Ruidoso Spring Rally 2009

The Ruidoso Spring Rally was nice, it had drizzled and rained a bit cooling things off nicely and helped thin the crowds just a bit. Despite bing in the cage we got plenty of thumbs up and points to my bumper as bikes passed us on the road, I’m glad that I can still be recognized as a fellow motorized two wheel enthusiast in my wimpy econobox. At least my bumper sticker is getting plenty of visibility with the bike out of commission for now.

 

After a half hour search for a tiny car sized parking space I quickly spotted across the parking lot from the Barnette HD bikes there was another truck, a Yamaha Star Motorcycles Truck! Wow kick ass!  I’ve never seen a huge metric setup like this at a primarily HD rally, or any rally in NM for that matter.

They were doing demo rides all week for all the star models and FJRs. Now I was kicking myself for not bringing any gear to do a demo. I did get lots of Yamaha swag and nice glossy catalogs for the entire Star line. I heard when my dad went back to get some of the extra things I had found, several of the other vendors and the doorman thought that he was with the Yamaha truck with his Star Motorcycles vest heh.

The inside was jam packed in the little convention space and there was some cool stuff in there but not worth the door fee IMO. There wasn’t much in there and they had things arranged in spaces so it was almost single file with 100 people trying to get through.

 

All in all it was a little disappointing, not very many vendors, not much space, for as many people as showed up and it just wasn’t organized well.  Even checking the paper the day of some of the events it had a time that stuff was supposed to happen but no locations, so everyone was confused and trying to find out what was going on where. The fall rally was much better done.

 

But the trip down, the MAW thing and places we ate made it all worth it.  It rained, there was a fire filling the whole town with smoke for a afternoon, heavy rain at times, poorly organized events, nobody knew what was going on but everyone had fun and that’s what counts.