Thursday evening before the rally I found myself in the second row for a David Byrne concert in New Bedford. David Byrne went to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence where he founded the Talking Heads so a show in NB was almost a homecoming of sorts. It was a great show and a great way to spend some quality time with my wife Chace. It's a bit of a tradition, in 2007 I stopped in Cleveland to see Modest Mouse. David Byrne was better.
At some point during the week prior to the start the Chief Technical Inspector, aka "Warchild" offered up a way to guarantee to be one of the first out of the lot. Now let it be known that while I have stated I was planning on being casual, that didn't exclude me from taking advantage of situations when presented. In this case it was allow the rally staff to give you a hair cut and if your trim was judged most interesting by the masses you could leave the lot first. Personally I like getting out first if possible. Everyone is tight, it's raining and anyone could waffle before the first stoplight, not to mention that if everyone is going to the same bonus first as in 2007 it will be beneficial to get there early.
That and the chance to save fourteen bucks had me convinced it was worth it to get my traditional #2 from Nancy Oswald rather than my normal barber. I bravely went first while Nancy and Dale learned how to use trimmers. Thank God for John Harrison; himself a father of some very well cropped young men. He stepped in and made me presentable.
Saturday morning I breezed through the technical inspection and registration process. It was so well done that I was through in record time, so fast that I had to cool my heels to wait for Lord Kneebone as he had gone across the street for supplies, confident the first rider wouldn't be done until lunch.
Sunday we had our mandatory rider's meeting then a nice banquet followed by the distribution of the first leg rallybooks and the thumb drives containing the waypoint files. All good so far and I loaded the waypoint files into the tablet at the table to start getting a visual representation. They gave us all the waypoints at once which was good and bad, good because all the data was there, bad because you didn't know which waypoints were for which leg or if there were any repeats.
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| All bonus locations as provided at the banquet. |
Once released from the table I got my rallybook to the fax machine then went upstairs to input the point values into my spread sheet. Just about everyone is using a spreadsheet to input point values, I use one to combine the bonus name, value and D (daylight) or R (time restricted). I then sort by value and create my breaks based on points. This takes about 15 minutes. I didn't use EZ bake or calculate the anticipated number of points because I never knew exactly where I was going when I left the checkpoints. I looked for clusters of red flags in areas I wanted to go.
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| My Leg one "Picture." |
Most of the Reds are daylight only. In reality most of the bonuses in the rally were restricted either by daylight or opening hours. I decided that the cluster over the lake would be important as would be Quebec and Detroit. I decide it would be fun to visit the incline plane in Johnstown on my over to New Hampshire and Quebec. I'd see how I was doing and decide how to approach the lakes and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn as this was big points. While the winners went clockwise, sweeping up points to the Northwest, I went counter clockwise running down some low hanging fruit on the PA turnpike before blowing my rainy sunrise photo of the Cog train in New Hampshire. This was my first big bonus and my first and only mistake of the rally as I forgot to include my bike in the photo. Better to work the kinks out here than on Pikes Peak.
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| No bike, no points. Oops. |
Moving on to the North I really enjoyed Quebec. In fact, all my time spent in Canada was fabulous. A fellow rider, Perry Karsten proved to be a great banker, exchanging US for Canadian dollars on par. A few bucks in local cash and some really horrific High School French got me by although my fist gas stop was a challenge.
From Quebec I headed west. I was planning on going to the top of the lakes but it soon became apparent that the daylight restriction would be working against me so I adjusted my route to go south to the Whirlpool Aero Car in Niagra Ontario.
One area of advance work that did prove valuable was my taking the time to get a Nexus card. This is a card that requires enrollment in the trusted traveler program. Getting the card was a process, however for entry back into the U.S. it saved me over three hours on one crossing.
The Whirlpool Aero car is a bonus I love to hate. Riding in an antique cable car suspended high over raging currents is not something that I seek out on a regular basis but for 999 points I'll give it a go.
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| Don't look down! |
From there I continued west to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn with a stop at Canada's first commercial oil well.
In Dearborn I ran into Jon Good and Ande Bergmann. They're a pair of Naval officers riding two up on a K16GT. There's something about Naval officers that make good rally riders and these two are no exception. It was nice to see them.
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| Ande Bergman, still smiling on the third day. |
To claim the Henry Ford bonus we had to find and photograph 25 exhibits, with our flag visible on any one. If I could have brought any car home it would have been this Beetle for Chace.
From Dearborn I went north to the Mackinaw Island Bridge and the cluster north of the lake. This was a night I elected to sleep on the ground. I brought along a nice Big Agnes bivy sack, sleeping bag and thermarest pad. But for a good pillow I would have enjoyed a great sleep but it was still pretty good. With minimal practice I was able to go from the bike to a bug free IB hotel in under 10 minutes, or less then it takes to get most hotel rooms.
I finished the leg with time to spare and between the COG mistake and another location I arrived to 15 minutes late due to rain and traffic I left 1055 points behind. I finished the leg with 16,426 points while riding 3,710 miles. This had me in 34th. I gave it a "meh" and was happy that I had banked more points than required to be a finisher.
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| My leg one route as ridden |
Next:
Blowing up a checkpoint.
