MACH.14: Day 6 - Metamorphosis

Day 6: Metamorphosis

Saturday May 3, 2014

Copyright(c) 2014, Jim Beachy

“These people are serious about their departure time,” I tell Kitty.  “When they say 9:00 AM, that means everybody on the bikes, engines running, and pulling out at 9.  I  don’t want us to be the ones watching all the other bikes’ taillights as they roll out.”

So we make sure we're awake in plenty of time to be fully packed and checked out of the hotel in time.

When eating crawfish, one should carefully consider the implications of wearing contact lenses.  I learned this years ago in Memphis on some motorcycle trip.  Having eaten quite a few plates of extra-spicy mudbugs, I paid no special attention to extra hand-washing; the instant I touched a finger to my eye to remove the lens, someone lit a match in there that did not diminish for many minutes.  There was no remedy except to wait.  And then repeat for the other eye.

Since then I've learned how to scrub carefully around the fingernails, which doesn't completely obviate the capsaicin's effect but makes it tolerable.  It's the lesser evil compared to taking out the contacts first and figuring out how to affix my glasses after putting on my helmet for the ride.

This morning my eyes smart only a little and it's gone after a few minutes without residual effects.

At breakfast, Kitty asks about various people whom I probably know or should know but she probably doesn’t.  One such is Willie Davis, who I hadn't seen yesterday. Willie is a rather small man, quiet, unassuming, never given to telling a lot of stories about himself.  “But make no mistake,” I tell Kitty, “He may be the fiercest Iron Butt rider of us all!”

It’s another crisp and delightful morning, nothing but sunshine and blue sky, one of those mornings that makes a biker happy to be a biker. Maybe a gardener has that same feeling but it doesn't quite have the same ring, does it?  Riders start assembling their bikes in an informal queue so the ride can start in an orderly, unified fashion.  When the procession pulls out, led once again by Picky, filling in for Roger who's still in the hospital, Kitty asks what time it is.  I glance at the clock in the bike’s display:  9:00 AM exactly.  “I told you they were serious about their departure time,” I say to Kitty.

As a sidebar, I've resolved one mysterious issue:  Last night I discovered my Slime tire inflation pump, cleverly disguised as a Slime tire inflation pump, stowed in the extreme rear corner of the right saddlebag.  I'd checked there several times before giving up at the beginning of the trip.  I don't know how I could have  missed it.

The 30 or so bikes take a leisurely pace southward, a pleasant ride on Hwy 27 to the Natchez Trace.  The Trace is a bit like the Blue Ridge Parkway without the mountains.  Picky acts as our tour guide.  "If you look off to your right, you'll see some trees.  Now if you look over to your left, you'll see some more trees."  I don't count the miles but in probably 50 miles or so and with two rest stops we reach US 61, which we take northward to what has become another annual tradition: The Old Country Store (http://www.natcheztracetravel.com/natchez-trace-youtube-videos/562-old-country-store-restaurant-lorman-ms.html).

"My grandma was the Queen of cooking cornbread.  I'm the King of cooking chicken," proclaims proprietor Arthur Davis, quite famous in these parts and even beyond.  "If Colonel Sanders had my recipe, he would have been a five-star general."  At various times Mr. D will come out and sing for the patrons.

It's hard to argue with his sentiment, and while we are there, a number of other biker groups stop by for some delicious all-you-can-eat fried chicken.

We've planned from the beginning to tap out after lunch and head to Gulfport, MS to see our family.  After making our rounds of goodbyes we strike out in a generally southeastern direction for the 200 mile ride to Gulfport.

I've had the GPS generate a route via roads whose numbers I don't even know, but seems to involve Hwy 28, Hwy 550, and US 84 to Monticello where we pick up Hwy 587 to Columbia. 587 would be a fine 2-lane road if only it had a decent road surface.  I will avoid this segment on future rides. Mississippi roads tend to feature long stretches of forested areas with few towns and little development, so making sure there's a plan for fuel is a good idea.  At Columbia we pick up US 98 for a few miles to Hwy 13 and then the final miles on US 49 before following several street roads to our son Kevin and family's home.

We make room for the bike and trailer in the garage and the metamorphosis is complete:  Biker couple transformed into grandparents.

