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Charchie Brownfinger is 40! WTF?!?

Party? Party? Brownfinger is putting on a pimping party? Charchie Brownfinger turning 40?!?!?!? Not possible... but if a party is on, then we'll go to it — even if it means travelling for a day to get there. Even if it's in the police state of Victoria.

 

Departure:

Rat 1: Lost souls gather at stupid early-morning times and somehow leave only an hour later than scheduled, thus facilitating various essential Safety Stop activities...

Rat 1 witnessed a feast of rainbow action: once, the end-o-rainbow was sitting RIGHT NEXT TO THE CAR, then it was RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE BONNET, then both ends were clearly visible either side as we DROVE UNDER IT!! None of us had EVER seen ANYTHING like that before. I doubt I'll witness anything much like it ever again.

Rat 2: Leaves the night before to make a stop along the way in order to help-out some grandparents, and to score a home-cooked meal...

Rat Vehicles meet on the highway and proceed to Melbourne in formation, as per plan. Nothing could go wrong. Strangely enough, nothing did go wrong... nothing at all! We arrived and began to party for several days. Limp nursed a new hole in his nose sustained by 2humpz's moon roof, from which we surfed at 120kph.

 

The Party:

Awsome location, right on the beach! Awsome! And only a 600m ride from our pimping beachfront house. Band played, hot chicks decided who to try and bonk or not, many guests arrived and continued to consume alcohol at alarming levels... sunrise time over Melbourne was going to be very niiiice!

Then later, someone had the idea of heading bak to th pad to grab our PA with Master Gravity Esquire. It was a good idea, but we had no Rat-certified MGE Pilots, so prompt training began in ernest, explaining corners, steering technique, gravity and momentum. MGE's reverse steering phenomina was also explained and demonstrated at great length, conluding with the words of "if anything goes wrong, don't steer, just BRAKE".

It's easy enough to say these things, but when the time comes it can sometimes fail to be in your mental emergency proceedures manual... as turned out to be the case on this occasion. Hardly surprising on this day though... I can barely remember getting on my tallbike — we were all pretty mashed. So it was, a most pleasant start to our well-intentioned journey. As we rode happily along the beach promenade, a tiny piece of uncertainty entered the mind of the inexperienced MGE pilot... that's when MGE's reverse steering phenomina stepped in. That's when MGE accelerated dramatically and steered sharply towards the vertical drop... if one wanted to ride MGE straight off a vertical edge, this would be axactly how you'd do it!

This was one of the better cargo bike crashes I've seen; I rode directly behind MGE as she attacked the vertical drop... there was nothing I could do except watch it all happen... it's one of those things you think about when making a vehicle such as this. Strangely, both pilots and passenger were spat out on the high-side, thus avoiding this rather heavy, gravity-assisted bohemeth landing directly on one of our unsuspecting, not-ready-for-anything MGE-riding randoms. They weren't really expecting this. The amazing thing about this crash is that nobody was seriously hurt and MGE only suffered a pancaked wheel and bent forks!!! I was laughing so hard that people couldn't work out if I was happy or sad — I was HAPPY!!!!

Ha ha, we 'gently moulded' the front wheel vaguely back into a circular shape and continued on our journey as though nothing had happened — HA!!!!! Pictured below: the somewhat reluctant impromtu MGE crew soon after launch... Jac's knee got a bit of a bang, and there were a few skin reductions, but all was well :)

 

Departure once again:

It was time to leave... but we hadn't done a Rat Ride proper in our new and fertile grounds of Melbourne town, so we had to do that. Safety Stops and breakfast along the way...

Then, we loaded the trailer, made some Safety Stops (safety first, safety second, and safety last), then drove...


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