I found out one of the guys involved in the taxi incident was a friend
I met before the GVBR.
I made tonight's CM my first, and I took part in a couple of corkages
myself. There was one taxi that decided to "nudge forward" (sound
familiar?) just as a motorcycle cop was next to his door. He would
have hit my wheel had I not moved it quickly out of the way (still
corking him though). I had made a note of his number plate, then after
the cop yelled at him, he came around the front, also looked at the
number plate, at said to both of us to remember xxxx. The guy next to
me took a couple of seconds to figure it out, before exclaiming to me
"he was a nice cop!" 🙂 Anyway, he didn't cause any more problems, so
I've promptly forgotten it.
The motorcycle cops had a pretty bad burning stench following
them. Seems their bikes can't physically go that slow without burning
the clutch.
A couple of times during the night, it seemed we wanted to head onto
the westgate or similar, and everytime we turned a corner, the cops
were blocking the appropriate road. In the end, we just sat in the
middle of an intersection, as we could see the road around the corner
was blocking the path forward very much. The truck driver was a little
surprised 🙂
So we sat, as one of the guys proclaimed that we were stopping,
because on Feb 1, a cyclist was hit and killed by a negligent
driver. We gave him a minute's silence, and then whinged about how the
perp would never even be charged with manslaughter. There was a TV
camera there, with the person behind it wanting us to raise our bikes
(probably would have put caption of "rogue cyclists stopped from
holding our bridge to ransom"😉, so we refused.
Unfortunately, most of the night was directed by the cops who didn't
let us ride the chosen route, and wouldn't let us on busy roads. There
was bugger all traffic around. Only a couple of cagers beeping, who
were responded with party blowers.
Went along to the pier, and the cops stopped us from boarding the
Spirit of Tassie 🙂
A guy with two very large speakers in a trailer, powered off a 12V car
battery joined us as we were circling a roundabout. Unfortunately, he
mostly played rap.
Went and rode through a Maccas and KFC, just as a song about "we don't
need this [censored]" or similar came on. We all cheered 🙂 Rode then to
Crown Casino, and held up the bikes. You know, a bike with panniers
wouldn't be a bad weight lifting excercise. Only just got it up and
held it up. Forgot to latch the panniers in correctly, so it flopped
around a bit 🙂
Didn't go to Andrew Bolt's office, unfortunately 🙁
Finished at Fed Square.
Hopefully, next month, we will get back onto main roads.
--
TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/
}> Is "wrongest" an actual word?
} It's a perfectly cromulent word.
Which, when used, embiggens us all.
-- Jeff Ramsey, Steed and D. Joseph Creighton @ ASR