We are content to be with our Mississippi family.  We drive in the van about 15 miles to the Back Bay Seafood restaurant for dinner, but it really doesn't matter.

MACH.14: Day 5 - Mudbugs

Day 5: Mudbugs

Friday May 2, 2014

Copyright(c) 2014, Jim Beachy

Yesterday and today are rewards for enduring the vicious onslaughts of severe storms and threats of tornadoes earlier in the week.  It’s hard to believe that this crystal clear and cool weather could occur so close in time to the monster storms that terrorized much of the country.

At breakfast in the hotel, we learn that there is an impromptu ride for today, loosely organized by the Missouri Gold Wing chapter whose members have showed up in force for the MACH.14 event.  So precisely at 10:00 AM, it’s kickstands-up and we are off, forming a long line of bikes where Kitty and I are #9 in line, and thus riding the left track.  CB chatter is professional and ride-related, not a lot of extraneous chatter this morning.  Picky is our leader and Dean is our tail gunner as we take the exit off I-20 west to US 61 south and an eventual right turn on Hwy 462 to Grand Gulf Military Park, where we take some group photos and kick around the place for the better part of an hour.

From there it’s off to a Sonic drive-in restaurant in Port Gibson for a quick lunch, and back to the hotel, except for some who wanted to collect Louisiana as a visited state, performing a little detour across the Mississippi River and back.

The afternoon is spent at the hotel, chatting and lounging around on folding picnic chairs that magically appear from the various trailers that folks have towed behind their motorcycles.

At 6:00 PM it’s off to Toney’s for the main eating event:  Crawfish!  (http://www.toneysrestaurant.com)  I don’t do a head count but I’m guessing about 40 people show up in Toney’s back dining room for all-you-can eat spiced steamed crawfish.  Four heaping plates and one not-heaping plate, supplemented by delicious new potatoes and sweet corn on the cob is all I can eat.  Kitty does a fine job on her own share of mudbugs.  I dare not ask how many heaping plates full of crawfish she herself consumed.

Afterwards, someone says “We’re going for ice cream.”  I ask Kitty as we climb on the bike if she wants to go back to the hotel or go for ice cream.  “Ice cream sounds pretty good to me,” she replies.  So we head out of the parking lot with with only the instructions to “turn right and it’s on the corner just up the road.”  I see no ice cream place and almost ride through the intersection, but then notice a bunch of bikes in the parking lot of… MacDonald’s!  Well, I guess they do have ice cream even though I wouldn’t have thought of that as an ice cream destination.  So about 8 or 10 of us sit around eating MacDonald’s ice cream, regaled by stories “Fearless” tells of his experiences as a one-time security guard at a large hospital in Atlanta.

I’d unhooked my trailer from the bike this morning for the ride (it’s a lot easier in tight quarters with lots of bikes to be without a trailer), so back at the hotel I reconnect and check the lights and connections.  Looks good for tomorrow, and we spend another hour or more chatting before packing up our own chairs in the trailer and saying good-night.

Tomorrow there’s a more formal group ride; rumor has it we’ll be riding south to Natchez, then coming back north on the Natchez Trace to Lorman and lunch at The Old Country Store that has become a group favorite over the years.

MACH.14: Day 4 - Ole Yeller Weed

Day 4: Ole Yeller Weed

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Copyright(c) 2014, Jim Beachy

Once again we make a very lazy start and it’s 10:50 AM when we pull out of the gas station next to our night’s motel.  It’s a brilliantly beautiful, sun-drenched morning, but chilly, 64 F.  Kitty is wearing one of my sweatshirts under the mesh jacket with the liner; I’ve opted to ride without the sweatshirt, but keeping the liner and mesh jacket.   Of course I’m a little chilly right away, but not enough to stop and put on the sweatshirt.  Sometimes you just live with your decsions.  “Silly boy!” Kitty says encouragingly.

I have routed random two-lane roads to Vicksburg.  These seem to take the form of Hwy 19 to Philadelphia (the Mississippi one, not the Pennsylvania one), then Hwy 16 through Carthage and Canton, and Hwy 22 to near Vicksburg, finishing out the last 16 miles on I-20.

These routes are sometimes scenic and always pleasant, occasionally surprising us with four-lane stretches.  Philadelphia is a quaint old southern town with a long main street and lots of small businesses, but as we pass we don’t get a vibe of a bustling, thriving town.

