Frenchy's Rant

Finally, the WWE is back in Providence! That’s right, the WWE circus rolled into the Kingdom of Rhode Island for the Backlash Pay Per View this past Sunday, and Fiona and I decided to have a little party, and host some of the TV crew at the lake house on Saturday night.

There is definitely something cool about having a tour bus pull up and park in front of the house. Made the nosy neighbors peek their heads out their doors and wonder exactly what the hell that guy – the one that’s almost never home – does for a living.

In a move of astounding brilliance, I decided I needed a new grill for this event. The evening before the party, Fiona and I went shopping and brought home a huge Char Broil beauty – loaded with infrared grilling capabilities, side burner, the whole works. This thing is one lean, mean grilling machine!

Of course, in hindsight, I would recommend trying out a new, fancy-pants infrared grill a time or two before cooking dinner for a bunch of hungry co-workers. One thing I learned, something I would have probably learned earlier had I bothered to try the new grill out, infrared grills cook fast. REALLY fast! Much faster than you’d think possible. Fortunately, everyone seemed to enjoy their hockey puck….err.. I mean extremely well done infrared grilled steak.

Nobody died or got violently ill, and some brave souls even went back for seconds. After what has been a really hectic and really long month of televising endless wrestling events; after seeing these same people more days in a row than I see anyone else I know, I have to say it was nice to have these all-too-familiar faces at my house to have a few laughs and toast the Best Day Ever.

I also have to say at the end of the night, it was good to see them load up on the bus and head on down the road!

Seven days!

That’s all that stands in the way of Fiona and I going down under to visit my friend Dan in Australia. Well, that and a fourteen hour flight to Sydney. Dan has a great ride plan for us, which, happily enough, seems to include plenty of pub time. Based on this ride-park-pub plan, it’s good to see that becoming an honorary Aussie hasn’t spoiled Dan too much!

About three years ago, Dan and his wife Maxine sold what they could sell, burned what they couldn’t sell and escaped the drudgery of California for their new home half a world away just before the economy started it’s free fall into the toilet. Thanks to the global economic meltdown, Dan learned recently that all of his Australian work for the entire month of May evaporated. What do you do in a situation like that? Badger your old riding buddy until you shame him and his girlfriend into coming for a visit of course!

It’s not going to be a long trip, but a week of chasing kangaroos, toasting the Best Day Down Under, nursing headaches and riding a rented FJR on the wrong side of the road sounds much better than a week of working to me. And of course, claiming that little rogue island for the Kingdom of Rhode Island has always been pretty high on my list of things to do, so it makes perfect sense.

Then, back to Oklahoma City to pick up where we left off, heading to Denver to continue the Road Away From Wrestlemania – and from there, who knows? No worries, there’s plenty of ideas percolating in my tiny brain, I just need to bring my Sharpie to a pub with a large supply of napkins to get them all down!

Cheerio! Across the pond right now with the WWE for two shows in London. Hard at work getting everything set up for tomorrow night’s show, but, never fear, there’s always time to be found to have a little fun.

Not quite a motorcycle, but seems like it would be a hell of a lot of fun to try and drive one of these big red beasts on the open road. I can just picture it now, a frightened busload of passengers screaming for their lives as their driver, the French Tickler, maniacally laughs as he slams them from side to side, drives up the wrong side of the motorway then unceremoniously dumps everyone into the River Thames.

Yeah, maybe I’ll just stick to my day job for now.

Speaking of motorcycles (something that I almost constantly seem to do) I had the rare opportunity to meet a fellow rider from the Motorcyclist Café forum in London this week. Sir Limpsalot (AKA Simon) and I have been in touch through the forum over the past few months. During that time, we arranged a very clandestine, very James Bond-ish, 007 type meeting, to be held on the day I arrived in Simon’s Kingdom – the official, United one.

My instructions were explicit. Meet at 4PM next to a statue of a horse and chariot – across from the big clock.

I took some of the WWE audio crew along as backup. At the appointed hour, a tall, mysterious man in a beret walked up the stairs. Identifying each other with the secret handshake (I could tell you but then I would have to kill you) we quickly shuttled off to a secret safe house for some top secret, high level discussions.

Simon was a great guy, he sat and listened to hours of boring stories about the wacky world of World Wrestling without screaming at us. We had a lot of laughs that night. Sir Limpsalot managed to escape our clutches just in time to catch his train home.

