What a wild weekend! The Motorcycle Show started Friday and I had planned to go on Saturday. We intended to leave by 10:30am to get downtown and back, since we were supposed to have our first snow flurries of the year in the afternoon.My son came over and the 3 of us left. It seemed warm out…..high 40’s maybe. We had a nice ride into Seattle. The show was at Qwest Field Events Center which is part of structure where the Seahawks play football, and adjacent to Safeco Field where the Mariners play baseball. If you ride a motorcycle to the show there is free parking, so lots of people do, otherwise it’s $10.00. This particular day with the forecast of snow, there were still an amazing amount of motorcycles in the lot.
This year seemed a little disappointing to me. In years past, the show had included more local and independent bike builders, and just lots of stuff. The event mainly showcases the 19 major manufacturers of motorcycles, ATVs and watercraft from around the world. The large names in gear and accessories were all there. It is awesome to look across the room and see all the shiny motorcycles, some on pedestals. There were smiles on every face. This year the number of females who were obviously interested in a bike for themselves was just awesome. Everywhere you looked there were females who had caught the bug and were sizing up a bike of their own. Over half of the people sitting on bikes were women, with big grins on their faces. I could imagine they could see themselves whizzing down the road with the wind in their hair.
One of the fun things I did was walk through an RV, my very first! It was quite large, and had an actual fold-down ramp in the rear. The ramp led up to a garage that you could tie down 3 large motorcycles. It was so awesome that I could see myself at least traveling in an RV sometime. There is always a wonderful collection of antique motorcycles and this year was no exception. There also seemed to be a lot of sidecar models and manufacturers. It is fun to look, dream, watch the people and just spend hours absorbed in the world of motorcycles. I was almost overwhelmed by it all.
It was quite a large event, so after walking around for a couple of hours we decided to walk down the block to the Pyramid Brewery for a bite of lunch. As we neared the exit we looked out the window and stopped abruptly.
During the couple of hours we had been inside, it had begun to snow. It was snowing heavily. The flakes were huge, and it was already sticking on the ground. We continued to walk to the Brewery. We had a fine lunch, all the while looking out the window scanning the traffic, amount of snow on the parked cars, etc. By the time we left to walk back to our vehicle the city was a winter wonderland, and a parking lot. I was amazed at a few motorcyclists, still out riding around in the snow. It was kind of slippery.We slowly made our way back to the freeway and headed north outside of the city towards home. By the time we reached my home, we had 2 inches of snow blanketing everything. It snowed all night and was beautiful. The next day we had torrential rains for 48 hours; actually very uncommon in the Seattle area. With the snowmelt and rains there were life-threatening floods and my particular business park was evacuated yesterday. There are creeks and rivers everywhere that have washed out roads and access for thousands of people. A stretch of I-5 is flooded and closed between Seattle and Portland for several days. No motorcycling for a while here….