In Carthage we see giant casinos with beautifully manicured landscapes and artfully designed buildings.

In Canton (the Mississippi one, not the Ohio one), we stop for a break and I find some locals to ask about the yellow flowers in the fields.  They say it’s a weed of no earthly known good that moved in some years ago and they can’t get rid of it.  “Poison it one year, and it’s back the next.”

“Do you know what it’s called?” I ask.

“I don’t rightly know that it has a name.  It’s just Ole Yeller Weed here”

Just as we’re ready to pull out, a guy walks up to us, admiring the bike and trailer, and spontaneously starts a conversation.  Retired from the US Army, he says “You better be really grounded when you come back home, because there’s nothing here for you.”  He goes on to say how economically depressed he has found the area since his return home.  A chicken plant and two Mississippi State prisons, he says, offer the major source of employment.

“What about the casinos?” I ask.

He almost snorts in derision.  “The casinos suck a lot more life out of the community than they put back!” he says.  “Lots of people here will get paid today, tomorrow, and by the weekend they’ll be up there spending two-thirds of their paycheck in the casino.  The house always wins in the end.”

Thus armed with this encouraging and uplifting commentary on life in Canton, we continue solemnly on our trek. Having talked for a while now about having some lunch, we are hoping to find a roadside barbecue stand, but the chances of that, outside the little towns, appear to be slim.  As we round the a curve in the road and cross the railroad tracks into the village of Flora, I spy a building on the corner and catch a delicious whiff of cooking food on the breeze.  “I think that’s a restaurant, and there are two bikes already there!” I say, and wheel around in a small parking lot to return to the restaurant.  It’s the Blue Rooster, in a tiny building probably 30 feet by 50 feet in area.

There are maybe a dozen tables and booths in the place, and it is clearly not just a normal everyday restaurant.  Displayed on the wall is a large sign “Home of the #1 burger in Mississippi, 2012,” along with numerous other similar awards.  C.J. is our waitress today, a perky blond with a disarming southern accent, and she seems to take great delight in explaining the menu, offering suggestions, and answering questions.  She entertains us with a brief history of the building: It’s over 100 years old, was built as a little general store with a gas pump out front, and was at various times a laundry, a dry cleaning shop, and since 2008, the Blue Rooster.  Every night, she says, the trains thunder along the track barely 100 feet from the restaurant; in the old building, mortar and brick dust are shaken off the interior bricks that form the walls.  Staff must come in every morning and sweep up the white perimeter of brick dust that has accumulated overnight.

That #1 award-winning burger is an 8-oz hamburger called the “Flamethrower,” which is my kind of hamburger, but over the top for my lunch today.  I settle for the “Rooster Chicken Club” sandwich (a clever play on words, I think), and the instant it arrives, I know this is not a cook-by-the-book kind of restaurant.  This sandwich exudes passion, artistry, attention to every detail.  It is a labor of love, a masterpiece!  Served on a jalapeno bun toasted to perfection, it features a honey mustard dressing not too sweet and with just the right amount of mustard that allows the perfectly seasoned grilled chicken to speak for itself, a few slices of tomato, and  topped with bacon and a cheese that I don’t recognize.  I will say unequivocally this is the absolutely the most tender, most exorbitantly decadent chicken sandwich I have ever eaten!

Another waypoint to be stored in my GPS for some future ride!  The website can be found at http://thebluerooster.info.

We arrive in Vicksburg at about 3:30 PM to find some old friends and warm hugs waiting for us, and Gold Wings steadily trickle in for the rest of the afternoon.  Gordo, Gibbie, Skippy, Shaggy, Digger, Jacko and Tezz, and the list continues.  We learn that sadly, Roger, the host of the event, is in the hospital and unable to attend.  Some folks have ridden much farther than our 1200-plus miles.  From the West Coast, Canada, north, south, east and west, the areas of our North American continent are well represented.  There’s an informal short ride to a barbecue place for dinner, then back to the hotel parking lot for more stories and reminiscing.

Tomorrow seems to be a make-your-own-schedule kind of day until the actual crawfish dinner in the evening.

