So how could I make my weekend more exciting?

Here is what the Meatplow looks like when it is safely attached to the back of a vehicle (on a non-sponsor non-approved non-rack):

I was leaving for the mountains with a new crew on Sunday. I hopped in a car with Ben and Todd with my bike strapped to the back of Jon's Explorer. On our way to pick up Cameron (who was supposed to be at a designated meeting point, but something about alarm clocks or electricity happened) I sat in the back seat of Ben's car watching my bike travel down the road ahead of me. Something looked peculiar about the orientation of the hooked arm, and before I could explain my concerns the next thing I knew I was watching my bike fall over and teeter towards the surface of 4th Street.

It didn't fall all the way to the earth's man made driving surface. The rear wheel of the Meatplow remained locked into the rear tray as the front wheel dangled precariously close to the street... for a few seconds, and then it started to bounce off the blacktop at 40MPH. Meh. Meanwhile I was on the back of the car asking Ben nicely to please honk his horn or flash his lights as my bike was in terrible danger. Ben did better than that and sped up to Jon so we could start yelling "PULL OVER!!!!!". He did, and then turned into a parking lot, and then started to back up... "NO!!!!"....

He stopped backing up before bad things happened, and upon inspection the worst thing that happened to my bike seems to be just a slightly tweaked front wheel. I helped Jon put my bike on that rack at my house in the first place, and in both of our defenses it was a borrowed rack that was on his vehicle. Neither one of us realized the hook on the not-so-friendly-to 29'ers Yakima rack had to be pulled on pretty damn hard to get the hook into the proper position. Anyways... no harm, no foul. The Meatplow lived to fight another day.

And what a day it was. We met up with Eric "PMBAR Honcho" Wever, Mike Brown, and Kassi and went out on a route that never stopped changing from the moment the ride was first discussed days ago, through a driveway meeting to my house, all the way on the drive up, and the whole time we spent on the trail. "What about this?" and "How about that?" the whole way. We spent some time over on parts of the Swank course (forwards and backwards), and I just realized that the course is different than it was the last time I did it in 2006 making me wish I was gonna be there in 2009 (but I won't).

The Geek Air drop on Cat Gap.

Photo cred: Eric

So new folks in the mix, suffering through near tragedy on the streets of Charlotte, bumping into my old PMBAR partner Jody "Little Feet" Flemming in the woods, running into Shanna in the parking lot, broken chain, a few trips over the bars (not me)... just another better than average ride in Pisgah on a beautiful fall day (made better by the fact that my bike didn't fall off on I85 and end up under an eighteen wheeler).