Looking forward to coming back to the United Kingdom in November and following through with the secret plan I hatched at that table that night. Yes, it involves motorcycles, ferries and claiming a certain tiny Isle between the UK and Ireland for my Kingdom – the Kingdom of Rhode Island.

Man, if it works out like I hope it will, that’s going to be some serious fun!

And so, the countdown to Wednesday’s flight home continues. Finish today’s set day, then squeak through two shows, home for a week, another Pay Per View (April is a busy month for wrestling) then finally jetting off to Australia for a vacation, a little Kingdom territory enhancing, and, of course, more motorcycling fun!

This is my friend Keith. He loves lobster.

I met Keith a few years ago during one of the WWE ‘Tribute to the Troops shows in Afghanistan.

Helping set up the Tribute show, Keith was great, a hard worker and, as it turned out, a HUGE wrestling fan. I honestly believe that Keith’s brain contains more useless facts about wrestling than the WWE Encyclopedia does. If a position for WWE historian ever opens up, I’m fairly sure Keith will have a job with the WWE for life.

Besides being a Sergeant in the Air Force and a lobster lover, Keith also is a rabid motorcycle fan. Small wonder we get along so well. During the Great Nova Scotia Expedition planning phase, I badgered Keith to come along until he gave in.

It was on this trip that Keith earned his nickname – Unleaded. He garnered this moniker when I distracted him at a gas station in Newfoundland, and he poured about three gallons of high test all over Stormbringer.

As much as he loves lobster and all things motorcycle, his passion for wrestling is stronger. Staying at his house after concluding the Road to Wrestlemania ride, I got to find out first hand exactly how strong that passion is.

That’s right. Unnleaded is an officially licensed Professional Wrestler in the state of Oklahoma! It gets better. Saturday night he took me to Lawton, OK. the home of Impact Zone Wrestling.

You’ve probably never heard of Lawton, OK unless you watch COPS or have ever tried to mail order parts for your home meth lab kit. On Saturdays in Lawton, the locals stop stealing cars long enough to watch some top notch entertainment at the Impact Zone!

Behind this door, Keith, A.K.A Unleaded takes on another persona, that of Professional Wrestling referee Donny Brooks.

Walking into the Impact Zone with my camera, I was immediately singled out by one of the staff. “We’re all wonderin’,” she asked me eagerly, “With that fancy camera, are you here with anyone? A magazine? the Newspaper?”

I replied, “Nope. Just here to watch Donny Brooks.” If she only knew…

For the next hour and a half I watched in amazement as my friend, this guy that I thought I knew pretty well, refereed five professional wrestling matches.

Maybe I was wrong about the historian job. If the WWE is ever looking for a referee to work cheap… well… I know where they can find one.

A ‘Wind Event?’

What a joke! That’s what the weather-heads called it. Calling the ferocious, ridiculously high gusts of rapidly moving air a ‘Wind Event’ is like calling the sinking of the Titanic a ‘Boating Event.’

Mother Nature’s mood that morning could best be summed up with two words: Sucks and Blows. If we put something down while loading Rain Cloud Follows, it blew away. Fiona’s sunglasses disappeared for a while, we finally found them twenty feet away behind a curb. My gloves ended up under a parked car. I’m honestly surprised the motorcycle hadn’t blown over in the night. We both were laughing at the strength of the wind, but it wasn’t a funny laugh, it was more of the nervous, ‘Are-we-really-going-to-try-and-ride-in-this-shit‘ kind.

As soon as we got on the road, the laughing stopped, and the crying began. Rain Cloud Follows bucked like a rodeo bull as the angry masses of air attacked. Immediately, a huge gust of wind grabbed my map holder and tried to launch my map to Oz.

Then, we passed a freshly plowed field. The hurricane force sent dirt and dust flying across the road, coating everything with a fine film of grit, making it impossible to see.

The bike pitched around violently, and I leaned at ridiculous angles just to keep it going straight. Gusts would blow us across the lane and back with alarming regularity. Frustrated, I pulled off the highway.

I turned and shouted to Fiona, “I don’t know about this!”

She shouted back, “We’re already in it, let’s keep going for a while!” Turning around to make sure I heard correctly, I noticed she was actually smiling.

She is the voice of reason in this relationship. She is also 100% crazy.

