Teaching
an SR500 to fly on the Minnesota 2000
by Jim Winterer
FSSNOC#2213
I had seen the full-size replica of the Spirit of St.
Louis hanging from the rafters of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport before, but
this time was different. I stopped and stared and remembered.
I first remembered as a kid watching the movie about
Charles Lindberg’s historic 1927 crossing of the Atlantic, and I remembered
how Jimmy Stewart struggled to stay awake and somewhat functional during the
33-hour crossing.
I also remembered that in less than a week I’d be
struggling to stay awake and somewhat functional during the 52-hour running of
the Minnesota 2000, an endurance rally named for the new millennium and the
number of nearly nonstop miles that serious contenders could expect to cover
over last summer’s 4th of July weekend. Gulp. I knew I’d be pushing both me
and my 1981 SR500 into previously unexplored levels of goofiness. Let the fun
begin!
Faithful Thumper News readers might recall earlier packs of
lies about some of the long roads the (usually) trustworthy SR has hauled my
butt since I bought the bike back in 1981. I’d like to say I’ve learned a
few lessons over the past two decades and 70,000 miles on the same old thumper,
but if I had, I probably wouldn’t have entered this thing in the first place.
The Minnesota 2000 was going to be my third long-distance
endurance rally, all organized by an outfit called Team Strange, a name that
says it all. The first two rallies ran 24 hours and pretty much stayed in
Minnesota and surrounding states. The MN2K would span 52 hours and potentially
about two-thirds of the United States and a decent chunk of Canada to boot.
I say potentially, because each rider decides his or her
route. Sort of. Here’s how it works. The evening before the rally, after
completing an odometer check, the 200 riders gather for a liars banquet, a rules
review, and something that borders on a religious experience: handing out the
bonus-point route packets. Even though it’s called the Minnesota 2000, it
doesn’t matter how many miles you rack up. What matters is how many points you
earn. Smart riders often wind up with more points but fewer miles than
less-smart riders.
To earn points, you have to go somewhere and prove it. The
bonus-point sheets give you the locations and directions on how to prove you
were there. Sometimes it’s just a dated gas receipt, sometimes it’s a
fill-in-the-blank question, and sometimes it’s a Polaroid picture of your
numbered rally towel pinned to the object.
The rally really begins the minute you receive your packet,
because you’ve got to go home or back to your motel room and figure out which
bonuses you hope to snag during the 52 hours of the rally. Once you do that, you
try to get as much sleep as you can put in the bank, because your snooze account
is going to be way overdrawn by the time this thing’s over.
But just when you should be sleeping, you’re looking at a
dinning-room table overflowing with maps and calculators and colored pens and
worksheets and, most importantly, those rally route sheets. There were dozens
and dozens of possible locations, and they were listed in no particular order.
There were bonus sites in New England, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Colorado,
Saskatchewan and Manitoba. To make matters even more confusing, Team Strange
gave us three different lists, and you could combine locations on two of the
lists, but not all. And in one final, cruel twist, the rally masters (or
“rally bastards” as so they are sometimes affectionately called) usually
hand out some additional bonus locations the next morning, just minutes before
the rally starts.
Figuring out your route is actually a lot of fun, but
it’s hard fun. The worst part is that it gets your adrenaline pumping. Once
you get the plan nailed down, you’re wide awake and want to jump on the bike
and hit the road.
Many long-distance competitors, and nearly all of the
serious ones, now use computer mapping programs to help figure out their routes.
Then they download the maps and coordinates for bonus locations into the GPS
units on their bikes. Man, you should see the cockpits on some of those LD
machines; it’s Star War city. Even I got the fever. For the Minnesota 2000, I
used velcro to stick a watch on the SR’s handlebars.
At work earlier that day, I had used my computer to
research the weather around the country for the next few days. It was going to
be a 100-degree scorcher to the south and east, and it looked like a strong wind
from the north would keep Canada cooler. Mmm, should I pick the heat or the
headwind? Should I make a loop out to Colorado? How about those tempting tons of
bonus locations in Ohio and the East Coast? As I studied the sheets, looking for
possibilities, there it was. Gilam, Manitoba. It had the SR written all over it.
