Butt Lite 6IX

Well, it's begun...I'm finally on the road (well, at the moment, I'm stopped for the night, but I'm still "on the road"), on my way to Blairsville, GA for the start of Butt Lite 6IX.

Butt Lite 6IX

I'm a bit behind on blogging -- this will have to do for now, as I'm packing for Butt Lite 6IX.

Here's a link to the "official" blog:

http://buttlite6ix.blogspot.com/

2012 Minuteman 1000 Ride Report

This is my belated ride report for this year's Minuteman 1000 -- I'm later than usual in getting this ride report put together, but needed to get a few notes scribbled as I prepare for Butt Lite 6IX.


I registered to ride shortly after registration opened -- at the time I registered, I knew I couldn't ride the Mason Dixon 20-20 this year, but needed to have another rally before Butt Lite 6IX (and the ride to and from Minnesota for the MN1K was a bit more than I could fit into the schedule). This was my first Minuteman 1000 so I wasn't sure what I'd find, but I suspected it would be a lot of fun (and it was).


The Minuteman 1000 is actually two events in one: a planned Saddlesore 1000 (for those who want to complete that ride to gain admission to the Iron Butt Association) and a 24-hour rally, starting at 0600 on Saturday and finishing a scant 24 hours later at 0600 on Sunday. I was riding the rally.

Preparations

The bonii listing showed up in my email inbox on Wednesday, 6 June at about 1730 -- it contained the latitude, longitude, and point value for all of the pre-planned bonii. That list went directly into the planning spreadsheet and Mapsource, so I could do some initial route planning. Because I didn't know any of the other critical details (mandatory check-points, wildcard bonii, combination bonii, check-in time limits, and so on), there wasn't much I could do other than work out a few combinations. As it turned out, I wound up riding a modification of two of the early routes I'd planned.

The ride north

I headed north to Northampton, MA on Friday -- I knew I had to be at the rally hotel not later than 1800, so I planned my departure with plenty of time margin in mind. I was a bit delayed in getting the cats squared away, and traffic was MUCH worse than my worst-case expectations. A full-face, modular helmet kept me from gnawing fingernails to the bone, while I baked in stop and go (but mostly stop) traffic on my way north. I ended up getting to the hotel about 1840, certain that I had likely turned my adventure into a DNS (Did Not Start). The rally staff was very kind (which is true of rally staffs generally, and the Minuteman 1000 staff particularly), and let me do the odometer check and the rest of the check-in procedure right after dinner (at which the rally packs are distributed).

This is my check-in picture (which makes sure the camera works, and the rally staff can read the card in the camera). I don't look much worse for the wear on the ride from Northern Virginia. At least I wasn't sunburned....

I skimmed the rally pack while at the banquet table, looking for the kinds of things that sometimes trip me up in planning (the usual reading comprehension problems). There were more than a few twists included -- the biggest was a time-limited bonus location that caused the rally to be essentially split into two rallies. You didn't need to do that bonus, but you had to ride a lot of miles to make up the HUGE points allocated to that bonus, which was located just about the half-way point in the rally time-wise.

All the riders showed up for the pre-start meeting about 0530 to get last-minute changes (one of which changed the back half of the rally in a big way for me), and we were off around 0600 (my start was about 0608).

My route out of the hotel had me heading north, to Vermont. There was a lot of intermittent patches of heavy fog early in the morning, but the traffic was very light and the roads were in great shape. Riding up the Connecticut River was gorgeous.

The theme for the Minuteman 1000 this year was bells. Lots and lots of bells.

One of the "treats" included in this rally was the opportunity to visit Taco Bell restaurants along the way. This fact was revealed in the rally pack each rider received at the end of the banquet on Friday. I did a quick search on my way north on Saturday, and found that there was a restaurant not far off my planned route. What I didn't realize was that it is a Taco Bell restaurant in a mall food court. I spent too much time hiking through the mall to find the "goods", then hiking back to the bike only to have to find a willing accomplice to take the picture. I'm sure the lady I lassoed into the job thought I was nuts.

Taco Bell feast at the Mall in Burlington, VT

Well, there's a story and a lesson-learned concerning Paul's Cow Wash.

Two bonii involved real maple syrup -- I bought two containers for the rally here, and two for gifts. One of my rally mates was dealing with an electrical failure here, but he was able to complete his Saddlesore 1000 with a little ingenuity and persistence.

This nice lady sold me the maple syrup that I needed to complete two of the bonii. She couldn't provide a computer-generated sales receipt, so I had to snag her picture.

I'd wanted to visit Lake Champlain for a long time -- this was a great opportunity for a "survey trip", which was sufficient encouragement to come back when I'm not "on the clock" to see more. This is a statue of the lake's namesake, Sam, and one of his associates.