I got back on the road, and the wind showed no mercy. It pummeled us from the left, and when that got tiring, it switched around and pummeled us from the right. It was extremely brutal riding.

Futilely Shaking My Fist at the Wind

Note the building behind me in the picture. I think the third Little Pig lived there, and even though this house was made of stone, Mother Nature huffed and puffed, and the roof blew clean off.

One interesting byproduct of all this wind is fire. We passed burning buildings and brush fires as we fought our way through the onslaught.

Riding in vicious wind like this is a lot like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. It feels really good when you stop.

Two hundred seventy miles later, it felt really good when we finished battling the wind for the day and arrived at our new friend DarthRider’s house.

Since I started posting ride reports, DarthRider, a.k.a. Dave has consistently extended an invitation for us to come and stay with him and his wife Betty. Way back in the ‘Map-kin Planning‘ days, I realized that Dave’s home was somewhat close to Houston, relatively speaking, and gladly accepted his kind offer.

Don, Dave, Betty and Two Windblown Strangers in Amarillo

Dave, his wife Betty and friend Don extended every courtesy and kindness to us, stories and laughs were swapped, beers were drained, a fantastic steak dinner was consumed and we stayed up late into the cool and mercifully windless night. It will never cease to amaze me that total strangers can forge such an instant bond, all because of a shared love of motorcycles.

That’s why I ride.

The next morning we slept in, recovering from the beating Mother Nature doled out the day before. Though we had plans to meet Keith somewhere and ride to his house in Oklahoma City – the self-designated end of this leg of the ride – there was too much to see around DarthRider’s home town to just leave.

Later that morning, Don returned with his Harley, Dave fired up his Triumph, and we motored out to nearby Palo Duro Canyon State Park.

Donson on the Digital Bitch

Dave on his Wheelie Machine

New Friends in Palo Duro State Park

From the canyon, DarthRider led me and Sleeping Beauty to another place that has long been on my list of places to see; Stanley Marsh 3’s Cadillac Ranch! (note: it’s NOT Stanley Marsh the Third, it is Stanley Marsh Three. What else would you expect from a nutter that buries ten Cadillacs halfway in the ground?)

World Famous Cadillac Ranch

Fiona’s inner vandal made a rare appearance, as she picked up a half used can of spray paint and started tagging one of the Caddys, showing everyone how they do it back in the 626!

After this blatant act of graffiti, it was time to say goodbye to Dave. Keith, a.k.a Unleaded from the Great Unsponsored Nova Scotia Expedition was already en route to Elk City, our designated meeting place, and all this sightseeing and wanton destruction of private property had put us behind schedule.

With little choice, Sleeping Beauty and I jumped on the superhighway, a bittersweet straight-line way to end the journey, but, due to the lack of time, completely necessary.

Unleaded in Elk City

Unleaded Proudly Rides Little Baby Ooops

The ride to Casa Unleaded was mostly uneventful, save for one interesting photo op I spied and quickly snapped as a tribute to my missing riding buddy Abi.

An Official Oklahoma City Lighthouse

A few hundred miles of highway later, we arrived at Keith’s house, eagerly anticipating our last meeting of the ride – Little Baby Ooops herself.

Danica – The Newest Expedition Member

Sleeping Beauty Looks Comfortable… A Little TOO Comfortable!!

Gratuitous Cute Baby Pics

Pulling into Keith’s garage for the final time, I had that familiar melancholy feeling. Fiona would fly out (again) and I would go back to work (already) and the first leg of this early season ride would come to a close (too soon). Though it had its share of ups and downs, we still toasted the Best Day Ever, the Best Friends Ever, the Best Ride Ever, and the Best Baby Ever until we were completely out of happy juice.

The Entire 3140 Mile Route

Rain Cloud Follows will rest comfortably in Oklahoma for a while, but that doesn’t mean no riding for us motorcycle addicts. In May, Fiona and I go down, to Australia and a week of riding a rented FJR on the wrong side of the road with my old friend Dan. Then, in early June we’ll head back to Oak City for the second leg of this ride, doing Denver and a return to the Motorcyclist Cafe Barn and Bunkhouse. If we’re lucky (and I have to say it, we are VERY VERY lucky!) by mid summer we’ll end up in a dark bar somewhere in my adopted home of California with another napkin and frosty pint of Guinness in hand making some more ride plans.

Until then, Happy Riding!