twist my rubber arm with a butter tart

 

James’ FJR was parked in the street and he was working on the Warrior in the driveway when I got home around noon.

He keeps one of his bikes and a whole bunch of tools at my place because I have a garage and a lift and he doesn’t. It makes it easier for him to enhance and repair the Warrior and do stuff on my bikes as well. Lucky me because I know less than nothing about the mechanics of motorcycles (or anything else for that matter) and it’s great to have someone knowledgeable living around the corner who can help me.

“I’m going for a ride in a bit. Wanna’ come?” I said.

“Nah.” His response was immediate. “My knee is killing me. It’s the size of a basketball. No riding for me today.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to have a nap. See you later.”

“K.”

He had just put the Warrior back in the garage when I got up from a half hour of heaven.

“Oh. You’re still here.” I observed.

“Yep. I’m just on my way home.”

“Okay. I’m going to gear up and go out. In keeping with my new practice of telling someone where I’m headed, I’m letting you know that I’m going to Carleton Place and…”

Carleton Place (aka CP) is about fourteen kilometres from where I live in Almonte. James interrupted before I had a chance to share the rest of my planned route.

“Carleton Place? I’ll go with you. But I need to go home first. Give me fifteen minutes.”

“It’ll take me at least that to gear up. Maybe twenty with lipstick.” I joked.

~~~~~~~~~~

“Adam’s going to meet us at the Tim Horton’s.” James told me when he returned.

I needed to go Walmart to pick up a brace I had ordered for my back. I hadn’t asked James why he wanted to accompany me; I assumed he needed to run an errand too. Adam must be on his way somewhere and wants to say hi, I thought.

While I was in Walmart, James went to Timmy’s to fetch Adam. We chatted a bit when they got back to the parking lot where I had been waiting for about five minutes.

“So, where are you off to, Adam?” I asked.

“Nowhere in particular,” he said.

“We could go to Clayton.” James interjected.

This struck me as odd because Clayton is normally somewhere you go on your way to somewhere else – mainly the 511 and then either left to Perth or right to Calabogie. But it fit with my plan to go up Tatlock road, so…

“Fine with me,” I said.

“We’ll take the road where Susan had the flat tire last year,” James said to Adam to help orient him. Adam lives in Richmond and rides in the Highlands relatively infrequently. But he had been with me and James when I’d had a flat just outside of Clayton in October 2023.

It’s a nice sweepy twenty-five-kilometre ride from CP to Clayton; I led the way. When James and I ride together, I almost always lead. I prefer to be in the left track and being in front means I get to set the pace, which is less spirited than that which James may ride when he’s solo.

“There aren’t many choices once we get to Clayton,” I said to him on the communicator as we got close. “We can either keep going or go back.”

“We could go for a lemon tart.” He answered.

 

I laughed to myself. The favoured lemon tarts are sold at the Bogie General Store, which meant we would go through Clayton and on to Calabogie – another forty kilometres or so

“Okay,” I said. “You wanna stop at the General Store in Clayton? Or ride straight through?”

“Let’s stop. I want to check that my licence plate is secure.”

Attaching a new licence plate is what he had been working on earlier in the driveway.

When we got to Bogie, Adam had a lemon tart AND a butter tart. James took the requisite pic of his “little piece of sunshine” on his bike to post on FB. I had #PINK Gatorade Zero.

“Where do you wanna go now?” I asked.

“White Lake?” James offered.

“Okay,” I replied.

We stopped at the little picnic spot just outside of Calabogie so Adam could have a pic of himself and his Harley taken in front of the river and we paused again at Scoops so I could stretch out some of my back pain. None of us had ice cream. The tarts and Gatorade had been enough.

Somewhere between Pakenham and home, James’ voice crackled through the Lexin.

“Thanks for convincing me to go for a ride,” he said.

“Convincing you?” I guffawed into the microphone. “Seriously? More like twisted your rubber arm!”

And that’s how a 14.1-kilometre back-brace run to CP morphed into a 141-kilometre butter-tart loop to Bogie. Happens all the time as any rider worth their salt will tell you 🙂