Ride Report -- 10 May 2013

The Big Money Rally is rapidly coming to an end, and I needed to scrounge up 28 points to be a finisher this year. I planned a route that would take me south, somewhat west, then north again. That route would net 19 of the 28 points needed, which was very good. I ended up having to make a trip over to Joint Base Andrews, however, that soaked up two of the hours needed for that ride.

I deleted a four-point trip to Momma Rosa’s in Gretna, Virginia to get some time back. That left me with 15 points for the day, which wasn’t too bad.

As you can see, I got a much later start on the day than I should have to get this much riding done. Also note that it was 63 deg F…it would get to 90 deg F (or warmer) during the ride. Wow. Summer’s here (already).

The ride south was all slab, but I this was a rally-like run, so I needed to get south to start collecting bonuses.

The weather was really good, and since it was a Friday morning, the traffic was heavy but moving very fast. I tucked myself in amongst the I-95 crowd, and moved along.

Today’s ride was to be a LOT of rural road riding after the slab south. I was destined to ride through a lot of older, rural settlements.

My first stop was to Grandpa’s Kitchen in Littleton, NC. Littleton is an interesting place…one of the thousands of interesting places I get to see on the bike.

Note the flying pig on the sidewalk. For such a small town, there was a lot of traffic on the main drag.

Next stop: Boydton, Virginia (which, incidentally, is the home of a Microsoft Data Center). The coordinates I had loaded for the Boydton Volunteer Fire Department were off by quite a bit, so I did a little riding around Boydton to find the right location.

From  Boydton, I headed north to Drakes Branch, Virginia.

From Drakes Branch, I continued north to Meherrin, Virginia, birthplace of Roy Clark.

Then, on to Burkeville, Virginia. A local resident came over to see the bike, and to chat a bit. A drawback of a full-face helmet is that small talk is tough.

Here’s the Dillwyn, Virginia Fire Company’s building:

My last stop of the day was James Madison’s Montpelier.

From Orange, it’s a short ride home.

Saturday, 27 April 2013

Connie and I needed to do a little practice riding in advance of this year’s Mason Dixon 20-20, so we planned a nice Saturday ride. It was a great excuse to knock out a few more Big Money Rally bonus locations, along with a few Tour of Honor memorials.
We got a nice morning start, heading up I-295 / MD-295 through Maryland and the District of Columbia under a cloud-less sky. Road conditions were okay (I travel part of that route every workday, so I know where the worst potholes are located), and traffic was light for a Saturday morning.

Our first stop was the Caesar Rodney statue in Wilmington, Delaware, for a Tour of Honor memorial. We’ll be back to find his grave in Delaware for a future bonus location.


After Wilmington, we had a nice ride up I-95, to two stops in the Philadelphia, PA and Camden, NJ area.

Our stop in Philadelphia was to the Korean War Memorial.

The stop in Camden, NJ was to the Merchant Marine Memorial. The memorial is very close to the berth of USS New Jersey (BB 62), on the Camden waterfront.

Connie wanted to see a bit of Camden, so we took a somewhat circuitous route back to the bridge. We didn’t get to see ALL of the sights, but we saw quite a few.

From Camden, we headed west across the bridge, then west to our next stop – West Chester, Pennsylvania.

We found a bit of really bad traffic on the way to our next stop, so we took a bit of a detour north – up through an area that was known as Rittenhouse during the early days of Philadelphia. This is one of those locations that’s worth a return trip.
Our next stop was to a virtual geocache in West Chester, PA. West Chester was a happenin’ place while we were there – lots and lots of people on the streets, with quite a few sidewalk restaurants and a general welcoming feel. This is another place to which we want to return.

We next visited the Haym Solomon Memorial Park in Chester County, Pennsylvania, the location of Jim Croce’s grave.


We continued north to the rugged highlands of the Gettysburg-Newark Lowland Section.