MACH.14: Day 3 - Trickster

Day 3: Trickster

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Copyright(c) 2014, Jim Beachy

Since we have only a 320-mile Interstate day, we lounge around at breakfast and it’s nearly 10:00 AM when we say our goodbyes to the hotel staff.  They have been most helpful and accommodating way beyond reason during our enforced two-night stay.  To offer shelter from the storms, the general manager has had me park Crusader and the trailer obnoxiously right in front of their lobby, just so the lobby doors cleared the front wheel; they’ve offered us cookies and given us tips on eating without having to ride to a restaurant.  It has been much appreciated.

After I take a minute to generate the new Interstate route on the bike’s on-board GPS unit, we pull out of the parking lot and I notice the GPS shows an estimated arrival time of 1:15 PM.  What?  How can that be?  That would be almost 100 miles per hour.  I quickly zoom out to see if I’ve chosen the correct destination, and see that I have.  Then I remember that this GPS is time-zone aware, and displays the estimated arrival time as local time in the new time zone, which is Central Time.  We will “gain” an hour this day.

Having scanned the weather radar, it appears we’ll be skirting the edge of some residual rainy patches just north of I-59, but doesn’t appear to be anything we’d need rain gear for.  It’s 69 F as we hit the Interstate under heavy clouds and a few miscellaneous sprinkles.  About 30 miles later, as predicted by the weather radar, rain splatters on the windshield  in Chattanooga as we round the great sweeping arc where the Interstate curves tightly along the Tennessee River.  “We should be out of this in about 20 miles,” I tell Kitty on the intercom.

And 20 miles later, having run through on-and-off rain, mostly light, the radar shows we are exiting the patch of rain.  It’s somewhat foggy with low-hanging clouds, but according to the weather radar we should be well clear of the rain.  Yet new water droplets keep appearing on the windshield  as if by magic.  I’m mystified as to how this trickster weather system is showing us clear of the rain.

We cross the northwest corner of Georgia and into Alabama, where the on-board clock unceremoniously switches from 10:58 to 9:58 as the GPS senses the new time zone.  About 50 miles later, having navigated 43 miles of unrelenting Alabama construction zone speed limits, Kitty is getting cold and we decide to stop to put on rain gear.  This is not so much for rain protection, as on a Gold Wing you can pretty much ride through moderate rain on the Interstate without getting wet.  But rain gear offers a significant measure of protection from the wind, so the body feels much warmer.  When we stop, I think I understand how the Trickster has tricked my weather radar:  In the fog and mist, a fine and constant drizzle fills the air, and I believe the water droplets are too small to have been picked up as rain by weather radar.  Thus the mystery is solved and I have learned one more thing to file away for the future.

After the Dance of the Rain Suit, of course the drizzle stops and by the time we navigate the Birmingham bypass, the clouds are breaking up and patches of blue sky appear.  Now we’re getting too warm with our rain gear.  We stop at a rest area just shy of Tuscaloosa where we reconfigure and have a little picnic lunch.  As we’re snacking, an inquisitive squirrel wanders tentatively up to the table, and emboldened by our apparent threat-less behavior, he finally comes right up to us and tries to steal our food.  Except the only thing he wants is peanut butter.  In this, Kitty and the squirrel have much in common!

“We have a little under a hundred miles to go,” I tell Kitty.  “Now that the weather has cleared, do you want to take a longer two-lane route?”

“Sure!” she says.  “Almost any route is better than the Interstate.”

And thus I quickly route a 160-mile bonus route from Tuscaloosa, roughly following US 82 east to Hwy 5 south, which intersects with US 80, which we’ll take west into Meridian where we already have reservations.  US 5 proves to be a moderately interesting two-lane route through mostly wooded areas but among some large grassy fields as well.  Some of the fields are covered with a kind of yellow flower, which we think looks like the mustard or water cress plants we observed in fields back home in Pennsylvania.  Yet the plants don’t seem to stand as high, so we don’t know what they are.  The mottled yellow against the green provides a scenic diversion from the forest and red Alabama clay road banks.  I think of Sting’s Fields of Gold - I thought he mentioned fields of barley, but maybe in actuality it was just water cress.  On a two-lane road with no berm, there is no opportunity to pull over with the big bike for a picture.