It was north, way north, about as close as one could drive to Hudson’s Bay,
and it was worth huge bonus points.
Damn, it looked like a tough one, though. It’s just a
little speck of a place about 200 miles northeast of Thompson, Manitoba. That
200-mile road looked paved on my map, but experience told me it probably was
gravel. I checked the Web, and found out my gut was right. It was 200 miles of
dirt and I couldn’t have been happier. If the SR has taken me anywhere, it has
been dirt roads through the Canadian wilds. With a mellow, low-end-grunt motor
that evolved from the TT and XT, the SR loves nothing better than a good stretch
of gravel.
Once I found Gilam, I just had to snag all the easy
bonus stops on the way up and back and I’d be sitting pretty. When the SR is
lined up at the rallies next to the ST 1100s and the Beemers and the Wings, it
looks, well, it almost looks funny. It sure doesn’t look like it could stand a
chance against those mile-eaters. But this rally would be different. This time,
the organizers dropped 400 miles of dirt and a superfat bonus right in our lap;
this time the SR looked like the bike for the job.
I knew I was biting off a big chunk, though. I’d have to
let the SR fly for all it’s worth on the way north, push harder than I like on
the dirt stretch, then haul-ass big time to make it home before being
time-barred. I remember back in the early 1980s, when I first started taking
trips with the SR, I rode to this same general area of Manitoba. That trip took
me a week; now I was going to try to cover the same ground in a weekend.
In previous rallies, Team Strange lumped all
single-cylinder bikes into a category they politely called the “Unique”
class. There never were very many of us, half a dozen or so, and that always
helped increase your chances for a nice trophy. This year they lumped the few
singles with all bikes 750 cc and smaller into a “Road Warrior” class. Gulp,
this year the SR would have to rely on its superior intellect, good looks and
sheer horsepower to bring home a trophy.
I managed a few hours of sleep and headed across the
Mississippi River to Minneapolis and the Saturday-morning start of the rally at
Bob’s Java Hut, a coffee bar for bike lovers that’s not to be missed if
you’re ever in town. True to form, the rally organizers handed out a slug of
new bonus locations. I looked them over and found nothing to change my Gilam-or-bust
scheme.
At 8 a.m. the horn sounded and motors came to life as 199
riders pushed their starter buttons and one rider jumped on his kick-start lever
(ah, that would be the SR) and off we launched in every direction. Many were
headed east for piles of boni (Latin plural for bonus), some aimed west for the
mountains, and about six of us turned north for the lure of Gilam.
The first eight hours were mostly slab work, a nearly
straight freeway up the table-flat Red River valley to Winnipeg. The ride
started with light tailwinds and, for now, the way-tall gearing I chose for the
Minnesota 2000 was spot on. I had increased the front sprocket a tooth, and
dropped two in the back. The trick with this kind of gearing is to crack the
throttle wide open, back off maybe a quarter, set the throttle lock, and let the
bike do whatever it wants. It usually finds its sweet spot: low vibes, just
under 5,000 rpm, and just under 80 mph. Dyno charts for a stock motor show this
is right around peak torque. On the rural freeways, with a 70 mph speed limit,
it’s usually safe to ride just under 80. A few riders equipped with radars and
four times the horsepower waved as they blew by.
When you can’t keep up with those guys, a big trick to
stay in the hunt is to stop as little as possible, especially at gas stations.
Long-distance riders have turned this into an art form that’s akin to an Indy
pit stop. They know that just a couple of extra minutes spent at rest can cut a
nasty chunk from the average speed of your next leg.
You learn to eat a snack, drink fluids, clean your
windshield and face shield, top up your oil, fill your tank, record your
paperwork, make clothing adjustments and study maps and bonus sheets all at the
same time. What helps me do this even faster is that I usually have to pee like
crazy by the time I stop for gas. The sooner I take care of all those little
chores, the sooner I can head to the bathroom. If everything clicks, you can do
the whole routine in six to eight minutes.
