Cruisers,
Please take a moment to welcome new member Mark Bamberger. Mark hails from the Spring Valley area and tells us:
Hey all. I ride a 2000 Goldwing and live in Spring Valley. I am a geologist, turned lawyer…long story. I ride a ton, logging about 15k miles, including 3-4 major trips, per year. I was in the Blue Knights for a bit, but it was a bad experience so dropped out. I’m juiced to meet y’all and ride, ride, ride.
We’ll be looking forward to seeing him on rides.
~ Steve
Good Afternoon Cruisers
I hope you’re staying warm and keeping the bike polished on these frosty days. Riding season will be here before we know it and I for one am certainly looking forward to it.
The chapter has struggled with participation a lot over the last couple of years, but there’s a couple of us that are still trying to keep things alive. One of them is Frank Wright. He contacted me today about setting up a meeting to try to plans rides for this summer. I’ve provided him with the current roster and he’s going to be giving folks a call to try to set up a meeting that’s convenient for as many as possible.
Please be watching for his call and be part of the planning for this year!
Steve
Fellow Southern Cruisers Chapters:
The Southern Cruisers is a diverse group of people with a hugely diverse skill set and at least one thing in common: the love of the ride. Personally, I feel that whenever possible we should put that diverse skill set to good use to help others that share our interests.
As First Officer of Chapter 044, I have the same challenges as the rest of you. One of them is providing a central location for information about my chapter and it’s rides. I do that with this website, and fortunately for me, one of my skills is server, email and website management and I have a number of my own servers at my disposal.
This is fortunate, because, as a free club, there isn’t a bunch of money to go around to pay for website and email hosting. My chapter is the beneficiary of my ability to do these things at no cost to the chapter.
I’ve decided to extend my help to the Southern Cruisers as a whole. If your chapter is in need of a website, or has a website and is in need of hosting, I will host your chapter’s site and if needed, set up one similar to this one for free. As a bonus, you can also have email like mine: sweigold@scrc-miamivalley.com. I don’t have tons of free time though, so you’re going to have to have an administrator with at least enough skill to update pages occasionally. Since I generally use a WordPress platform for such sites, learning to do so isn’t much of a challenge.
If your chapter needs a website, drop me an email and lets get something set up for you.
~Steve Weigold, First Officer
Cruisers, we’ve created a Facebook group to facilitate discussion. Please feel free to join and help us plan our rides for 2017! https://www.facebook.com/groups/970452556389137/
~Steve
Cruisers,
I’m starting to look at the riding schedule for the 2017 year. Turnout was low again for the 2016 season, but I’m still not giving up on this chapter. I’m going to continue doing what I can, even if it means riding alone and I’m hoping that if we continue to plug away we’ll eventually drum up some interest and perhaps some fresh blood.
So, my traditional event, the Blessing of the Bikes is on the schedule for May 21 this year. Again, I’m looking for ride ideas and more importantly Ride Captains. Even if you just lead one ride this season, that would help. I need those more than ride ideas. I already have more ride ideas than I can lead myself, but if you have one, let me know. That at least shows where people are interested in going.
Being a Ride Captain is fairly easy, and if you’ve never done it, I’m happy to help you get started. Generally, you pick a destination or area to ride, start point, choose a route, and then pre-ride the route to make sure it’s suitable for a group ride. On the day of the ride, you ride your route and we follow. Not real complicated.
If you’re interested, you tell me when you want to do your ride (or rides) and I’ll put them on the schedule.
If any of you are planning trips that chapter members are welcome on, such as to BRP or the Dragon, please let me know the details and I’ll communicate them as well.
Thanks everyone. Looking forward to riding with you in 2017
Steve
Good Morning Cruisers,
I hope all of you have had a happy New Year and you’re looking forward to getting out of the deep freeze and getting back on two wheels. As for me, I’m looking forward to 2015 riding and I’d like to start trying to plan things for the coming season. 2014 was a slow season for us, and I have to admit, it’s been difficult to keep up my motivation for the chapter due to the lack of support we’ve had. I’ve decided though that I’m going to push through another season and see if we can blow some life into the chapter.
To that end, I’d like to schedule a winter meeting with the intention of discussing and hopefully planning some rides for the coming season. I plan to schedule the meeting mid February and I’d like suggestions as to a day, time and location. I’m thinking a meet and greet format, probably over some food. Obviously I’m further south than many of you, but I’d like to schedule the meeting location somewhere convenient for the majority of the attendees. So, if you’d be up for such a get-together, please email me and throw out some suggestions.
Steve
Hey Cruisers,
We’re considering a meeting in the next couple of weeks to work on planning the riding schedule for the upcoming season, but it’s not worth planning if we aren’t going to get some turnout to help plan. Please take a moment to drop me an email at firstofficer@scrc-miamivalley.com and let me know if you’d be up for attending such a meeting and generally what is a good day of the week to schedule one. Thanks!
Steve
Good Morning Cruisers,
For those that missed the Blessing of the Bikes, you missed a good time. Hopefully we’ll see you on the next ride.
As for the next ride, after the challenges of last year, I’ve decided I’m doing something different with the schedule. Rather than add a bunch of rides that I may or may not be able to lead or may or may not be able to find Ride Captains for, I’m only adding rides to the schedule that have a confirmed Ride Captain whether that’s me or someone else. I don’t want to have a bunch of great rides listed that just have to be cancelled because I can’t lead them all and don’t have someone else to help. I do have 179’s schedule, and I’ll be adding those for anyone that may want to join them for rides.