We hit the intersection of US 80 and follow it west until we once again join I-20.  As we enter Mississippi moments later, I give a good strong blast of the horn to salute Mississippi and to say “Hi” to our family in Gulfport, a scant 150 miles to the south of where we stop for the night.  For a moment, it’s hard to stay focused on the Mississippi Area Crawfish Hunt when we are so close to our family.  Today we’ve ridden 388 miles.

But tomorrow we plan to finish out the ride to Vicksburg with a short jaunt of about 160 miles; I’ve had to add some extra miles on two-lanes for interest’s sake, as the Interstate distance is barely 130 miles.

I spend an hour cleaning the bike and trailer, removing the filth and grime from a day’s travel in light rain, which is the worst for dirtying your vehicle.  I sometimes take the bike to a car wash, where I simply use the low-pressure suds (never the high-pressure) and a cloth to wash, then rinse and dry.  Tonight there is no car wash so my alternative is to fill a hotel bathroom trash bucket with warm water and gently sponge off the dirt before drying and polishing as necessary.  After we return from a short walk across the street to dinner, Kitty helps me cover the bike and trailer.

I never ask her to do this, but I’m secretly happy when she does!

MACH.14: Day 2 - Old, Bold Thoughts

Day 2: Old, Bold Thinking

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Copyright(c) 2014, Jim Beachy

I am surveying my beautiful red motorcycle lying on its side, resting on its crash bars.  There’s a standard, well-published way to set it upright; I’ve seen a 90-pound woman do it, and so have I.  But this time, as I back into the seat and grab the passenger rail and handlebar, it won’t budge.  I finally give a mighty heave, and… suddenly come awake with a start, instantly on full alert.

After a tense evening of tornado warnings and people huddling in stairwells for shelter, all subjects here emerged unscathed, but strong storms pounded the area all night.  I’m unnerved by my dream of a fallen Crusader, and the need to see if the bike is Ok is so overwhelming that at 6:12 AM I slip on a t-shirt and pair of raggedy gym shorts and pad out to the hotel entrance in my bare feet.  All is well, covers still on the bike and trailer, and everything looks perfect.

Kitty is already in the gym doing her workout, so I turn on the Weather Channel as well as some local news to see how things look.  It doesn’t look good.  The monster storm that stretches from Michigan to the Gulf Coast and east to Virginia is trapped between pressure systems, and is setting up to do the same thing today that it did yesterday, spawning vicious cells and damaging weather.  In our local area there are downed power lines, flooding, and downed trees.  Much of Alabama has been declared a disaster area.

I borrow and modify a phrase from the fighter pilot jargon:  “There are old riders and there are bold riders, but there are no old, bold riders.”  Wandering around in moderately remote and unknown areas in these conditions seems unwise to this no-longer-bold rider (I ever I was a bold rider).  We talk it over and decide to see if the hotel has any rooms for tonight.  They do.  Two.  I book one.  We have to move to a different room and as we’re transferring our luggage we talk about what to do today.

When our son Kevin was 13, he and I took a fondly-remembered two-up motorcycle trip down the Blue Ridge Parkway, around the Smoky Mountains, and somehow ended up in Cleveland, Tennessee, which acted as our launch point for a day of whitewater rafting on the Ocoee river.  “For old times’ sake,” I tell Kitty, “if the weather is good enough, I’d like to ride that same road along the Ocoee.”

Most of the day locally is forecasted to be pleasant, with strong storms and possible tornadoes firing up again this evening, but it looks ok now.  No storms or cells are in sight within a hundred miles on the weather radar. So after a leisurely breakfast, we set off for our  pleasant little 110-mile round trip, winding along the very scenic Ocoee River just as Kevin and I did all those years ago..

Harnessing the power of its rivers, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has built a sprawling empire of hydroelectric power plants throughout Tennessee and even into Kentucky and Alabama.  Their methodology has been controversial:  On one hand, it garners praise because, in the length of a river, the same water energy can be harvested many times as the river flows downstream.  On the other hand, it has been open to much criticism because what they do kills a river.  Hydroelectric power production on the East Coast is very different from the mountains in the western United States.  In the East, they build a dam and then carry the water runoff in sluice boxes for miles down the river under there’s enough water pressure gradient, and then divert the water in huge pipes down a steep bank and into the hydroelectric power plant.  This can be repeated over and over again, based on the length and drop of the river.  But when the water is dammed up, the river downstream is almost completely dry for miles much of the year, thereby making it devoid of normal life forms found in rivers.