There, we were destined to find the Spring Mountain Ski Area closed, regrettably, for the season. I thought the Tiki Bar was a nice touch. We couldn’t afford the time needed to completely scout the place, because we had to get back on the road.

Our original plan had us heading northwest to another ski area, but we were running out of daytime, so we headed for our last scheduled stop – an eatery in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. In yet another twist of fate, we arrived too late to visit “The Very Best Hot Dogs, Hamburgers, Steaks in Pottstown since 1921”. Next time, as “they” say.

Aside from a stop at a Jimmy John’s for a sandwich, it was time to make tracks for home. What a great ride!

Report: Virginia's Traffic Loopholes Lead To Unsafe Conditions

Report: Virginia's Traffic Loopholes Lead To Unsafe Conditions

I can hardly wait to read this year's report. Its arrival will be reported, once again, by WAMU 88.5.

2012 Void Rally Ride Report

Wow…another great Void Rally is in the bag. The Void is essentially the end of the rallying season here on the east coast. There are one or two short local rallies after the Void this year, but the Void is the last of the 24-hour rallies on this coast.

Preparation.

The rally book for the Allentown starters came out on Tuesday, 2 October 2012. That gave me Tuesday evening and Wednesday evening to think about the routing options, before heading northeast to Allentown on Thursday. I worked up a couple of what I thought were good options, and slept on it to see if I got any more insight.

One of the themes for this year’s Void (there’s a theme every year) was SQRT(49), so the bonus location values were all a multiple of 7. I fixated on a bonus location at Fort Monroe, VA – this was a bonus location that I didn’t select during Butt Lite 6IX, and I got it into my head that I just had to go this time. To add to the challenge, the Fort Monroe bonus didn’t open until 1030, and the route between Fort Monroe and Lynchburg meant that I had to leave moments after 1030 to make it to the finish before penalties started.

With a couple of options plotted out, I was ready to head to Allentown. Connie was originally to ride with me, but she wound up on the injured list, so I rode this one solo. Bummer.

I got my usual late start out of Northern Virginia, so I wound up arriving in Allentown after midnight.

Allentown.

I stayed at the Hampton Inn in Allentown on Thursday night. I had called ahead to make sure they (a) had an Allentown address on their receipt, and (b) could give me a checkout time on the checkout receipt. I was very happy about getting this critical planning element out of the way so early.

The hotel certainly came through on (a), but I didn’t find out until 0850 (the opening of the start time) that the counter person couldn’t manage to get a printed time on the checkout receipt. Ugh. Well, I was off to find a place that could generate a proper receipt before the 0910 deadline. I stopped at a Sunoco station (that other riders had tried), only to find that the clock on the register was over one hour off. Amazing. So, I tried a CVS – didn’t have an Allentown address. Finally, I located a Rite Aid that was in the right place, and had the correct time on their receipt. With a couple of minutes left until I became a DNS (Did Not Start – riders that weren’t officially on the road by 0910 were out of the event), I had my receipt in hand, and the required text was sent to the rally staff. The lesson here was to skip the reliance on the hotel, and scout out the big box drugstores in the area.

The Ride.

My first bonus location was the Cabela’s store in Hamburg, PA. I had visited this store during its grand opening several years ago, and it was nice to stop by again, even if only for three minutes. The store is a spectacle of outdoor gear and activities – I heartily recommend it as a stop.

There’s a nice sculpture of a canoe out front, and my assignment was to get a photograph of my flag and that sculpture. As it often is, my bike was a perfect rally flag holder.

From Hamburg, I traveled southwest to visit the highway marker for the Tapeworm Railroad. As you can see in the photograph, there were several of us on this route.

Funkstown, MD was the next stop. I overshot this location by a bit, and had to do a U-turn to get back to the parking lot where my bike (and others) are parked.

The next stop was the Road Kill Café, located in Artemas, PA. The road to and from the Road Kill Café was awesome.