As I approached Canada that afternoon I noticed the
tailwind disappeared, and within a few miles of the border, we started working
against a stiff headwind. These were big-time prairie winds, and now I started
to wish I hadn’t pushed the sprocket gearing to the limit. The SR was working
harder now; I could tell by the thumper’s thumpier thumps. Damn, I figured the
riders on the big-dog bikes hardly knew there was a wind at all. This is when
you just hang on, bend a little lower, and when you hit a really big gust, tap
the poor bike down a gear and try to bring the revs back into the powerband.
It’s the kind of riding that wears you down, but you hang in there because you
know it won’t last forever.
I was glad to see the border. It’s where I picked up a
free new Manitoba map, some free cookies in honor of the Canada Day holiday
weekend, two nice rally bonuses (one of them by taking a Polaroid of a
“mountie” statue) and where I met several other MN2K riders, including
Charles Robinson, Tim Foreman and Leon Begeman, who were also heading to Gilam.
While we weren’t riding together, and didn’t share maps
or strategies, I’d meet them time and again at gas stations and bonus sites
from one end of Manitoba to the other. In a way, LD rally riding might seem like
one of the loneliest sports you could imagine, especially out in the boonies in
the middle of nowhere in the dead of night. But in another way, you feel closely
connected to another 199 riders scattered around the continent, and you never
forget they’re trying to beat your butt.
We didn’t stop long to gab at the border, but it was
tempting. I was weary of the wind, and knew it was still out there waiting for
me. Yuck, and stronger words to that effect. In the next leg to Winnipeg the
wind got even worse -- a good 40 mph with gusts that would knock us back to
fourth gear and all over the road. You had to keep it all in perspective,
though. It was only eight hours down and 44 to go ... .
I could feel the blood return to my strained arms and neck
as we entered Winnipeg, a prairie oasis of wind-blocking buildings and trees.
All I had to do for a fat bonus was get a gas receipt that said “Winnipeg”
on it. I took a beltway along the east side of the city and pulled off at a
spiffy looking station. After I topped off the tank and paid the bill, I looked
at the receipt. Rats, it didn’t say Winnipeg, it said the name of a suburb.
One thing about the Team Strange rally organizers: they have simple rules, and
you follow them. I doubted they’d accept the receipt, so I asked the clerk how
far it would be to a station inside the city limits. She pointed down the street
and said, “Oh, about four or five blocks down there.”
I should have driven down that street, squeezed a
nickel’s worth into the tank, and gotten a proper receipt. But I didn’t. I
thought the extra time wasn’t worth it, and I’d simply stop at the correct
station on my planned return trip. Of course, things rarely go as planned (more
on that later). After the rally, I did try to convince the rally masters that my
suburban Winnipeg receipt should count. “Does it say Winnipeg?” they asked.
“Well, no.” End of discussion.
Even though I blew the Winnipeg bonus, something good did
happen at the gas station. As I was filling the tank, a man about my age, late
40s or early 50s, walked over and started asking about the SR. He noticed things
like the oil cooler and o-ring chain, and commented on my weathered gear: the
Aerostich riding suit, the tank and saddle bags, the Nolan flip-up full-face
helmet, even the ear plugs.
“Looks like you’re out for quite a ride,” he said.
“Where are you coming from?”
“Left Minneapolis at 8 this morning and I’m heading for
Gilam.”
“Geez, you made it here that fast on this bike. What are
you going to do in Gilam?” he asked.
“I’m going to turn around and head back to Minneapolis
as fast as I can. I’m in this goofy rally called the Minnesota 2000 and I’ve
got 52 hours to make the trip.”
“Well, you’ve got the right bike for that road to Gilam,
at least if you can find gas. But man you’ve got a lot of highway ahead for
that old single,” he said. “Looks like you take care of it, though.”
Turns out the guy not only rides an XT Yamaha, but he races
sled dogs. He understood what I was attempting, and even why. Sled-dog people
are a lot like thumper and long-distance people; there’s not a lot of us, and
we tend to know each other. I thought it was kind of interesting that I knew
some of his sled-dog buddies back in Ely and Grand Marais, Minn., but then we
discovered something that blew us away. We both were invited to stay overnight
at the home of the same old Scottish-American Indian man in a town a few
thousand miles to the northwest, Fort McPhearson in the Northwest Territories.
He stopped there one winter on a dog-sled trip, and I stopped there one summer
on an SR trip.