...and then, more bells....

Max's BMW was one of the sponsors of the rally (and they're great sponsors). They have three retail locations -- this is one of them.

This was the big-point, more-or-less mandatory stop in the middle of the rally. I stopped by to get my photograph next to the bell hanging from the door.

All of those bells made me a big hungry for a real, non-tank-bag meal. As usual, I stopped for FAR too long.

My second "fine dining" experience of this rally.

Not the best photo of the rally, but good enough. I learned A LOT about night photography on this rally (including the fact that I need a lot more practice doing night shots).

After taking a LOT of shots of this bell, I wound up with this one that more or less met the requirements for scoring.

Every once in a while, the shrubbery cooperates....

This was the most difficult bonus to find on this rally. The USS Hartford bell is located in a pedestrian "mall", located quite a ways above the road level. Finding the access point to the "mall" was interesting, then there were three of us hunting for the bell. One rider asked a local if there was a bell monument around, and we were quickly directed to a small lighted area. And there it was.

Bell from USS HARTFORD

 I carry a floodlight that plugs into the bike, to make this kind of shot possible. The bell tower was completely dark; the rally book called for a photograph of the bell, so out came the light. One of the other riders came up as I was making the shot, so he was able to get the bell shot as well.

I ended up riding along with one of the other riders for a bit; we scored a couple of Taco Bell restaurants as we headed south. We arrived at this restaurant as they were closing.

Enjoying my third Taco Bell visit

Who knew it wasn't called an "apple pie"?

 My last "apple pie" of the rally.

My fourth (and LAST) Taco Bell visit of the rally, in Waterbury, CT

There were a lot of difficult photographs during this rally. It helped to have an extra pair of hands to take the shot while I held the flag. That spared the use of duct tape (which I carry for just this kind of purpose).

  

I overnighted in Connecticut, then got up early to make the run north to Northampton, MA for a 0600 arrival. I snagged three bonii along the way.

I finished 7th out of the rally riders -- not too bad. I rode 849 corrected miles, for 254500 points.

Epilog and lessons-learned

A historical note -- I've been riding motorcycles since the mid-70's, and have been slow to add states to the list of states in which I've ridden. I was able to add Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire to the list of this trip. I'll be adding a lot more in August.

I'd left Northern Virginia with a turn signal switch intermittent failure – temperature sensitive – which was very annoying. When I got home, I took the bike in to Bob's to have the entire left switch assembly replaced.

I finally wound up with the notorious failed fuel tank level sensor – failed before the 32300 mile mark, somewhere in CT. Another annoyance that got fixed at Bob's after the rally.

Hydration was much better, but still not good. That's something that needs a lot of attention before Butt Lite 6IX. Parts are on order.

Most stops were good, and some were very good – left flag at Paul's Cow Wash, which was extremely expensive in terms of time (I lost about 30 minutes on that mistake, which is huge).

The New York bonii were nice, but they were very expensive in terms of points / mile. I rode a pretty efficient route, but I could have been much more efficient if I had ridden more on the east side of Lake Champlain, and skipped the big-points-lots-of-miles bonii in New York state.

I need to think through the process of adding bonus locations enroute -- I didn't have a real issue on this rally, but it's a problem that may crop up in the future. I made a transcription error when copying a route from the computer to the GPS (I only transferred waypoints, and not routes -- that's a mistake I won't be making again). I ended up adding a waypoint into my GPS receiver's route that was in my Mapsource route, and it caused a little confusion. It would have been a good idea to break out the computer to recompute a route with a real map – I would have spent a lot less time doing that. Need to figure out how to get the computer to sleep, and to get it out of the sleeve and back up in time to do a little routing before putting it away.

Riding home on Sunday was tough…should think about staying over that night and heading home on Monday. Would have been nice to have the day to goof off around Northampton. Would also have been nice to avoid weekend traffic on the return trip.

I need to check traffic on the phone before heading anywhere! There was a huge delay on I-84 West that showed up just fine on the phone, but didn’t show up at all on the SiriusXM Radio traffic service.

Sitting

It's interesting that I can ride long distances on a motorcycle without discomfort or pain, but sitting on an aircraft seat for more than an hour gets to be unbearable. These aircraft seats are worse than stock motorcycle saddles -- that's saying a lot!

Ride Report – 2012 Cape Fear 1000

This year’s Cape Fear 1000 was held on Friday and Saturday, 20-21 April 2012. Registration for this annual (and east coast season-opener) long-distance endurance rally is extremely competitive. I wrote earlier about my experience in getting registered for this year’s event (truly an exercise in you-snooze, you-lose).

For new readers, here are a couple of previous ride reports that provide a little insight into what a long-distance endurance rally is: 2011 Void Rally, 2011 Mason Dixon 20-20 Rally.