I’ve been to the Farnham Colossi earlier this year (one of my Roadside America trips), so I knew what to expect. I didn’t expect the novel route that my Garmin GPSr would suggest – I knew of the paved road adjacent to the property; what I didn’t know is the goat trail that allows a “shortcut” to get to that paved road. Helpfully, the Garmin maps showed the speed limit as 55 mph on the goat trail, so every foot of 15 MPH to avoid shaking the bike loose on the gravel and washboard cost time against the budget. Oh well, “they” say that there’s a GS hiding under all that RT “tupperware”, so off I went. I got there safely, found the correct statue (third from the left), and got the photograph.

From there, I headed south to find a historic marker on Rt 50 in Virginia. I’ve been by this spot many times over the years…this time, I got to stop, take a photograph, and snag 49(!) points.

My next stop was the John Marshall’s Birthplace memorial near Midland, Virginia. I’ve been here before, too, so I knew that there was a ~1/2 mile hike to the monument that was likely to be really muddy. I’d factored in the 20 minutes I’d need for the hike the trail, take the photograph, and then hike out. There was a couple of fellow bikers hanging out on a picnic bench as I arrived – I imagine they thought it was odd that riders in ATGATT were showing up, doffing helmets and jackets, and hustling down the trail with a camera and golf towel (err, rally flag). I was happy to have them hang out on the picnic table, though, figuring that they’d keep an eye on my bike.

From the John Marshall Birthplace memorial, I had a nice (but slow – “rush” hour traffic) ride to Orange, Virginia. I had misjudged the effect of Friday afternoon traffic on my schedule. I simply hemorrhaged time as I sat behind trucks and school buses on the two-lane, no-passing-zone roads in that part of Virginia.

The Orange County Airport is located just outside the historic town of Orange, Virginia. As some (not me, thankfully) visitors say, “stop for the speeding ticket, stay for the history”. The goal at the Orange County Airport was to locate a stamp, and use the stamp on my rally book. I searched both the old operations building, and the new one, and couldn’t locate the stamp. A quick call to the Rally Masters settled on a substitute – a photograph of the Orange County Airport sign.

Orange is also home to one of the more popular Harley-Davidson dealers in the mid-Atlantic, Waugh Enterprises.

From Orange, I needed to head west, to the crest of Skyline Drive, in Shenandoah National Park.

This highway marker is on the eastbound side of U.S. 33, across the street from the entrance to Skyline Drive. I hadn’t scouted this location online, so when my GPSr said to find it in the park, into the park I went. I realized after looking at the GPSr closer, that the marker was outside the park. I lost a couple of minutes fumbling for my park pass and doing a few U-turns.

From the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe bonus, I needed to ride to Natural Chimneys Regional Park to get a photograph of the sign at the entrance. It was getting dark, so I used my headlights to help illuminate the sign.

I’ve been by the golf course at Swannoa several times (while motorcycling, not golfing), so I had a good idea what I should find at the bonus location. It was dark by this time, so I brought a flashlight, along with my camera and flag, to find the bonus location.

There was some huge social event going on at Washington and Lee University the evening I stopped by. I imagine that the young women dressed up for some kind of party were amused with a ATGATT rider stopping by to make a quick photo stop.

This is a photograph of a bikini-clad woman riding a dinosaur in Glasgow, VA. This hasn’t been on my giant critters list until now. I’ll have to come back in the daylight to get a proper picture.

I’d been by the next location on my own travels – it had been a bonus location for this year’s Cape Fear Rally, but I didn’t stop for it then – I thought it was too far off the track. My GPSr said the location was right off the road. It was dark, but I couldn’t find anything like the description given in the rally pack (something like “find a gate hanging from two stone pillars”), so after thinking about the problem for a few seconds, I elected to head up a gravel road (past a sign letting me know that the area was really closed after dusk). After going up the gravel road a few hundred meters, the gate became visible in my headlights.

Having taken the needed photograph, I turned around in the gravel very carefully, then continued south.