But this is whitewater rafting country!  In fact, the 1996 Olympic white-water rafting competition was held here.  When the gates of a dam are open, the dry boulder-strewn riverbed becomes a raging torrent of rapids!  Expeditions are a major source of income for the area.

At the former Olympic site, the gates are closed and the river bed is dry, filled with boulders. It's hard to imagine a wild river hosting an Olympic event: We stop to take a few pictures and I snap one of Kitty looking for something in the bike’s trunk.  I think it looks like an alien is inspecting our motorcycle.

We continue the mesh jacket experiment.  We’ve discovered one characteristic that is a deficit, at least for me:  Often while traveling, Kitty for no apparent reason suddenly decides to impart a wonderfully relaxing back rub to my person.  These jackets have crash protection in the form of a “tortoise shell”pad across the back, shoulder pads, and elbow pads.  “There’s not much area left over for a back rub!” says Kitty.

On the return trip, 15 miles from Cleveland and the hotel, we stop for a late lunch at the Ocoee Dam Deli and Diner (http://www.ocoeedamdeli.com).  “Why can’t we have a place like this at home!” Kitty exclaims as we walk in.  It was recommended by the chief engineer back at the hotel, and if our experience is an indication, it is worth coming back to any time we’re in the Cleveland area.  This is a very funky, very off-the-beaten path kind of place.  In some ways it reminds me of another favorite, The Shed barbecue joint in Missisissippi.  Kitty orders a mushroom and cheese hamburger, while I indulge in a black-and-bleu version that includes some decadent crumbly bleu cheese.  With all due respects to my all-time favorite, the Kobe beef burger back home, at the Blue Duck restaurant in DC, this could be the best hamburger I’ve ever eaten.  Perfectly prepared, tangy blue cheese, tomatoes, a little lettuce, and some sauce I can’t quite identify, perfectly delectable.

In the course of our lunch, we strike up a conversation with a couple of southern good ole’ boys about the huge wild boar’s head mounted on the wall.  And thus commences a fascinating conversation about wild boar hunting, Crimson Tide football, accents and dialects throughout the country, how the TVA affected life around these parts (the dams covered over several little settlements, which one supposes are still there to this day), race and ethnicity, and the Amish settlements not far from here.

After saying good-bye to our new friends and leaving the restaurant, I tell Kitty “This is just practice for our next trip to Nova Scotia.”  For that trip, whenever it happens, she has expressed an interest in going to some place, staying there for a few days, and doing some local exploring.  This has turned out to be a fantastic day, with a delightful little 110-mile ride, rekindling some fine old memories, riding out of weather harm’s way, and absorbing some local color.  What seemed a setback has become a little gem in its own right.  And isn’t that how we should strive to live our lives?  The old “make lemonade out of lemons” philosophy.

Crusader and the trailer are parked back underneath the canopy, and since we have  plenty of time and opportunity, Kitty is doing laundry and I’m writing this blog.

Tomorrow the weather should be less severe and we plan to catch up our itinerary completely by riding to the same destination via Interstate vs. meandering mountain routes.

MACH.14: Day 1 - Splotches of Red

Day 1: Splotches of Red

Monday, April 28, 2014

Copyright(c) 2014, Jim Beachy

When I awake, Kitty has already departed the motel room for her morning workout.  I think when the first motorcyclist camped under the pines on the first night of his first trip, he did exactly what I do:  Pull back the curtain and take a look at what the weather is doing.  In this case, it’s cloudy but not raining.

I walk outside and uncover the bike and trailer, load up the day’s route and take a look at the XM Weather in motion. After some consideration and consulting the Weather Channel on TV, it appears that with a late start we might have a better chance of missing the big red splotches in the approaching weather front that has brought extreme devastation to Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas, and unrelenting, is now bearing down on the East Coast. So we take a lazy approach to breakfast and packing and finally are ready to roll a little before 10:00 AM.

The bike temperature reads 54 degrees F, so the experiment of the warm-weather mesh jackets continues.  What would happen if we each put on a heavy sweatshirt under the jackets and their thin nylon liner?  Could we ride in these temperatures with the mesh jackets?