Having successfully completed the initial registration process, I was left with prepping my bike, getting enough riding in over the winter and early spring, and doing some practice rides.

Connie Custer graciously accepted my invitation to ride with me – this was to be her first long distance ride (previous rides had been in the 250 – 350 mile per day range) and her first rally (i.e., first time riding “on the clock”). The practice rides over the month before the rally focused on getting our fuel and bonus stop timing down – these rides did a great job of getting us into a “battle rhythm”: make the approach, side stand down, jump off the bike, prep whatever needed to be done, jump back on the bike, restart the engine, and safely get going in the right direction for the next bonus. In the spirit of “Bottom Line Up Front” (BLUF), Connie is a natural rallier and a great competitor, and was a huge contributor to our safe and immensely fun ride.

So, on to the details.

I was VERY fortunate to have been able to register for a Jamestown start. We left Northern Virginia on Thursday to give us time for a nice ride north, stopping off in Bedford, PA for a post office photograph:

and a very nice lunch.

Here’s our track on Thursday:

We took a little detour at the end of the day to capture a photograph of the Chautauqua, NY post office:

Then, we were on a mission to find some food. Chautauqua is a ghost town for ten months of the year (we were there during the ghost town phase), so we headed back to Jamestown. Jamestown, NY is not in the “happenin’ places” category – we did a bit of riding around until we found (a) Mexican place, and (b) a Mexican place with two rally bikes parked out front. The food was everything I expected from a Mexican place in Jamestown, NY. Sufficiently nourished, we needed north through town to the Hampton Inn and Suites, where I put a few finishing touches on the plan and went over the whole route with Connie. I’d had some real “fun” with the rally book the night before (finishing with map making some time after 0100), so I needed the opportunity to take a few more glances at the bonii and routing options before we headed out in the morning.

We selected one route for the first half of the rally (the time from the Jamestown launch about 1000 Friday to our arrival at the odometer check on I-40 in North Carolina, which was to be about 23 hours later), and three options for the second half of the rally (the period from the end of the odometer check to the deadline end of the rally at 1500 Saturday.

Connie got our starting receipt at 1007, then we headed out.

Road conditions were great, and the temperatures were pleasant (considering it was late April near Lake Erie). As it turned out, we were VERY fortunate not to be leaving just a couple of days later, when Jamestown received a foot or more of snow. That would have really put a damper on our rally plans!

Our first stop was in Andover, OH at the site of the Andover Bank Time Capsule. We hadn’t been on the road long enough to spread the arrival time of the riders who had elected to take this route, so there were a lot of bikes parked around the bank. We got our picture, saddled up, and continued south.

Our next stop was the Quaker Steak & Lube in Sharon, PA where we had to snag a receipt. Connie deftly dealt with the crowd of fellow ralliers, got our receipt, and we were off to our next stop.

We skirted Youngstown, OH….

…enroute Carrolton, OH where we were to find a particular sign. Lots of riders milling about looking for the sign, and Connie made the save. It didn’t take long for other riders to figure out that Connie was on to something, so we got our assigned photograph and headed south.

We stopped by Clark Gable’s birthplace to get take the required photograph. Note the sky – this was a beautiful day for riding (good thing we had sunscreen along!).

Then, we had a long ride south, into West Virginia,

to Looneyville, WV. The road to Looneyville was a great set of twisties (typical back-road West Virginia) – we were fortunate that we didn’t have to do this road in the dark or in bad weather, so we were able to enjoy the whole ride.

Our next stop was in Virginia, so we headed south again.

If you look closely around Bradley, WV you can see the first time error of the trip – I got off the WV Turnpike and went too far for gas. That cost a few critical minutes of our timeline. We had been running exactly on plan all day, but costly mistakes like this consume valuable minutes.

And there’s another time-wasting mistake around Wytheville, VA where I misread a ramp sign and got going the wrong way on I-81 (got to go north on I-81 to go south on I-77 don’cha know!

We departed I-77 enroute Stuart, VA – although it was getting dark, the ride was beautiful. This part of Virginia is high on the list of places to go for more leisurely riding. We had a Confederate memorial to find in Stuart. It’s a very nice small town, and the weather was such that there were a few people just hanging out, watching us run around taking pictures.

Our next stop was Speedy’s Barbecue, Inc in Lexington, NC.

From Lexington, we headed south to Albemarle, NC. The mandatory rest period window opened at 0000 Saturday, and we needed to have a receipt from anywhere in Albemarle, NC so it made sense to do the entire rest in Albemarle. We had fallen behind plan, to the point where we arrived in Albemarle about 0020. I hadn’t made reservations in Albemarle as one of our rallying pals had, so that cost some time while we looked for somewhere to stay. I got the clock stopped and rest stop started about 0045 (after some fun trying to find fuel at that hour) – that delay was very costly (50 points / minute!).