I’d lost enough time during “rush hour” in central Virginia that I dropped one of the bonus locations south of Roanoke. With that one dropped, the bonus in Roanoke was the last one before heading to Lynchburg to get a couple of hours of sleep.

Connie and I had been to Roanoke earlier in the year; while there, I wanted to snag a particular virtual geocache (I build practice rallies using virtual geocaches, normal geocaches, and roadside attractions, among other things). Imagine my surprise when I find myself back in the same spot, in downtown Roanoke, reading historical markers! There was some kind of event going on, so it was fun to find a safe place to park the bike near the marker. One of the EMTs on duty came over to ask me what all the motorcyclists were doing, jumping off their bikes, writing down numbers, then getting back on their bikes to get out of town. Pretty funny.

After Roanoke, it was time to take the mandatory rest stop. Because of my fixation on Fort Monroe, I elected to take the mandatory rest at the Rally HQ hotel in Lynchburg. During the Void in 2011, I did the odometer check just after midnight, and completed the rest bonus at the rally hotel.

I scoped out a place to start and stop the mandatory rest bonus – it was a 24-hour grocery store in Lynchburg. We were to put no more than 6 miles on the odometer from the start of the mandatory rest to the end. I thought I had a LOT more margin that I did…I nearly used up all six miles in getting from the grocery store, to the hotel, and back again.

After some nice rest, I was off again, heading south and east.

This highway marker near Pleasant Hill, NC, discussing the exploits of Lord Cornwallis, was missing the good stuff. I got a picture of what was left, then went off in search of a receipt. By this time, I was a little short on fuel, as well, so I was hunting for a fuel station.

This nearby place was happy to sell me a candy bar, but couldn’t produce a computer generated receipt with all the right information, so I snapped a picture, then went off in search of fuel.

My next stop was to visit a historical marker to retrieve some dates (one of the other themes of this year’s Void was math, so there were several bonus locations that involved numbers).

My next stop was the Ruritan Memorial in Sunbury, NC.

I visited the Fort Monroe National Monument to get a stamp for my rally book (28 points!) and for my National Parks stamp book (which I carry in the tank bag). Fort Monroe really turned out to be a bad idea – I got caught in the usual traffic jam on I-64, and there was just too much riding and not enough bonus stopping. Oh, well.

So, after getting out of the I-64 traffic, I was headed back to Lynchburg. I knew I was going to be in the penalty window, but that I could get enough points at the next bonus to pay the incremental penalty and give me enough time to complete the scoring packet before the next penalty increment kicked in.

This would have been a lot better, were it a chicken…had to settle for a nice dairy cow, though.

Scoring.

I made it back to Lynchburg a few minutes after the penalty window started, but the elevated cow offset the first penalty increment. I got my stuff off the bike, scribbled the last bit of data necessary to get the scoring packet complete, then checked in to stop the clock.

I did okay at the scoring table, leaving no points on the table (which is really good).

Banquet.

The banquet was first-rate (as is usual for the Void Rally). I got a lot of time to chat with my friends, before I headed back to my room to get a nice night’s sleep.

The journey home.

We’d had spectacular weather for the rally – reasonably clear skies, with very pleasant early October temperatures. That was not to hold, though. The rain started sometime overnight, so the area was pretty damp when I got up on Sunday morning.

I waited for the weather to clear a bit – I’m usually either nearly the last or the last out of the parking lot to head back for the barn. Today was no exception. It was a bit chilly and damp, but it was still a nice ride home.

I can hardly wait for the 2013 rally season to begin!

The Void Rally -- 2012

Here we go!

2012 Rendez-Vous Rally – the ride home

It was great to have a nice night’s sleep before saddling up again for a ride home. The bad weather of the previous day had cleared out, and we were all set for a nice riding day.

The Auberge Harris puts on a nice continental breakfast (there’s a hot breakfast available, as well, but we were both set for the lighter fare).

