Passes & Canyons Blog

As a freelance writer it is standard procedure to do what you can to use the information you gather in as many different articles for as many different publications as you can. In that way you minimize your costs, maximize your earnings, and make more efficient use of your time, which in this case more than many others, truly is money.

I’ve written here about trying out this board game, American Throttle. I also wrote about it on Examiner.com. I don’t just republish the same piece; I totally rewrite and make it a different piece with a different angle.

I also wrote about it for RumBum.com, where I do a regular column once a week and some other article every other week. That Rum Bum column was supposed to have run yesterday but it didn’t. My editor surprised me greatly by sending me a note saying, “I’m sorry but I can’t run this piece. It doesn’t at all jibe with the mood of the site. (A bunch of guys sitting around playing a board game is pretty much the antithesis of Rum Bum, which is all about living, having cool adventures, etc.)”

Now, I knew she didn’t want a product review sort of piece, so I worked hard to give it a very different slant than I had done here or on Examiner. Nevertheless, it got axed. But you know, I thought I had done a pretty good job with it and I hate to let a good piece of writing disappear without ever being read. So I’m publishing it here, below. Check it out.

Playing the Game

Dennis was on a Fat Boy, Bill chose another Harley, while Dan and I were both riding vintage bikes older than us. We had a heck of a ride planned, starting in Seattle and ending up in Hollister, CA, site of the legendary Hollister “riot” that set the image of motorcycling back for about 50 years, and which spawned the Marlon Brando movie “The Wild One.”

We weren’t taking the direct route, however, straight south. We were doing an abbreviated Four Corners Tour, with stops in New England and Florida before reaching Southern California. Not to mention occasional side trips to Music City, the Middle of Freakin Nowhere, and elsewhere. And being that this was a motorcycle ride, we would hit the big rally locations, including Sturgis, Daytona, Laughlin, and a few more.

“Wow,” you might ask, “That’s one heck of a tour. How long did this take you?”

Oh, about an hour and a half the first time. Second time we made it in about an hour.

Huh?

OK, OK, we weren’t really out on the actual road on real motorcycles, fabulous as a trip like that would be. We were playing this board game, “American Throttle,” that is part trivia game, part poker run, and part a test of your motorcycle knowledge. On a Friday night in November it’s not very likely that you’re going to be out riding, so if you want to get together with your riding buddies it’s nice if whatever you end up doing has at least something to do with motorcycles.

I had acquired this game almost two months earlier and told all the guys about it and said I wanted to get together and play it. Were they interested? Everyone said yes but finding a night when we could all get together took two months. Even then I could only get five, counting myself, and at the last minute Alan called to say he had a plumbing emergency and would not be coming. So four of us played.

Was it a viable winter substitute for actually getting out and going for a ride? Of course not. But it did bring some of us together, and of course the number one topic of conversation was motorcycles. Plus, Bill and Dennis are members of the OFMC, while Dan is someone I met working on a piece about Iron Butt riders, and they had never met each other. So this brought them together for the first time.

As always happens, no ice breakers were needed. All three of these guys ride Harleys and they launched right into it. Dan, being an Iron Butt guy, immediately started probing to see if there were any potential Iron Butt riders in the group. He quickly identified Dennis, as I knew he would. Dennis’s longest one-day ride to date was about 800 miles, and that was on two-lane roads. Dan pointed out that that was hardly different than riding 1,000 miles on the interstate.

Life is often like a game, in that you put pieces into motion and have no way of knowing the outcome. I’ve always enjoyed bringing people together. We’ll see how this game plays out.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
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Biker Quote for Today

I was a motorcyclist before I even rode one. I’d buy the magazines and dream.

Tags: American Throttle game

This entry was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2011 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.