Monday, May 19, 2008

Yeah, I'd wear a Triumph t-shirt

I usually hate sporting brand names. It makes me feel like a tool for someone else's profit. At least, that's how I usually feel. But after our Saturday motorcycling adventure, I think I've made an exception.

Megan tracked down a Triumph demo event happening at Clinton Cycles, a dealership just over the Woodrow Wilson bridge in Maryland. The idea of getting to test drive a Street Triple had us more than interested in heading out there, so I hit Google Maps in an attempt to plan a back roads route. We even managed to gather Will onto our bandwagon - the more the merrier!

And so we set out Saturday morning, the 3 of us riding staggered. While we kept off the highway as much as possible, we had to hit 495 to get across the Potomac. We hopped onto some local roads asap, and got lost as fast as we got off the interstate. Our impeccable sense of direction and Megan's map got us, finally, to the Triumph dealership much later than we had planned.

Ah, but this is where the fun began! Parked in the lot was a gigantic 18-wheeler sporting the Triumph logo, and a fleet of machines straight out of their 2008 catalog. After cooling off in the dealership's accessories department, we headed for the Triumph demo truck to see what they had to offer.

It was great - after a waiver, they had a sign-up sheet with a matrix - each row represented a bike they had, and each column was a 1/2 hour time slot. Every 1/2 hour you could sign up for whatever bike you wanted to take out! If the bike you wanted was taken, you could just sign up to ride whatever other model was available. Between the 3 of us we got to try 4 different models - it was a blast.

The Triumph team led us out in a staggered group on the local roads. They had one lead rider, one rider in the middle, and one rider taking up the rear of the pack. Mixed in-between were people like us getting a kick out the whole event.

The Triumph reps were really friendly and they basically let us have a little field day with their bikes. It was a low-stress, low-intensity motorcycling event, but for some reason it was still way fun. I'll leave the bike reviews for future posts, but bottomline? I like Triumph.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Now you'll get your chance to wear a Triumph t-shirt...for participating in the demo event we were mailed free t-shirt vouchers.

author said...

Score! I'm totally gonna wear it to work on a Friday.