We chatted with the Rally Master and some of the other riders, before heading out about 0900.

We started out with partly cloudy skies, and temperatures in the low 50’s (deg F). We had both brought our heated jackets and controllers, and Connie ended up using hers for much of the day. I found that the jacket alone (without the rain liner) was just fine, and that my soaked gear from the previous evening was drying quite well. The ride home was uneventful weather-wise. The temperature started off cool (<60 deg F) and slowly warmed after about 1030 until the temperature got into the 80’s in New Jersey.

We had about 600 miles to cover on Sunday, so we elected to ride straight home. The border crossing wait was quite short (~12 minutes).

We did a fuel and snack stop in Lake George that was interesting – there was a car show that was wrapping up, so there were a lot of people and vehicles in town.

I always dread the boredom of I-287 and the New Jersey Turnpike, and wasn’t disappointed during the Sunday ride. The construction spiced up the ride a bit, but otherwise it was the old and familiar ride. Ugh.

We got back to Northern Virginia safe and sound a little after 2000. We’re looking forward to the 2013 edition of the Rendez-Vous Rally!

Epilog

Lessons learned

Get a few Canadian dollars and some pocket change early.

It’s essential to have primary and backup GPS – my primary went stupid early in the morning of the rally – took some time to get it back on track. Several times I had to force recalculation on either the primary or the alternate to get the two to agree. Sometimes they disagreed by as much as two hours on the arrival times. Ugh.

Got foul weather gear on at just the right point on Saturday. Temperature management was reasonably good, as was hydration.

Goat trail routing. I had both the primary and secondary GPS receivers configured for motorcycling. That may have contributed to our being routed to two very rough roads. We took the first one, but the second one was a bit too long and too uncertain, so we went around. As it turns out, I should have stayed on the freeway for the second one, which would have saved a lot of time.

Know where the ferries run, when they run, and how much they cost. I didn’t know about one of the ferries on the St Lawrence River – knowing about that ferry might have caused me to drop a big bonus (and a LOT of riding) for several lower point bonii that would have yielded a larger total.

Get Connie a clear pinlock visor for rain.

Our stops are getting better and better. With a little advance reading and planning, we can get our bonus stops down to under five minutes (which is pretty good). We had one stop that involved a photograph and a purchase, and we were able to get both done in 12 minutes.

2012 Rendez-Vous Rally

Getting ready.

There were two options for breakfast available at Auberge Harris – a full breakfast, and a toast, coffee, and juice breakfast. I knew that my on-the-clock riding style favored the lighter fare – we agreed to skip the heavy breakfast and to go with something lighter and faster.

Connie and I had slightly different wake-up times in mind, so we set two alarms. The first alarm went off at 0345, and the phone alarm went off at 0400, signaling the start of a full day on the clock. I wanted to be at breakfast soon after the 0430 start, so we could get our meal before heading out. We’d heard discussion about Saturday weather during the Friday evening dinner, and I’d consulted weather.com to get an idea of what we might be facing. We made sure our weather gear was handy in packing the bike for Saturday’s ride.

After breakfast, we made sure everything we needed for the day was loaded on the bike. One of the nice things about a loop rally (same start and end location) is that you can leave stuff you don’t need at the hotel, leaving a little more room on the bike, relieving the need to pack everything extra tight. After making sure the bike was loaded and all the electronics were on, I moved it to the starting line.

The 0500 rider’s meeting provided the two wild-card bonii, and Connie set about getting one of them accomplished before we left the hotel (which was a great plan). That ensured that we had one less bonus that needed to be done “on the clock”.

The ride.

We had a staggered start, three bikes at a time. Our start time was 0537.

This map shows both the bonii locations in the vicinity of our planned route, and the track as recorded in the primary GPS receiver. The purple symbols are the highest value, then red, then green, then blue.

Due to my error in capturing our track, I don’t have the track for the beginning of the rally. Ugh. I’m going to buy a separate GPS tracker so I don’t have to remember this little bit of housekeeping every 800 km or so.

