Convoys, Automotive and Otherwise

Do you ever look at the photo at the top of this blog and wonder, "Who are those Reservoir Dogs-looking, bike-riding badasses, and where are they going?" I do not, because I know the answer: It's me, Brendan, Joel, Ken, and Chillwill's shoulder, going to the CCBA annual dinner. That's pretty prosaic, but one of the nice things about pictures is that while they are worth a thousand words, those thousand words might vary significantly if you don't know the back story. For example, perhaps in the photo above, Brendan is actually our prisoner and we are leading him on a long Trail of Tears-type death march/ride to some unsavory fate in Manchester. He does have the downcast look of a doomed man, and we are more or less surrounding him, making escape attempts futile (except that in real life, he is faster than any of us, but you don't know that, in keeping with my point about the back story). Why am I saying all this? Because the other day I saw a real life prisoner convoy on I-91: a Judicial Marshal truck heading up the highway at 80 mph with an unmarked state trooper car in front of it and another behind it. It was pretty tough:


(Click on the picture for a larger version with insightful annotations.)