A long weekend in Vegas

I flew to Las Vegas, met up with some friends I had met online, rented a motorcycle, and rode with them around Vegas and some outlying areas. Holy cow what a great time I had!

We all met up at the Sahara Hotel breakfast buffet. We ate a tonne so that we could keep up our energy and strength. A day of riding can be tiring, after all. If this picture looks a little strange it's because I spliced it together from three different ones. (I wanted to be sure that I got every rider's head into one picture.)

Everyone else in the group either rode to the ride or brought their bikes in the trailer you see here. I rented my bike from a shop there in Las Vegas, and as you can see, we got ourselves together and in order in the classiest of parking lots :-)

We drove from the bike rental place West out of Las Vegas to Red Rock Canyon Nature Reserve. It took us a few minutes and a few miles to get past all those stoplights and cages, but once we got into Red Rock Canyon and got our bearings, the real ride began. The first few miles we stopped everywhere.

Here are all of the riders except the one taking the picture at our second stop. I look as tall as Godzilla in this picture, but I think that's only because I am step or two closer to the camera. (Either that or I grew to 7' tall when I wasn't looking.) You can see the canyon behind us. Pretty country there.

Here's what eight motorcycles squeezed (mostly) into one parking spot looks like. In all, there were:

• Four Kawasaki Ninja 650Rs (two silver, one black, one blue)
• Two Harleys (a Softail and a Road King)
• One Kawasaki Ninja 250
• One Yamaha FZ1
• ... and later we picked up some Honda along the way—I think it was an RC51

I like this picture. The zoom lens flattened the image, and also caught a kind of "highway" feel. Very nice.

Here I am standing in front of the bikes.

There's one thing about the area we rode around that took me by surprise: I wasn't expecting it to be so beautiful. I mean, just look at it! I come from the land of green mountains, trees, and oceans; so I figured desert was desert was desert. But I was wrong. The whole area through Red Rock Canyon was stunningly beautiful. I guess the reason I didn't know this was because every time you see Las Vegas and surrounding areas on television, they only show the most ugly barren terrain, or the city itself (casinos, etc.) They never seem to show the beautiful parts, which is a shame.

Here are three biker chicks. They will kick your ass and smile while they do it.

After lunch, and after riding the entire width of Las Vegas without a single one of us getting killed by a cager, we went out to Lake Mead. You can see that Honda we picked up. I told the rider he could be our "token Honda". He just looked at me kind of funny, but I'm used to that.

Our last picture before we rode back to Las Vegas and I returned the motorcycle (it's the black and red Ninja behind me) to the rental place.

From there we had dinner and a drink or two afterwards.

This really was an awesome trip for me; it was great to get away—I just wish my wife could have come along as well, but we will do it or something similar together in the future. Meeting Mherlee and Mr. Mherlee, aiiieee and Nova, SnowDevil, Mama SnowDevil, and Papa SnowDevil was awesome too. The ride and the company, eating and laughs were all great! Thanks, you guys!

-Brian, aka: MeanderingMan

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