Other than that, I’ll be adding rides as I have time to plan them and lead them and I’m looking for Ride Captains to help with others. I’d appreciate it if everyone would at least consider leading a ride. If all the members on this list lead one ride, we wouldn’t have time to get them all in. Planning and leading a ride isn’t a difficult process and I’m happy to coach anyone through it that feels like they may be interested in helping but needs a nudge in the right direction. As a Ride Captain, you get to call the shots on the time, route and destination or area. If you want to help but don’t have areas or destinations in mind, I have plenty of suggestions.
If you’re willing to help by leading one or more rides (either with or without help) please let me know.
Steve
Hi Cruisers!
I hope you’ve taken some time during these unseasonably warm days for some windshield time! I know I have. As we progress into the 2012 season, the first order of business is to update the roster and the email list. We’re not at all interested in pushing anyone out, but if you haven’t ridden with us in a year or more and don’t intend to start soon, there isn’t any reason to stay on the roster or the email list. So.. check your email for a message from me. If you’re planning on continuing to ride with us, be sure to respond to my email and let me know. More importantly, if you didn’t get the email, let me know quickly as that probably means your information isn’t current with the club. I’ll be cleaning out the inactive members in about two weeks.
I look forward to riding with you all again this season!
Steve
Good Morning Cruisers,
I hope you’ve taken advantage of the recent warm weather to blow the dust off your trusty steed and hopefully some of the carbon out of the carburetor! As warmer weather and with it our riding season approaches, it’s time to be thinking about what’s in store for the club this season. I also wanted to remind everyone about a couple of things:
First, the reminders (or perhaps introductions):
Please keep in mind that the Southern Cruisers in general, and Chapter 044 specifically, rely on several different means of communication for events, rides and items of club interest. In case you aren’t aware of them, please check out:
Chapter 044’s website: https://www.scrc-miamivalley.com. Here you’ll find the current schedule and pictures as well as links to National, other chapters, and items of interest. We also offer courtesy links to member interests, so if you as a member have a website you wish to have linked, please let me know.
Chapter 044’s facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/SCRC44. For those of you on facebook, we post ride information and pictures there too. If you are a “facebooker”, one thing you may want to keep in mind is that facebook has made some subtle changes to the way status posts are handled. If you haven’t seen anything from someone on your friends or likes in a while, you may want to check your settings. Facebook made a quiet change in it’s settings that causes status posts to be hidden for some people by default. On your newsfeed, go to the very bottom and select “Edit Options”. Make sure that the “Show posts from all your friends and pages” option is selected. Facebook defaults to “show posts from friends and pages you interact with most”. Because of this, if you haven’t liked or commented on someone’s (or some page’s) feed in a two week window, you stop seeing posts from them.
If you’re the Twitter type, you can also follow Chapter 044 on Twitter: http://twitter.com/scrcmiamivalley This is an echo of the same content posted to facebook.
The Southern Cruisers nationally also relies heavily on the Delphi forums for communications. Ohio has it’s own forum which you can find here: http://forums.delphiforums.com/ohioscrc/start You’ll need a Delphi membership, but the basic one is free. There are sub forums for each of the Ohio chapters and we currently have a discussion going on about this years multi-chapter event. Check it out!
As for what’s in store for this year, well, that’s still in the planning stages, but here’s what’s up so far:
Multi Chapter Gathering – 2010 was the first year for this event and we had something like five chapters and close to a hundred riders represented. We’re doing it again this year, although it will be later in the year. In 2010 it was in July and hot as hell! This year, the event is tentatively planned for September 18. Same type of fun we had last year though. Good food, beverages, and games, both on and off bike!
Blessing of the Bikes: May 15th. We attended this event last year as a club. Lots of food, vendors and entertainment. It was a great time, even if you aren’t of the faith! http://www.blessingofthebikesohio.com/
Southeastern Ohio Group Ride: Member Neal Neato suggested this as an event: http://www.valueaccessories.net/Southern%20Ohio%20Ride.htm Sunday August 13. Check it out and let me know if you’d be interested in it.
Beyond these big events, I’m working on putting together an assortment of rides, both to old favorites and new ones. I can’t do it alone though, and I certainly can’t lead them all! I’m looking to put together this year’s list of Ride Captains. If you are interested in putting together and leading a ride (or perhaps more than one!) please let me know! If you don’t want to lead, but have suggestions, I welcome those too, even if it’s a vote in favor of an “old favorite”.
Last year, we weren’t able to release the schedule of rides until April. This year, I want to get it out sooner and start riding sooner, so please get me suggestions and feedback as soon as you can!
One last item of business, Rick Geatty has respectfully declined to continue as Second Officer of the club, so if you have issues that need to be addressed by an officer, for the time being, please direct them only to me. I expect to install a replacement, hopefully soon, but at this point, I don’t have a candidate. If you think you might be interested in helping in this fashion, please don’t hesitate to say so.
Thanks for your time everyone! I feel like we had a decent year last year event with the officer transitions. I want this year to be even better. I look forward to riding with all of you!
Steve