nd here is part II…

When last we left our intrepid adventurers, they had arrived back in North Providence with an empty 5′x8′ trailer and two packages of bungee cords from Walgreen’s…

I pulled the Suburban past Mr. Motorcycle’s house, looped around and parked across the street. He’d moved the bike to the street, making way for his wife to get into the garage. It’s now a little after 8PM, maybe 8:30 and he’s gone off with his buddy. No problem, Carl and I should be able to handle this. We figured we’d be on the road by 9PM.

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Ha!

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As I put up the kickstand, I look at the house and notice one of the previous owner’s kids sitting in the bay window watching me. He sees me notice him, but he doesn’t care. He looks to be about 7 or 8 and knows he’s safe. Or that he’s in for a show, either one. So I push the bike over to the back of the trailer. “Hey, this thing seems heavy…” The door is open, and I grab one handlebar and Carl grabs the other and we proceed to lift the front wheel up into the trailer. Not. The shocks decompress and the bike just moves a little. Hmmn. Ok, let’s put a little more muscle into it. Shocks decompress, tire goes to more round shape but does not leave the ground. Oooh, this is not going to be as easy as that.Round #1 fails: The bike will not just be lifted up into the trailer.So, we unhook the trailer from the truck and Carl lifts up the tongue so that the back edge of the trailer touches the ground. Aha! Never mind that in his disconnecting of the trailer he forgets to unhook one of the electrical wires, and it breaks. We’ll worry about that later. I tell Carl to keep the bar up in the air, and hold it tight. I go to the back of the trailer, put my hands on the handlebars, and push it towards the open door, now with scarcely an inch and a half of a lip from the ground. Front tire stops dead at said tiny little lip. I go back, take a little bit of a running start, and get the tire up over the lip with a little extra muscle. Carl, surprised by this level of force is unprepared for the trailer to be pushed so hard, and lets the trailer slide along the ground. He kept the bar raised in the air, though. So we switch places. He gets the bike, and I’m at the front, holding onto the bar and bracing the trailer. He doesn’t get far with that, so I tell him I’m going to try again, and “Hold tight!” He braces himself, and I get the front tire into the trailer, and a few feet up the “ramp” that is the floor of the trailer until I hit an obstacle. My shoulders. I can’t remain standing while pushing a motorcycle into a 5′x8′ trailer because the inside of the trailer isn’t tall enough. Ok, I back up, bend over more and run at it again. This time, I get the front tire up the “ramp” a little further and then stop at a lurch when the back tire hits the lip of the trailer. <sigh> This is not easy.Ok, one more really good run, with some pushing, some leg extension, and some back straining should do it. “You got that end, Carl? Hold on tight, I’m going balls to the wall on this run.” So, I picture a solid shield wall ahead of me, lower my shoulder, get a good run and into the trailer. I get the front wheel in and up the “ramp” and get the back wheel just barely over the lip of the trailer! Unfortunately, I’m now prone to the right side of the bike, completely extended and sort of hanging in mid air, the bike barely in the trailer, my feet on the asphalt, and I’ve started to really sweat now. I just need to get it about a foot more inside. I place my foot inside the trailer and start to “climb”. Only, I don’t have that running start this time, and even on my best strength day, I can’t pull this off.

Unfortunately, the metal floors of U-haul trailers are designed to slide boxes across them. The floors work just as well for sliding sneakers. So I’m slipping and losing my balance. The bike decides to lean to the left, away from me and I don’t have the oblique muscles to hold it up. Against the wall of the trailer it goes, and there goes the left mirror. I call out to Carl who leaves his post and helps me right the bike. We get it straight again, he goes back to the front of the trailer, and I back it out.

Round #2 fails: The bike will not be pushed up a slippery, low-clearance moving ramp.

Now we’re really stuck, and I’ve had my first motorcycle part casualty and I haven’t even ridden the bike yet. We try to think how we can get the bike up this “ramp”. Mr. Motorcycle had mentioned that when he puts the bike in the back of his Mighty Max pickup truck, he just idles the bike up a ramp and it works fine. Well, I have no pickup truck, and no ramp, but the bike does run really well.

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By this point, the kid in the window has gotten bored with us, and went off to find something more entertaining.

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The next theory, we do what we were just doing, only I use the engine to make the climb into the trailer. Again, Carl elects to hold the front of the trailer, knowing very little about the operation of motorcycles. And hey, it is my bike, I should be the one responsible for this. I start the bike up, rev the engine a couple of times to make sure it doesn’t stall and adjust the choke. So I’m standing to the right side of the bike again. I let out the clutch a little and I can just feel the engine brimming with anticipation. Then, a vision comes to me… It’s a vision where I get part way into the trailer before I’m at the end of my reach, and slip my hand off, popping the clutch. The bike lurches forward and Carl, surprised, let’s go of the bar to have it hit his foot, pinning him to the spot. Just then, the bike crashes through the front wall of the trailer hitting him since he’s unable to move, but not before I get my arm caught in the chain and get burned by the tailpipe on the way by. Not wanting to become another entry in the Darwin Awards, I turned off the motorcycle. “Carl, let’s just not do this.”