I could have swapped stories with this Winnipeg musher for
hours, but we kept our conversation to just a couple of minutes. “This wind is
killing you, isn’t it?” he asked. I hadn’t even brought up the subject.
“Get out your map, I’ll show you something. See right here, about 80 miles
up the road, that’s where you’ll get out of these prairie winds. Just hold
on till then and it’ll get better.”
And then he asked: “What kind of range do you have in
that tank?” I told him, and he circled the little towns on the rest of my
route that night where I’d find open gas stations all the way north to
Thompson, the last town before the dirt road to Gilam.
He was exactly right, about the winds and about the gas.
Fuels stops were one of my biggest worries. I’d be heading, basically, as far
north as you can drive in Manitoba. Towns are small and few and far between, but
I trusted this man I’d never met before, and sadly will probably never meet
again.
Finding gas is actually my second biggest worry on these
rallies. The biggest is smacking a deer at night. I’ve upgraded my headlight
to a Bosch quartz halogen with a 60-watt high beam. It works at least a third
better than the stock bulb, but it’s still not enough to turn night into day
... the way the serious LD bikes do with their banks of PIAA auxiliary lights.
Of course the SR’s stator was never designed to run all that stuff, while a
riding buddy once told me his BMW alternator cranks out enough juice to run an
arc welder.
Being as far north as I was, it took a long time for the
sun to set and it seemed like it was in my eyes forever. I wish I knew then a
trick I learned later, which is to stick duct tape across the top of your helmet
face shield. (Works perfectly, and even matches my gray helmet and bike. Talk
about stylin’.)
So I squinted a lot. I
never did see any deer, at least Saturday night. But I did see something else
I’ve never seen before or since ... big gangs of rabbits. Honest. At first I
saw four or five of them at a time, hanging out in the middle of the two-lane
blacktop. Then I started seeing groups of 30 or more. Must have seen 20 of these
rabbit gangs by the time I reached Thompson. (Hey, once I saw a pig in the woods
about 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle, so I guess rabbits aren’t so
weird.)
It was about 2 a.m. when I pulled into a Thompson gas
station and noticed someone on a bike parked in the shadows. It was Pat
O’Keefe and his year-old BMW F650 single and he was taking a nap at what’s
called the Iron Butt Motel. I hate the man for a couple of reasons. He keeps
beating me on these rallies, and his bike can carry enough gas to make the 200
miles to Gilam. He was trying to grab a few winks during his three-hour layover.
To encourage riders to take an extended break every now and
then, the rally masters award a pretty good bonus simply for not moving for a
few hours. To claim the points, you need two receipts showing the elapsed time
and from the same town. Pat was about half-way through his three-hour break, so
I didn’t want to disturb him too much, but the guy looked cold.
You could easily see your breath, and the clerk at the
station figured it was in the upper 30s. Luckily I had my Widder electric vest
and Aerostich Darien suit to help keep me warm. Pat had a Stich too, but not a
vest, and he was paying the price. Bet he’ll have one next year.
I decided to grab that three-hour bonus, too. After 18
hours of nearly constant riding, I was ready for a break. I had come all the way
to Thompson hoping I’d be able to find needed gas along that next 200-mile
stretch to Gilam, so I thought I’d spend part of my time doing a little
detective work, a little time getting a hot meal, and a little time for a nap.
I wish I could simply have packed an extra gas can for the
run to Gilam, but gas cans are not allowed under rally rules. If I had used an
approved, permanently mounted auxiliary fuel cell, that would have kicked me out
of the rally’s Road Warrior class and into the Expert class. So without spare
fuel on board, my only hope would be to find some at a little settlement about
halfway to Gilam. Nobody I talked to knew for sure if I’d find the gas there.
Some said maybe, some said no.
The news was about as inspiring as the pancakes and eggs I
got at Thompson’s all-night restaurant. Not only were the cakes terrible, the
waitresses were swamped by hungry drunks pouring into the place after the town
bar had closed. It’s the only restaurant I’ve eaten at where I had to get up
and find my own fork and knife, and go in the back and ask for a little water,
butter and syrup.
