My wife and I were out yesterday and had six H-Ds come up behind us on a nice quiet part of a secondary road that runs along the north shore of Lake Erie - called Hwy. 3 - east of of the town of Leamington. It is an Ontario provincial road and is in good shape with no large trees near the shoulders. The road has pretty decent sightlines, but it does wind left and right a fair bit and there are no passing lanes, plus we were stuck behind two slower vehicles and so we also couldn't pass. There were, however quite a number of straight portions that any bike should have been able to use to easily blow-past all three cars.
A pimply-faced teenybopper on a Honda CB350 wouldn't have been stuck behind us for long....
I think the problem was that Harleys don't have a lot of passing power at 60+ MPH and these clowns wanted to be able to rumble by us in strict 2x3 formation and not one-by-one, which obviously would have been the safer alternative. Oh, I should clarify that, as per usual cruiser practice, they were riding two-abreast with each pair about 6-8 feet behind the previous pair so the whole "package" was likely around 40-50 feet long. Also, most of the bikes were two-up - so there were about 9-10 people riding in that group (that is a lot of lives to risk in that fashion, IMO).
The lead pair hung about 10 feet (!!!) back of my rear bumper for around 4-8 km - what a couple of jerks. I could easily see the individual facets of the lens on the left-hand rider's main headlight (he had the usual three forward lights - all on high-beam, needless to say).
Eventually, the lead car turned off and the H-D geniuses found a stretch of road that met their exacting requirements and sure enough, the whole gaggle "thundered" past us with the right hand bike of each pair coming within 8-12 inches of the left-hand rear corner of my back bumper. One guy could easily have reached out and touched my driver's side rearview mirror as he rumbled past me at a "stately" pace.
Windsor-Essex is a big biking area and yesterday was a really nice day with a lot of bikes and sports car enthusiasts out enjoying the day. There have been some tragic motorcycle crashes over the past few years with quite a number of lives lost. I don't have any real data as to demographics or motorcycle type, but my perception is that many of them involved older riders on cruisers and Harley-Davidson is the big brand hereabout - and from what I witnessed yesterday, it is not a big surprise.
I don't know why or how these people have formed the idea that they are invincible - because none of us are.
Pete
PS - let me add that this is NOT a slam at H-D. I ride with a touring group every summer and several of bikes are Harleys. Having said that, the practice of riding two-abreast with very little distance between pairs of bikes does seem to be confined to that segment of the motorcycling community, at least in my locale.