He thinks maybe we need a ramp of some sort. Well, duh. Hook the trailer back up to the truck, and get both of us to push the bike up a ramp into the level trailer. Only I don’t have a ramp. Carl suggests one of my shields, but the wooden one is already weakened by my freight train antics on the battlefield, and the aluminum one wouldn’t hold the bike. Hell, the wooden might not have held the bike even in peak condition. So, good thinking with available tools, but that’s not going to happen.

Then he suggests perhaps leveraging the bike up somehow. He suggests perhaps my 6′ hardwood marshal’s staff. Well, I’ve used it to forcibly push combatants back from encroaching people’s tents, but I don’t think it’s going to hold for something like this.

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Did I mention that I found a web page yesterday with specs on my bike that list it as 573 pounds?

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Then, I get a brainstorm. I look around for interesting terrain, but don’t come up with anything immediately. Lacking anything that looks like an amateur motorcycle loading dock for tired, dumb Virginians I focus on the street curb. “Hey, what if we put the trailer against the curb and use that to help us get the bike into it?” “I don’t think it’ll make up the height difference.” “But what if we tip the trailer up like we have been doing, only with the back on the lawn, and the tires on the street?”

“What the hell, why not?”

So I wheel the trailer over to the curb in front of Mr. Motorcycle’s house. I figure I don’t want to go wandering over his neighbors’ lawns. I back the tires right to the curb and push the bike through the guy’s driveway and across his lawn.

“Ok, lift up the bar!”

Sweet. The lip touches the lawn, and the angle inside is minimal, maybe five degrees. I tell Carl to hold tight, and I push the bike into the trailer, until the back wheel stops. <sigh> I’m getting really tired now. Back up, one more good run into the trailer. I got both wheels in, and the bike is all the way inside! Woohoo! I put the kickstand down, and gingerly exit the trailer.

“Don’t move! I’m going to bring the truck over to the trailer, you hold it steady.”

I get in the truck and get the hitch as close to the trailer as I can. We gingerly get the bar back on, and secure it to the truck. Now I can walk around inside the trailer with confidence. I wrestled with the bike a few times to get it up on its center stand. “You watch the back, and tell me if I’m in danger of pulling the bike out while I try to jerk it up on this stand [while I’m hunched over inside the trailer and my back is expressing its discomfort].” A few good violent rocking motions, and it’s up.

“Uh, Kevin?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s great, but now the back tire is hanging out a little bit and the door won’t close.”

“Shit!”

At this point, I am so done with this. I grabbed the metal underneath the seat, put my chest against the rear and shoved it. The bike moved some at a diagonal. Well, that helped. I do it again. And again. And again. Finally, the bike is situated diagonally, and there’s room for the door to close. I connect the flat bungee cords around the forks and put two cords to each side, so as to stabilize the bike from rocking side to side too much. On its center stand, the bike barely moves side to side anyway. And it can’t really travel forward or backwards because of the fit inside the trailer. I figure we’re done.

Wearily, we climb back into the truck, and head out. Having driven all over North Providence, we find the easier way to I-95 South past Providence Place Mall (which has a Dave and Buster’s, by the way).

We stopped at the welcome center for Connecticut, and being the paranoid traveler I am, I check on the bike in the trailer (especially since I thought I heard something unpleasant). Well, the bike had indeed lurched forward but in the absence of having room to go anywhere, the front wheel just turned, and then there was lots of space to roll. Doh! The bike rolled forward just enough to come off it’s center stand, and there was no way the bungees were going to hold it upright. One of the bungees on the left was broken, and the bike had fallen over against the right wall of the trailer. There goes the right mirror.

I right the bike, shove it into the right front corner of the trailer (I’m taking no prisoners here) and secure it as best as possible with every remaining bungee I have. I put down the kickstand, but it still doesn’t look like it’s secure from falling over to the left. “Hey Carl, you want to ride on the bike in the trailer on the way home, keeping it steady?” I won’t write what his answer was.

I need a stronger strap to hold the bike up against the wall, or something to prop it up with. Again, the shields and marshal’s staff aren’t going to do the trick. However, I do have this huge armor box in the truck. It’s about two and a half feet tall, about 40 inches long, and about two feet wide. And with every scrap of armor I have in it, it’s pretty heavy.

So, we wedge the big ass armor box into the trailer next to the bike, check the pitiful bungees, close the door and I say a little prayer.

The rest of the trip home was fairly uneventful. We listened to every type of music imaginable from the gamut of New York City radio stations, got the winning Capitals’ score for the evening (C-A-P-S, CAPS, CAPS, CAPS!) and ate some really trashy fast food at service areas.

A couple of times I even opened my eyes to remember that I was still driving a large truck and trailer on a dark interstate. :-/

I don’t know what the hell happened, but it wasn’t our fault. One the way home, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania disappeared. I swear, I didn’t sleep through it. We left New Jersey, paid the outrageous sum of $14.70 to get off the New Jersey Turnpike, and we crossed a huge bridge that I didn’t recognize into Delaware. What the hell? Where’s Philadelphia? We missed an entire state somewhere! But we were too tired to care.

We got back at 7:30AM - there and back in one day, baby! I took a look at the bike in the trailer. It had in fact fallen over (breaking another bungee) but hadn’t gone far; it was resting on my armor box. Fine.

I told Carl goodbye and headed up to bed. We’d get the bike out of the trailer later.