I pull out the soft Gold Wing branded luggage where we’d packed our cool-weather items and realize that none of the sweatshirts I’d packed have made the trip!  It turns out Kitty had asked me about those shirts and I said we didn’t need them.  Only thing is, I thought she was talking about my set of t-shirts while she had in hand the stack of sweatshirts.  Guess I need to look a closer, pay a little more attention, when Kitty asks a question.. So, given a meager choice of merely two not-so-heavy sweatshirts, both mine, I give one to Kitty and I wear the other.  It’s a relatively light travel day of under 350 Interstate miles, so we will have plenty of time to stop and switch things around.

At the last minute, I take another look at the XM Weather that overlays the GPS route and see that within 50 miles we’ll be riding in rain.  So we do the Dance of the Rainsuit.  I almost always leave the bike key in my jeans until after I’ve put on the one-piece suit, but this morning I’m saved by the fact that the key is in the bike.  So rather smugly, I comment that for once I’m ready to go without halfway disrobing again.

We soon learn that at 54 degrees, the mesh jackets with a sweatshirt would have been inadequate to keep us warm.  But with the rain gear, it’s perfect.  And thus we learn that the likely temperature at which we could ride with these jackets is mid-50’s; the rain gear fits over the jackets.  Even so, the heated seats are a welcome addition on this chilly ride.

Just as predicted, in 50 miles or so we are riding in rain, moderate to heavy.  As we head southwest at a constant 70 mph, I keep an eagle eye on the red splotches on the weather radar.  In 95 miles, about 50 miles from the Tennessee border, we stop amidst heavy rain for fuel, and shortly after this the sky clears and we have some moderate sunny weather. The radar looks like we’ll have no more rain today, with the possible exception of the very end of the trip, and some red splotches that hover dangerously close to Knoxville.

By now the temperature is 82 F and I’m getting way too warm and sweating in the rainsuit.  So at the Tennsesse Welcome Center, we pull in to to the Undance of the Rainsuit and take a little picnic lunch.  Our Excel trailer features a vinyl-sheathed picnic cooler mounted on the tongue between the body of the trailer and the bike.  We pack various foods in it from time to time, and inside this cooler goes another little cooler.  Kitty learned years ago to pack several bottles of water in ice overnight in the hotel, and in the morning she pours out the melted water and repacks the bottled water in the smaller cooler.  We have ice-cold water all day, every day, even on the blistering hot days.  We seem to settle on some kind of protein bar supplemented by peanut-butter based offerings:  peanut butter on carrots, peanut butter on celery, peanut butter on apples, or in Kitty’s case, peanut butter off the spoon.  To Kitty there are three basic food groups:  Chocolate, peanut butter, and all the other stuff.

We leave the liners in the jackets because I’m still skeptical of Knoxville:  It looks very close as to whether we’ll be in rain there, and the liners will keep us dry, if too warm, in the event we hit more rain.  By the time we make Knoxville and take the I-640 Bypass, it’s 86 F and I’m sweating.  Eventually it becomes clear we will skate by the red splotches representing tornado and hail warnings, and at the next fuel stop (which we really don’t need yet) we take the liners out of the jackets and I remove my “arms.”

A word of explanation:  Kitty and I both have a pair of LD Comfort riding shorts (http://www.ldcomfort.com).  My good friend Mario Winkleman, a Gold Wing rider and a wonderful poet in his own right, some years ago developed a special riding material and garments for Iron Butt rides.  In the early days of marketing his product, we would frequently meet in San Antonio for an annual event called the Alamo Run, where a hundred (give or take) Gold Wing riders would show up for a barbecue hosted by the man we called “Pappy.”  That’s another story.  I recall asking Mario about the LD Comfort riding shorts and right there on the street, he pulled down his pants to show me the shorts, and said “Here, feel the material!”  Not being quite up to that challenge, I declined.  But I never bought a pair until last summer.  I ordered them online and in the space where it asks how I heard of the product, I simply said “My old friend Mario” and told this story.  Back came the product I ordered with a note from Mario and a bunch of other stuff I didn’t order.

Among the extra items were LD Comfort “arms,” which are just sleeves made of the LD Comfort material.  I’d put those on at the rest stop because the liners are sweaty and the “arms” feel pretty good.

