Sunday, March 6th

The Ulysses Motorcycle Club is having its AGM in Launceston this week.  All the members are over forty and you're more likely to see their wives riding pillion rather the bikie chicks who ride with the Bandidos.  Apparently, there were about 2400 in the cohort, most of them camping at one of the local football fields.  Yesterday morning, there was a Grand Parade through the town so, because we're starved for entertainment in Launceston, we turned out at 8 o'clock to watch them.  We were lucky enough to find a table in MacDonalds overlooking the main street so were able to fortify ourselves with coffee while enjoying the spectacle.

Some of the machines are fantastic - three wheelers of all kinds, Honda Gullwings, Harley soft-tails, BMWs and so on.  There were one or two scooters hiding their blushes and the occasional fixer-upper, but the vast majority were gleaming with chrome and reeking of money.  The organisers claim there were $14 000 000 worth of machine there.  Still, riding a $15000 bike didn't hide the fact that many of the riders were overweight, retired, middle-aged men with their equally chubby and middle-aged wives behind, trying to re-capture their exciting youth.

The Ulysses Club is also one of the last bastions of male supremacy.  Every one of the bikes we saw with a pillion passenger had the man driving and the woman hanging on.  Not one had a female driver with a male passenger.  And we didn't notice any dykes with bikes either.  Maybe they were all in Sydney for the Mardi Gras