After a meal that was my breakfast, lunch and supper for
the day, I went scouting for a place to curl up for a nap. I found my bed for
the night: a dew-drenched picnic table behind the town power company office. I
set the Screaming Meanie (a little gadget that was created by mating a screech
alarm and an oven timer) for 45 minutes and stretched out. Between a little
indigestion, and wondering what day two of the rally would bring, I probably
only slept about 20 minutes. I figured I’d be a little stiff when I got up. I
was a lot right.
The mark of a good rally competitor is to have a Plan B.
(Next time remind me to have one.) My Plan A was to take that dirt road and find
gas along the way, come hell or high water. Feeling not entirely convinced this
day was going to have a happy ending, I drove out of town in search of the
yellow brick road to Gilam.
It didn’t look nearly as bad as the way people described
it, but you can’t judge a road by its first few hundred feet. I pulled off the
pavement and stopped for a minute to make sure all my gear was snug. Just as I
tapped the SR into first gear, I saw another bike heading toward me through the
early-morning mist.
It was Dick Fish, also competing in the Minnesota 2000. A
veteran off-roader riding a well-equipped BMW R11R, Fish had made it about half
way up the dirt road to Gilam before giving up. “I had three flat tires and I
ran out of tire plugs, so I had to turn back,” Fish said. When he took off his
helmet, steam swirled around his sweaty head.
I looked down at Dick’s bike and said, “Uh, did you
notice your rear tire, Dick? You’d better make that four flats. At least
you’re closer to town now.”
No matter how badly you want to press on, a basic rally
rule is that you help each other when you’re in a pickle. It’s a karma
thing, too; you hope someone will help you in a jam, so you help others. I
offered Dick some of my tire plugs. He never had used my kind before, so I
offered to fix the tire and make sure it held air before I left.
As we were pumping the tire, I started pumping Dick for
information about the road to Gilam. Yep, he had been to that little settlement
half-way to Gilam and, nope, there was no chance of finding gas there on a
Sunday. Ouch. Bad news. Very bad news.
One thing about these long-distance rallies is that your
highs are very high and your lows are very low. For the moment, I felt like a
washed-up dope who bit off more than he could chew ... and blew it.
Another thing is that you have to balance two philosophies.
The first: just go for it; you’ll never finish an adventure if you don’t
start one. The second: know when to fold em. I read once that there are old
long-distance riders, and there are bold long-distance riders, but there are no
old bold long-distance riders.
I decided to scrap Gilam and all those bonus points. You
don’t win rallies by running out of gas in one of the most remote areas on the
continent. That left Plan B, which did not yet exist. And that’s when Dick
Fish repaid the favor. A resident of southern Manitoba, he had worked out a
slick bonus-grabbing plan that would cut across the top of Manitoba to Flin Flon,
head back south to North Dakota, and then high-tail it southeast to Minneapolis.
“Get out your maps and bonus sheets,” he said. “I’ll show you the
route.”
Points-wise, this route wasn’t going to be a gold mine
like Gilam, and it was long. But if the SR was in the mood for eating some big
miles, and I could hang onto the thing for another 28 hours, the plan might
work. I thanked Dick for the route and he thanked me for the tire plugs and off
we went. It was a beautiful, brisk morning, just the kind the air-cooled SR
loves. Ahead were miles of twisty two-laners through post-card-quality northern
woods. I set the throttle-holder, patted the gas tank, and told the bike,
“What the hell, let’s go for it.”
I learned after the rally that besides Dick Fish, only
three other riders tried to reach Gilam. Jac Kelvie crashed his Gold Wing and
broke some ribs. Leon Begeman on his Ninja made it to Gilam but was stranded
there with fried electrics, and Pat O’Keefe who I hate because of the size of
his gas tank made it there and back on his BMW 650 single. Oh well, score one
for the thumpers.
And so the miles and hours rolled on, picking up points
along the way in northern and western Manitoba. I was considering a bonus
farther west in Saskatchewan, but there simply wasn’t time. I kept pushing
hard all day Sunday because one of the key boni, in northern North Dakota, was a
statue of a huge turtle riding a snowmobile. To get the bonus, you had to take a
picture of it, and that meant you had to get there before sundown. I figured
I’d just make it ... if there weren’t any delays crossing the U.S. border.