The Spotwalla track is driven by Spot, which has a low data rate (1 update / 10 minutes), so it’s difficult to see what happened at the beginning of the rally.

I managed to make the first two turns out of the hotel correctly, but missed a turn onto the freeway. As a result, we ended up starting the rally going east, instead of west. You’d think that after all of these years riding a motorcycle, I’d be able to get the turns right, but this rally was plagued with missed turns. We made two trips across Rivière Richelieu, one to the east, and one back to the west, before getting on track.

We headed west, before turning north. Somewhere southeast of Montreal, the weather started to turn nasty, then it got a little worse. Adding to the weather fun, there’s a lot of construction around the southern extent of Montreal.

In the middle of the impending thunderstorm, the construction zones, and my apparent lack of fluency in the French language, the primary GPS (Garmin zūmo 665) decided it just had to freak out. At one point, the 665’s display was covered with routes, all of which were nonsense. The backup GPS (BMW Navigator IV, which is a rebranded 665 – without the SiriusXM receiver) was behaving just fine.

Navigating unfamiliar freeways and roads, and dealing with Garmin navigation quirks, led me to make a few navigation mistakes that cost crucial minutes. At one point, we were headed west on Autoroute 40 (one of the routes of the Transcanadienne, or Trans-Canada Highway), when we were supposed to be heading northwest on Autoroute 13. We got that straightened out (eventually), and got on the right highway.

With all of my navigation errors, that initial conservative route was going to be realized, one missed turn after another!

Once we cleared Montreal, we stopped long enough to get our rain gear on (in a freeway service area, just south of Prévost), and top off the fuel tank. We got our gear on just in time, as the rain really cut loose as we got back on to the freeway. We rode through hard rain nearly to the next bonus.

Our first bonus was in the lovely town of Sainte-Agathe-Des-Monts. As specified in the rules, the pillion needs to be in the photograph for every photo bonus (not every bonus in this rally was a photo bonus – for several, we needed to answer some kind of question, just like a virtual geocache).

The theme of this rally was “the cheque is in the mail”, so we visited more than a few post offices….

The rain stopped, and the skies ever-so-slowly cleared over the next few bonii.

We headed north to the southern-most shore of Lac Tremblant, to find a specific Canada Post box. This area is definitely on the “do-‘gain” list! On first impression, the area is largely targeted at the skiing crowd (with the bottom of a lift just a few meters from where I initially parked the bike), but with a large national park nearby, I imagine that people visit year-round.

The route out of the Parc Du Mont-Tremblant area was awesome. The roads were dry, and marvelously twisty (and well-paved). I surmised, during the ride, that the bonii were selected to entice some of the riders to try this road – that was confirmed by rally staff conversations on Saturday evening and Sunday morning.

Our next stop was St-Donat-de-Montcalm.

From there, we headed to Notre-Dame-de-la-Merci to visit a motorcycle-related site.

I just loved the ride through the Laurentides, with its forests and great roads. Next time, I want to check out the vegetation a bit more, to compare it with what we would find in the Pacific Northwest.

From there, we were on to Sainte-Émélie-de-L'Énergie to get a photograph of the sign in front of the Canada Post office.

Just after Sainte-Émélie-de-L'Énergie, in the vicinity of Lac Maskinongé, we wound up routed on what can be best (and charitably) described as a goat trail. I suspect that since I have the GPS routing set up for “motorcycle”, it thought that saving a few seconds by running us on a rough gravel road would be a good idea. Well, what’s a motorcycle trip without a few miles of rough, loose gravel and downward sloping, uncambered turns?

Imagine my surprise, and delight, when we popped out on the road that we should have been on before!

