Cove Rally, September 14-16

[Frank Smith]

Thanks for hosting a great event. The hospitality was spot on and the night ride up to Bingham was fun.

[Johnny Tobyone]

Natural bridge stop near Sewanee Tennessee.  Thanks for leading the street ride Win. and Griff, MsSGriff for hosting.
Great food and riding areas!!

[alabamatoy]

Sounds like yall had a good time.  I had to bow out at the last minute, ended up working long hours all week, was planning to have to work Saturday but at last minute didnt.  The bike simply wasn't ready and I dont yet have a tag on it.  So instead of meeting all yall, I wound up riding up Bingham to shake the bugs out of the new-to-me bike.

....next time.

[klaviator]

Those of you who attended one or more Rally in the Valley know what a great event that was.  It was sad to see the last rally in the Valley but thanks to Griff and MrsGriff we have a great new rally to take it's place.  I'll have more to say on this as well as more pics later but I'll post this one now as a teaser:

[KevinB]

Great ride yesterday! Hate I couldn't stay and missed the night ride.

Thanks to the Griffs for hosting and Frank for the BBQ.

[Fencejumper09]

Big thanks to the Griffs for hosting a great event!  I made it safely home and am about to sleep for 3 days straight! Pictures a d videos to come after hibernation!!

[Mulley]

That was a fun weekend. The Griff's are fantastic hosts. The riding was a lot of fun. Especially the night ride. I love a good night ride.

I made it home but only after sitting stopped on I-59S for 45 minutes while a wreck was cleared. I would have taken a nap if I had known it would take that long. You know it was fun when you're this exhausted.

[MsSGriff]

Thanks everyone for coming out. We're only a small part of the equation. We provided the opportunity, but you all showed up in numbers to make this first Cove Rally epic. The impromptu night ride made me full young again. It was great to share the four wheel experience with some two wheelers. Thankfully, Griff was on hand to give her some real hell and get her out. That mud hole was soft and sticky. I can't nap until the caffeine from last night leaves my system completely. I seriously never have caffeine. A special thanks to Frank for some AMAZING BBQ and rolls. I didn't know what I was missing. Next year, we'll have to push this event out to October, so it's a little cooler. All in all... great times with good people. Keep pushing pictures. They are wonderful to see.

Sent from my SM-J727V using Tapatalk

[MsSGriff]

Video to follow.

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[Mulley]

Frank, wow! The BBQ was fantastic. Thank you and I'm glad you got to go on the night ride. Fun times.

[klaviator]

There are a lot of cool thing on this forum, bikes, rides, events, discussions on what is the best oil ::)........but IMO the best thing about this forum is the people on it.  With that in mind I headed over to the Rally site on Friday night.  Sure I was enticed by the idea of a free meal (MsSgriff makes some awesome Taco Soup) but mainly it was the chance to spend some time with some great folks.

When I got there Griff was fabricating a heavy duty skid plate for Beck's bike.  That last pic I posted was in Griff's machine shop.

A few pics from Friday night.



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Then I headed back home. 

[klaviator]

Saturday morning I headed back over to the Griff's.  I had volunteered to lead the street ride.  While there were far more people for the DS ride, we still ended up with 6 street riders.  Frank decided to not go riding so he could smoke some awesome BBQ pork.  I convinced him to break away for a bit and at least ride with us to Lynchburg so we ended up with 7 riders.

Johnny Tobyone on his new Beemer.



As is typical for one of our rides we had a divers group.  4 fairly sporty motorcycles, 2 cruisers and one scooter.  I led a reasonably sporty pace to Lynchburg and we didn't have to wait long for anyone.  If you think cruisers are only good for riding very slowly, you haven't ridden with us!

Break in Lynchburg:



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[klaviator]

After Lynchburg we headed up to Sewanee for lunch.  Frank and Buckeye Doug broke off and headed home along the way.  We had lunch at Shenanigans then headed over to the Sewanee Natural bridge.



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Then it was time to ride some of the twistiest roads in Alabama.  While stopped near the top of CR39 a guy pulled up in a pickup and offered us all some cold bottles of water.  He had ridden past us a few minutes earlier on his bike and figured, in his words:  "those boys must be hot and thirsty".  So when he got home just up the road hed grabbed the water and headed back.  We talking with him for a bit.  What a nice guy!

We had ridden up 39.  Then  we rode down 33 and then up 21 and down 79.  We lost HawkVTX and Mojo1 along the way as they headed home leaving three of us.  We rode up 17 then west on CR8 followed by a ride up and over Keel mountain.  After a break in Gurley it was back to Griff's where we waited to the DS gang to return and more importantly for Frank to show up with that BBQ ;)

Dinner was great and so was hanging out with everyone.  TWJohn got a chance to ride a few of the High performance dualsport bikes there and he was as excited as a kid who just got to try ice cream for the first time.  I see a new bike in the near future for him.

A ferw pics from Sat evening:



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Before we left a few crazy people where talking about a night DS ride ???  I was nervous enough just riding some unfamiliar paved country roads at night.

I guess they ended up doing just that.  I'm waiting to hear the stories from that!

A big thanks to Sam and John for hosting this event and to Frank for the delicious BBQ!  I'm looking forward to the next one!!!

[kylepeterson]

Thank you Griff for the tour and the tour. Thoroughly enjoyed the weekend at your home.

Frank that BBQ was outty this would, thank you for providing us with supper and second supper at about 3am Sunday morning after the night ride. It was delicious!

I have 21gb of videos to sort.

One tw200 owner is probably going in debt because of the "here try a buddies bike" test ride program.



This was a great success.

[kylepeterson]

we increased our elevation until, it was sufficient for a night ride rave :D