The guard asks how long I’ve been in Canada and where
I’ve been. “Oh, you’re one of THOSE guys,” he said. “We’ve seen a
couple of other riders on that Minnesota thing come through here today. You
don’t have any guns or alcohol, do you?”
“Nope,” I said. The only heat I was packing was the
electric vest, and that quit working about an hour before.
“You can come on through,” the guard said. “Good
luck, and watch out for the deer.”
I made it to the giant turtle on a snowmobile in Bottineau,
N.D., with about 20 minutes of daylight to spare. I could put those minutes to
good use. The evening already was getting chilly, and I hoped to figure out what
happened to the electric vest. If I was lucky, it would just be the fuse, but I
had to pull the saddlebags and seat off to check. Ahhhh, it was the fuse, and I
had a spare. I’d be a toasty camper tonight.
From the giant turtle it was east to Rugby, N.D., for a
bonus-point Polaroid of a monument marking the Geographical Center of North
America. Luckily, this was a "24-hour" bonus because it was well-lit
and you could take the picture even at night. By now I had pretty much collected
all the possible bonus points I had any hope of collecting, except for a few
right around the Twin Cities if I had time. It was around midnight, and I had 12
hours to breeze on home. This should be a piece of cake. In my dreams.
Except for that 20-minute nap back in Thompson the night
before, I’d been pushing hard for 40 hours. That was already seven more than
it took Charles Lindberg to fly across the Atlantic, and I had 12 more to go.
This deep into the rally, it was time to take stock of how
I was holding up physically and mentally. It would be another six hours before
the sun came up, and for me, those hours -- especially between 2 and 6 a.m. --
are always the most difficult. At 3 a.m., I’m convinced, ancient rhythms tell
humans to knock it off and get some rest.
The old SR has carried me to some wonderful places over the
last 20 years, but this time it was taking me to a new place ... an inside place
... I’d never visited before. It was a time to be extra careful.
I felt more mellow than sleepy, but nothing serious. I had
been eating and drinking along the way, and was careful to avoid caffeine, which
can seductively string you along and then drop you like a rock. I wasn’t too
cold, thanks to the vest. My arms and hands felt pretty good, even my ratty old
throttle hand still healing from its third break six months earlier. My butt
felt fine, many thanks to a gel pad. Physically, the only thing to complain
about this deep into the rally was a stiffness in my knees and a growing urge to
ride down the highway with my legs sticking straight forward.
I decided to push on into the night. The SR was running
well, winds were light, and while the North Dakota two-laner was dark it was
straight and well-marked. These should be some easy miles, I thought as I
nestled into the warmth of the vest. An hour later, it happened.
Glancing down at the glowing dials of the speedometer and
tachometer, my first thought was that a bolt in the front end must have come
loose because both dials were bouncing around wildly. I kept one hand on the
throttle and reached down with the other to feel the dials. Mmm; that’s funny.
They didn’t feel like they were bouncing around. I removed my hand, looked
down, and the dials started bouncing around again. I touched them with my hand a
second time. Nope, they weren’t loose. What my eyes were telling me did not
match what my hand was telling me.
It didn’t take long to figure out that my overworked
eyeballs had blown a fuse. The dials weren’t bouncing around at all. I had
found, and crossed, the limits to my endurance; it was time to get off the
highway, like RIGHT NOW.
Luckily I spotted a gravel road intersection almost
immediately. I braked hard (which honest SR owners know isn’t all that hard),
turned and drove about 10 yards off the blacktop. I shut off the key and the
world turned black. As my eyes adjusted, what unfolded was simply amazing: an
incredible display of stars, just the way you might imagine them out on a North
Dakota prairie hours away from big-city lights. And the stars were all bouncing
and dancing, just like by tachometer was doing a minute before.
“Wow,” I said to nobody, “This is really cool.” And
then it got a million times better. These nearly indescribable fluid shapes,
wispy things that looked like stringy electric glowing energy clouds, shot from
one end of the horizon to the other. I’ve seen northern lights many times
before, but they were nothing like this. Maybe they weren’t northern lights,
but something connected to what my brain was doing with tachometers and stars.