We each got some good sleep, then got going in the morning, starting the clock again a little after 0600 at the Walmart gas station across the street from the hotel. From Albemarle, we headed to Ellerbe, NC

where we snapped a picture of some figures out in front of the Inn at Ellerbe Springs.

Carthage, NC was next on our list, where we stopped by to see an old time sign on the side of the [former] Cornwallis Service Station (where corner gravel is featured prominently).

Now, we were off to do the odometer check and participate in a Time-Distance-Speed test (the goal was to finish as closely as possible to the mean speed along the odometer course). We had a bit of a routing challenge during the odometer check, so we got to do it twice, but we came in 2 seconds below the mean on the T-D-S challenge, so we got the maximum number of points (7500).

We had worked out three alternative routes to take after the odometer check. We were a little late getting out of the check, so we selected the route that we had planned in case that happened.

In the spirit of routing mistakes, I blew another turn (that I didn’t realize until much later) – I was supposed to take the short blue route to the east, but since I missed the turn, I got to go quite a bit further south on the freeway, before turning north again to our next stop. We had plenty of margin on this route, so this mistake wasn’t nearly as costly as it would have been if we were on a route with a tighter margin.

This is a lighthouse in a small pond in back of a gas station in Pink Hill, NC (note: we couldn’t see anything that remotely resembled a hill in Pink Hill).

After Pink Hill, we headed north to Kinston, NC to locate the CSS Neuse. This was one of the big point bonus locations that we wanted to get, and we did.

We had enough margin remaining in Kinston that we got some water and got a quick bite to eat. From Kinston, we had a straight shot south to Surf City, NC to visit Skully the Pirate.

There wasn’t anyone else around, so I knew I had to use the tripod. Good plan – poor execution, since you can’t read our number using this resolution on the camera. Next time, park closer and use the max resolution allowed by the rally rules.

After Surf City, we had a leisurely ride down U.S. 17 to our penultimate stop – the convenience store across the street from the rally headquarters. Our mission: obtain adult beverages that could be safely carried on the bike across U.S. 17. We got to the finish line safe, and sound, with beverages in hand in plenty of time to stop the clock. There were bikes everywhere – about 120 or so.

We got scored okay, and got ready for the post-rally banquet (which was BBQ and GREAT). We were both pretty tired after riding much of the previous three days, so each of us turned in to get a little shut-eye before getting ready to head back to Northern Virginia.

We rode about 1140 [uncorrected] miles in 29 hours on the clock – not too bad – just about my historical average speed over ground for all trips, on the clock and not.

The weather report for Sunday was predicting a lot of rain all up and down the eastern seaboard. It wasn’t raining when we left Wilmington, but it sure looked like it was going to rain any minute. We got a few sprinkles on the way north, but the ride was otherwise uneventful.

The post office in Maple Hill is on the Big Money Rally bonus list, so we stopped by to take a photograph.

The Smoke Chasing Grand Tour has a mandatory stop in North Carolina. It was closed on Sunday, but the owner was there to greet us – it looks like a great place to eat!

We wound up eating at a nice BBQ place in Cary, NC before getting back on the road heading north.

I had wanted to stop in the Richmond area to knock out the National Battlefield Park, but the rain was really starting to pick up, and the traffic was getting bad. The rain intensified to the point that we headed north on U.S. 301 to avoid I-95 entirely.

We had U.S. 301 essentially to ourselves the whole way back to Northern Virginia.

We got back safely (if more than slightly soggy) at a decent hour. I dropped Connie off at her place, and I headed back to a heroes welcome offered by Opie and Cinder. We had put nearly 2000 miles on the bike over the four days – a very nice ride!

Epilog. Our objectives for this rally were pretty simple: Finish safely and have fun. We met those objectives handily.

Lessons learned:

* Plan for visor change-over and layer add / removal. Doing this ad hoc is expensive

* If you can’t see the gas station from the road, it doesn’t exist. That’s a lesson that I have a real hard time learning.

* Plan the evening stop ahead – it pays huge dividends to have a reservation. We had plenty of time before we left Jamestown to make a reservation and didn’t. That cost a lot of points and cut down on needed rest.

* Our 3” x 5” card system worked really well – we’ll work on double-checking the data, and making sure we understand the requirements for each bonus location (they’re frequently different, in terms of what must be in each photograph).

* Rain-proof all gear before leaving. It’s easy, and it’s easily forgotten in the planning process.

* Bring heated gear – April can be chilly.

* Build a checklist of stuff to be brought to the scoring table. It’s easy to forget things in the press to be scored, particularly when you’ve been riding a while. This will be really important at Butt Lite 6IX in August, because of the pressures of a multi-day rally.