It was too gorgeous of a weekend to not be out riding. I rode with a couple of friends to Kinder LA with high hopes of becoming independently wealthy with the help of the Coushatta Casino. We all did the basic maintenance check ups to make sure bikes were ready to roll, and when all checked out, we headed out early on Saturday morning and had a beautiful ride taking several back roads. When we arrived at Merryville, LA we were famished. We saw a little hole in the wall place called Stu’s. We hoped that it would be an eating location to keep for future visits, instead it was somewhere to definitely avoid. The room temperature gumbo that was served tasted like it was made with dish water; the fries a couple of us ordered also arrived luke warm in addition to the grilled cheese sandwich in which the cheese wasn’t even melted…fortunately they were polite enough to not charge us for the food we didn’t eat. We headed out from there and only had a short distance to get to the casino. Upon arriving at the casino’s hotel around 4:15 one of the other riders discovered her rear tire was flat. The major dilemma is that we were about an hour away from any motorcycle shop/dealer and they would close before we could figure out how to get the bike there. Plus all the tire shops we called (also 30-45 min away) would not work on a motorcycle tire. Even tho the friends bike was a Honda Shadow (not a VTX) I gave Brock a call to see if he could give me some names off of the emergency travel list. He gave me Pat and Bubba in the Orange area, and David in Beaumont. I gave both of them a call and they were extremely gracious in trying to figure out how they could help us. While I was on the phone with them, my friend was outside on her phone making calls to insurance co, hubby, and another friend in Houston. There was a casino employee that walked by and overheard the problem and mentioned that her husband also rides a Shadow and just changed his tire last week. He kept the tire and if it happened to be the same size she was sure we could have it. Within about 30 minutes, her husband and two friends showed up. It did end up being exactly the same tire so they took the flat off, took it to their house, replaced the tube, patched the nail hole in the tire, and then put it all back on. We all felt like our angels were definitely looking out for us...well, that is until we got to go to the casino that night and proceed to lose all our money. We were so in awe of how the circumstances worked out that we decided to party all night long to celebrate. The road trip home today was another gorgeous day of riding down different back roads and fortunately uneventful.