Hey, maybe it was one of those flashbacks they warned us about in the 60s.
It was as good as a 4th of July fireworks display, except
it was completely quiet. I suppose I should have been a bit apprehensive about
being alone in the middle of the night in the middle of a big prairie with a set
of badly buggered eyeballs. But instead, I just felt a great calm and wonder. If
this is what it feels like to push the limits, it’s kind of neat. It felt like
I had snuck into some place, some state of being, where I could only visit and,
later, only remember.
I could have watched the light show forever, except I was
suddenly clobbered with an overpowering urge to sleep. I dug out Mr. Screaming
Meanie and punched in 45 minutes. Ahh, bliss was approaching in the Iron Butt
Motel. I removed the gel seat from the SR’s seat for a pillow, laid down on
the gravel still wearing my helmet and riding gear, and bam, the lights went
out.
Mr. Meanie did his job, and so did the nap. The first thing
I did, after frantically poking buttons to stop that God-awful shrieking, was to
flip up the helmet face shield and take a good look at the sky.
Those weird, streaking bits of light were gone, and best of
all, the stars were steady again. That bouncing business was behind me. It
didn’t take long to break camp. I stood up, shook the gravel off the gel pad
and stuck it back on the bike, climbed on, stabbed the kick starter and was on
my way. I looked down at the speedometer; phew, steady as a rock.
Except for a few scary encounters with deer, the ride home
was uneventful. After all that excitement earlier in the night, I could handle a
little uneventful.
I’m more than a little embarrassed to report that the
final bonus I planned to nab was at the Minneapolis home of a Team Strange
groupie (well, she’s actually a member of the Minneapolis City Council). All I
had to do was swing by for a little free brunch and pick up a final, fat bonus.
I figured there would be dozens of other riders showing up for the same thing,
but as I approached the house, there wasn’t another bike in sight. I drove to
the end of the block to double check the street sign, then carefully backtracked
to what I thought was the correct address. Team Strange might be twisted and
demented, but it doesn’t pull cheap tricks. I pulled out the bonus sheets.
Let’s see, the house number looks right. The street is right. I looked at the
watch. Yep, the time is right. Oops. The brunch was on Sunday; I was exactly 24
hours late.
So scratch the brunch bonus, just like the Winnipeg bonus,
and the Gilam dirt-road bonus, and toss in a couple of North Dakota bonuses I
blew so I could make it back for the Monday morning brunch that was on Sunday.
Well I felt crappy again. I gave the rally my best shot,
and if I was a lot smarter, and a little luckier, I would have had a decent
score. So I did what I often do when I feel crappy, I got back on my old buddy
and we went for a ride. Heck, there was another hour left and I was about 50
miles shy of 2,300 miles for the rally.
So off we flew to the nearest freeway. With one eye on the
odometer and one on the clock we went 25 miles south of Minneapolis, spun
around, and made a beeline for the finish. We pulled up to the finishing gate
one minute before the noon deadline and patted the SR’s tank. I had never
asked more of it than I had weekend.
Trying to cut the finish so close wasn't the best idea of
the weekend, either; three riders were in the finishing gate right ahead of me.
By the time the rally official checked my odometer and the clock, the second
hand had swept past noon. That meant I was overdue and lost a few penalty
points.
Oh well, a few points didn’t matter any more. After
blowing Gilam, I figured we were out of the running for a trophy this year. But
I couldn’t be happier. That weekend I had learned more about my limits, and
more about what an old SR can do if you ask it; together we accomplished
something that has nothing to do with trophies.
Ya right, but it’s still nice to get one, and we did!
Remember what I said about smarter riders who earn more points but go fewer
miles. Bill Bruhn on a 2000 Honda 600F3 went about 250 fewer miles than I did,
but his first-place score was 25,540. I came in third with 16,266. The rider I
love to hate, Pat O’Keefe on his BMW 650 single, beat me again. He placed
second (with his Gilam points) at 18,397. And somehow, even doing those 400
miles of dirt road, O’Keefe rode 300 miles more than I did. How am I ever
going to beat this guy?
Whatever you do, don’t tell me to buy one of those 650
BMWs. The SR and I, we’ve still got some roads to travel.
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