We arrive at Cleveland amid flood and tornado warnings and dire predictions of large hail later tonight.  I’m not sure what to do with the bike and trailer.  I’m fresh out of instructions on how to handle hail, 50 mph straight-line winds, and tornados.  Raquel, the desk clerk, tells me to park the rig under the portico and I believe we are as well prepared as possible.

We are now spending a tense evening glued to the TV as it appears a tornado is developing southwest of Chattanooga and heading toward Cleveland.  Warnings have been issued to seek shelter.

I think it is time to sign off!  I will post pics and GPS tracks to this blog later.

MACH.14: Day 0 - Bonus Time

Day 0: Bonus Time

Sunday, April 27, 2014
Copyright(c) 2014, Jim Beachy

Today is a bonus riding day: We'd planned to depart Monday, but the first day sketched out to an almost-500 mile Interstate day, so we've opted to ride a couple hundred miles on this beautiful Sunday afternoon, knocking a serious hole in tomorrow's ride.

The church we attend features four services every weekend, and they stream one of the morning services live.  So instead of attending in person this morning, we sit in my little home office and watch the service on the Internet.  After a light lunch, we finish last-minute packing, perform the dance of the car-truck-motorcycle repositioning in driveway and garage , take a quick photo of Kitty standing by the bike, and climb aboard.

“And there we go!” says Kitty in my headset as she has for years when we start out, although recently she has taken to saying “Click-click” to represent the small click we hear in the headset when she plugs in.  And so we roll out, headed for I-66 west and I-81 south, just before 2:00 PM.  There’s really no destination goal for today, but in the back of my mind I’m thinking Roanoke, VA, about 200 miles from home.

The temperature is a pleasant but cool 64 degrees.  We’ve talked about how to dress for our new-jacket experiment; for now, we’re wearing the mesh jackets, a liner in each, and under that a t-shirt plus a long-sleeved shirt.  I have a medium-weight sweatshirt, Kitty is wearing a thinner long-sleeved t-shirt that I think will be a little cool for her.  The passenger always gets more turbulence as the still air pocket collapses around the shoulders, and it’s always a little chillier back there in cool weather.  An hour later, I feel perfect without using any of the fairing’s heat vents or heated seat, and Kitty is a little chilly but has turned on her seat heater, which she says makes a big difference.  I think we’ve learned that with a t-shirt plus sweatshirt, we can ride comfortably in these jackets with temps in the mid-60’s.  That is probably the lower limit for an extended ride.

Spring has come very slowly to Virginia this year.  None of the trees are in full leaf, but the enthusiastic patches of reddish-purple redbud trees offer a beautiful contrast to the pale green of the early springtime growth.  While the Shenandoah Valley holds promise of full spring and summer on its rolling hills, as we look eastward toward the mountains where runs Skyline Drive, no sign of green is to be seen.

By the time we’ve ridden a hundred miles or so to Harrisonburg, VA, my windshield is completely and distractingly splattered with remains of many bugs.  As I inspect the carnage and clean the windshield at a fuel stop (we’d left home with just half a tank of fuel), it appears most of the insects were yellow jackets or wasps - maybe relatives of the one that stung me yesterday?  Perhaps I’m getting my pound of flesh after all!  And speaking of which, the huge hard lump on the back of my neck is actually below where the helmet rests, so it’s fine.  However, the wind and the tails of my do-rag tickling my neck in that spot make for a maddening desire to spend the whole day clawing and scratching at my neck.

And thus to Roanoke, 213 miles for this short bonus day.  After checking in to a motel, I clean the front of the motorcycle - I don’t remember when I’ve ever had to work so hard to clean bugs!  So they get the last laugh after all!

I’ve spent some time reevaluating our trip for tomorrow and moved our stopping point 60 miles or so farther south to Cleveland, TN, near Chattanooga, where we plan to leave the Interstate for good for the rest of the outbound trip.  Before covering the bike and trailer, I’d programmed the new route into the bike’s GPS system.  Rain and storms are making their way eastward, so I’m not sure when we’ll hit those - it would be preferable, it we must ride in storms, to do it on the Interstate tomorrow rather than on Appalachian Mountain roads the next day.

We’ll take it as it comes.