• Please take a moment and update your account profile. If you have an updated account profile with basic information on why you are on Air Warriors it will help other people respond to your posts. How do you update your profile you ask?

    Go here:

    Edit Account Details and Profile

Which Ride?

Jim123

Jim123

DD-214 in hand and I'm gonna party like it's 1998
pilot
mad dog said:
I’ve heard of people doing burnouts in their garages. Maybe give that the old college try? :D
Click to expand...
Funny JO story that tangentially involves smoke inside a garage.

A loose group of us, from all of the Mayport helo squadrons, used to get together and go bar hopping on our bikes- some regular bikes and some "beach cruisers." The beach culture along Jacksonville Beach that includes such notions as not crossing the intracoastal waterway for as long as possible (weeks or months), also features these beach cruiser bicycles, complete with ape hangers, banana seats, sissy bars, etc. The more over the top versions have stereo systems, cupholders, and random visual props like tassels, bright pieces of plastic clipped to the spokes, fake exhaust pipes, you name it.

Several years ago we did one of these as kind of a sendoff for one of the guys in the other squadrons. Not the official wardroom hail & bail, really just an excuse-de-jour to do something on a Saturday night. The rally point was the guy's house along one of the streets between 3rd (the main street) and the beach, easy to find and lots of street parking if you brought your bike in your trunk or on a bike rack.

Same guy had fake exhaust pipes on his beach cruiser and he'd planned a grand entrance with little rocket motors or static firework whistlers, not sure which, inserted in those pipes and to start inside his garage, simultaneously initiating the pyros and opening the garage door. Well, I think that was the plan... but the flames from the motors ignited something in the garage, I can't remember if it was somebody's backpack on a bundle of newspapers on the ground. The pyros also produced a fantastic volume of smoke, as in a "can't see across the street" thick blanket. Chaos, attention from the neighbors, and hilarity ensued.

There were about twenty of us total and we'd already briefed the intended route, starting at I can't remember which bar but progressing to various local spots- The Moon (Jägers, IIRC), some place on Mayport Road of questionable repute (jello shots), a pizza diner was in there somewhere too (and really hit the spot!!), Pete's Bar for PBR in a can, the outdoor bar on Lemon Street behind the Sea Turtle in (Sierra Nevada, which was hard to find on the east coast in the early 2000s), and so on down to Lynch's (Guiness) and various other places I've forgotten. Anyway, a handful of us, waiting at the edge of the smoke blanket decided to head off to the first bar and reevaluate once there.

For normal sized groups each person would take a turn buying the round at one bar but for this sized group, the plan was to double up buying the rounds. Check.

Crossing 3rd, our subgroup got treated to the sight and sound of a couple fire trucks blasting past, sirens wailing. Fire trucks! Cool! At first we thought little else of it. Turns out somebody had called the fire department for the garage fire or for the smoke or I never really found out. All that confusion got cleared up and we got full personnel accountability at that first stop before proceeding to the next.

Let's see... farther down the line we stopped at one of the beach hotels, I think a Best Western or something ordinary like that, about halfway between the entertainment cluster at the head of Atlantic Blvd and the other cluster at the head of Beach Blvd. I remember a fully clothed group cannonball into the hotel swimming pool and a lot of yelling and assorted revelry that led to the manager declaring us persona no grata and a not-hollow threat to summon local law enforcement.

A bit after that, one of the guys inexplicably crashed his bike. He wasn't one of those clumsy, uncoordinated, unathletic kind of guys and the alcohol notwithstanding, it was unexpected. The crash disabled the bike, which he promptly stashed in a nearby friend's back yard (basically threw it over the fence). Then he ran along (and we slowed down so he could keep up), shirtless and bloody, as passers-by honked and shouted encouragement. We shouted encouragement too, channeling our inner Mickeys (Rocky Balboa's boxing coach), "Yer a bum! Ya got no heart!"


I think that night pretty checked a lot of the blocks- fire, fire department, water, police (threat), blood, shirtlessness...

It was a small miracle none of us got arrested or permanently injured.
 
taxi1

taxi1

Well-Known Member
pilot
We were at Key West for a drug interdiction det, had a rental van, and had discovered if you put on the parking brake and stomped on it, the van would make a god-awful-awesome squeal for as long as you wanted to. You could drive a city block burning rubber. And we did, multiple times.

What we were doing, though, was not spinning the front tire, we were dragging the back one, and did until there was a big flat spot on it. Oops.

The next morning, skipper shows up for his flight and says, "Hey, I'll sit in the back" and put himself right on top of that flat spot. Ka-bump, ka-bump, ka-bump the whole way to the base. He's back there like...what the fuck did they rent us? Fucking National...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top