultaco can run

That is, of course, unless its..err...not running

John attacks a woodpile with vicious Villiers Power!

And Chad proves that even a large amount of person can't keep a good bike down...well a BSA single at least.

With all those activities properly taken care of, the only thing left on the agenda was to set the field on fire, which we did

And then with our to-do list squared away, we sat around the mighty fire and drank more beer before calling it a night and trying not to freeze to death sleeping in Jay's wood stove heated front room (apparently the trick to keeping one going while you sleep is to NOT fall asleep). Oh yeah! And Max picked up the bike he'd be running come spring!

Not that it looked like this when he got it. I sadly don't have a pic in as-delivered state. He would have to fully rebuild it in time for the start of the season, which was very exciting, because 2010 was going to be a really busy year for Triumph 5hunnerts. But that's in the future, so for now we'll just bid a fond farewell to 2009.