Next, we were on to St-Édouard-de-Maskinongé to visit a location and answer a question. From there, we headed northeast to Val-Alain to visit a covered bridge. At the bridge, we were to locate and record a graffiti message. The route to the bridge was another great example of poor routing. I followed the bad GPS route, only to find us heading past a sign that said (in French), Cul-de-Sac (what do I care about the bottom of a sack, I thought). Well, it turns out that it’s not a Cul-de-Sac, really…it’s the start of a seriously long goat trail. As soon as I saw the trail, I turned the RT around, and figured that we’d find an alternate route.

As my two youngest kids are fond of saying about our geocaching trips, Connie and I took the hard way in, and the easy way out. The goat trail is Ligne la Petite on this map, and is impassable for two-up riding on an RT. Yes, I might have taken it if we weren’t on the clock, but not when we’re running a rally. When we looked back up Ligne la Petite, it looked pretty impassable (very narrow, and lots and lots of gravel) at its eastern end.

We then headed southwest to Drummondville.

From Drummondville, there were two bonii that combined would take about an hour. We had enough time on the clock to visit both, so we were off to Roxton Falls to visit six mailboxes. From Roxton Falls, we headed to a mailbox near Granby. I think the rally book location on this one was about 600 m off, so we took two tries to find it.

Our next stop was a former Canada Post office in St-Hyacinthe to answer a question.

We picked up some very gusty wind between Drummondville and the end of the rally. At some points, we were buffeted pretty hard.

Our last bonus of the day was this Canada Post kiosk in  Ste-Marie-Madeleine.

By this time, we’re getting to the point where we have VERY little margin to make it back before the penalty window opens. We have a short discussion about dropping our last bonus, and heading for the barn. The last bonus is right on our way back, but the few minutes taken to get the photograph, or question answered, would cut into our margin. As it turned out, the weather ensured that we (a) didn’t stop at the bonus, (b) got soaked, and (c) wound up seriously in the penalty window. As we rode west, the rain and lightning began – the more we rode west, the more the rain was “falling” sideways, and the slower the traffic got. It was raining so hard (and the wind gusting so bad), that we rode with the hazard flashers for a while. We rode for about the last 45 minutes of the rally getting completely, totally, and utterly soaked.

We were nearly at Auberge Harris, when I made the last bad turn of the day, at the same intersection as my first bad turn. How ironic. Anyway, we finished safely, if not remotely dry.

Scoring

I got about preparing our scoring package, which Connie got a hot shower to warm up after the drenching we got on the way back to Auberge Harris. We didn’t have a fuel log, and we hadn’t made a lot of stops on this rally, so preparing the scoring package was pretty easy. I got our package into the scoring queue, then headed back to the room for a shower.

Scoring was really uneventful – we left the two wildcard bonii on the table because we hadn’t recorded the bonus code and odometer reading on the receipts, but other than those two, we did really well.

Finisher’s Banquet and our score.

We had a nice buffet dinner, swapped a lot of stories, each received door prizes, and got our score (we finished 16th in a field of 31 finishers). The father and son team who took #1 and #2 each made 29(!) bonus stops.

Post Script.

Routing.

Now that it’s all done, I realize that the covered bridge bonus just wasn’t worth the time. At least one other rider took a ferry across the St Lawrence, avoided the covered bridge bonus, and picked up more points. The trip out to the covered bridge and back was straight slab, not my favorite kind of trip on a bike.

We would have scored much higher if we’d headed back to the U.S. for the day, but as one of the other riders said, “if we wanted to ride a rally in the U.S., we would have signed up for another rally” (like the Minuteman 1000, which I rode in June).

Weather gear.

The zip-in liner of my riding clothes works great. The gore tex / kevlar shell gets soaked (and weighs a ton when wet), but I remain nice a dry inside.

Connie’s zip-in liner of her jacket works great, and she wears rain pants over her armored pants.

We both wore heated jackets for most or all of the day, though I didn’t energize mine. I brought heated gloves, but didn’t wear them because even when completely soaked, it wasn’t cold enough to warrant the extra bulk.