There's a local group in my city that organises a friday night group ride together. They meet up in a parking lot, chat for a bit and then go for a ride. I'd never bothered going before but last night was their annual big turnout event so I decided to check it out.

For context I'm an ADV rider on a 2022 KLR650. Done ~30,000km/18,000m in the past 18 months touring around Australia solo. Have never ridden with anyone before.

It starts off sedate enough, people park up and chat, check out each others bikes. There's about ~330 bikes at the meetup, mostly sport bikes, but some cool bikes turned up:

-Kawasaki H2

-Honda NSR250R

-Stretched Hayabusa

-Honda NM4

-Honda CBR250RR MC22

-Some HD bikes with stretched forks

After the meetup there's a roughly 70km/45m planned route with a couple checkpoints ending at a pub. As soon as we hit the road though, people go absolutely nuts. Constantly blasting past each other, revbombing, doing wheelies, and then we get into town and they're doing burnouts at traffic lights, and the harleys that turned up are absolutely blasting it. We were on a dual carriageway at one point with some riders riding staggered, and then other riders were overtaking the pack on double yellows. Couldn't believe the amount of showing off and bad riding happening. We go to the first checkpoint, a service station, and I'm already regretting my decision to go. Once we get into town they just turn it up to 11, being full fucken idiots.

I decide to break off at that point and head home, didn't really want to be associated with that level of idiocy. Not to mention the amount of people squidding about, notably was a guy wearing helmet, gloves, leather sport riding pants, and boots. And then a singlet?

Are all group rides like this? Because fuck me, I just wanted to see some neat bikes. I know there's a local ADV group as well, but judging by their facebook group it's full of boomers.