Palm Springs American Heat 2011 Motorcycle Rally, a Review.

This year Liz and I have ridden to motorcycle rallies all over the western United States. You can read my many reviews about these rallies here on the Biker Law Blog.

The key word that you will notice in the previous paragraph is “ridden.” I have never caged and/or trailered a motorcycle to a motorcycle rally. I always ride, and I will continue to do so long as god lets me.

The reason I mention this is that when you watch the video below taken by me at the rally, you will hear me confronting bottom feeder so-called biker attorney’s representatives at these rallies. Don’t worry, I will write a complete article on this subject coming up.

So let’s talk about the Palm Springs American Heat 2011 Motorcycle Rally.

Palm Springs is approximately 125 miles from my house plus or minus a few miles one way.

I really wanted to attend this rally because I am going to have what I am told is an extremely painful surgery that I have been putting off on October 28, 2011. The surgery and the recovery therefrom will take me off work, and put me out of the saddle from what I am told, for at least a month.

Further, this motorcycle rally marks the last major motorcycle rally on the west coast for the season.

The last time I went to this rally, I actually laid my motorcycle down to avoid a careless motorcycle rider who turned directly in front of my while I was leading a pack of motorcycles. The result was minor injuries to me and my motorcycle. It would have been much worse had I t-boned the idiot that pulled in front of me. Further, right after the accident, I lost my ATM card at a gas station, and when I called my bank to report it, I was informed that my account had been cleaned out. This is a whole other story. I was basically stuck in Palm Springs with just the money in my pocket. The experience kind of ruined the rally for me the last time I was there.

This year was much better.

I was actually going to ride to the rally by myself this year, however, due to Liz being able to find someone to care for our dogs and puppies; I was able to take her with me. We will give away the pups in the next few days so we will not have to worry about this issue anymore.

The ride to the rally took about 2 hours, and it was a real good ride. The weather was basically in the mid 90’s the entire time. Eat your heart out, mid 90’s in the middle of October, which is warm this time of year, even for Southern California.

The new Harley Davidson I have has a built in intercom, with the speakers and microphone setup mounted in our modular helmets. It is really cool being able to listen to tunes clearly while on the road, plus have a conversation with Liz while riding.

However, we still like to be quite most of the time while we ride, it is just habit.

We pulled into Palm Springs in the afternoon at around 2pm. It was about 100 degrees out and hot. We decided to cruise the strip before we got something to eat.

The strip was full of the roar of motorcycles, and of course many motorcycles. I have been to hundreds of motorcycle rallies, but I always get excited when I see this many motorcycles and hear the roar. For me it is addicting.

They had the main drag blocked off for pedestrians and vendors. We cruised around once, and then decided to hit Denny’s to get some chow before we came back to the rally location.

After lunch we rode to the rally location on the main drag. You can see from my video below courtesy of my GoPro helmet cam, the ride from the Denny’s to almost the rally location. Due to my not having fully charged batteries on the GoPro cam, I was only able to get a little bit of video from the Denny’s to the main rally location. However, the rest of the video with my hand held HD camera shows the main drag.

Once we got to the rally location, some guy with a custom and what must have been a 400 tire on the rear of his motorcycle, asked me about my GoPro cam, we had a short conversation, and then Liz and I did our thing.

Most motorcycle rallies at least to me, have basically become shopping malls with mostly girly type of jewelry and other stuff. Palm Springs is probably worst of all because it appeared that the local merchants were out with totally non related biker stuff, also selling their wares. I can understand it.

We had a good time walking the main strip looking at merchandise, and buying some merchandise, listening to the band, the stunt entertainment, and looking at all of the people.

We did not leave until dark. It seemed to me that it kind of got real weird after dark. There were a lot of cops at the rally, and they seemed to me to be more aggressive and more visible when it got dark. They were doing some pull overs and they were all over the place.

Hell I am an attorney and a law abiding citizen and to be frank, I felt real uncomfortable with what I saw going on at night.

Liz and I decided to head over to the Morongo Casino to try our luck. She lost around 300 bucks, I won around 200 bucks, and then we called it a night.

The next day, we did our traditional Joshua Tree – Pioneer Town run, and then rode home.

All in all I enjoyed the Palm Springs motorcycle rally. To be frank it was better than Reno and Las Vegas combined this year. I just enjoyed it more for some reason.

Now for me the 2011 motorcycle rally season is pretty much over since I am having the surgery on 10/28/11, and will be out for a month.

I am going to try to get a ride in this weekend, because the surgery is next Friday. Fun fun fun.

Check out the video of the Palm Springs American Heat Rally 2011 I shot below. Tell me if there is a problem with the audio. The master tape has no problem with the audio but it seems like YouTube may be screwing up the audio.