Bloody Adventures in Alabama

At our next supply run, I realized we must be entering the South when I found a new brand of beer...

At least there was beer, because when we hit southern Tennessee, there was a certain lack of gas. I usually feed Bee premium, but when a pipeline breaks and people anticipate a shortage and thereby create one, sometimes that's not an option.

We found a map-dot tent east of Birmingham, Alabama and headed for it. Oak Mountain State Park proved to be quite large; from the check-in gate to our campsite was five miles. We parked the bikes in gravel and walked up a little woodsy hill to our site. The rest of the campground was a bit of an RV party, but the tenting section was both secluded and deserted.

I reported to Rogue that the shower house was quite nice, but upon her return she disagreed.

"That was a whole bunch of nope," she said with a shiver.

I was confused. "Why?"

"Spiders! Everywhere!"

"Really?" I hadn't found them, or they hadn't found me. The only life I'd seen was a single cockroach in a trash can, which is to be expected in warm locales.

The weather was perfect. For the first time on the trip, we sat outside in t-shirts and were comfortably warm. When I finally went into the tent to read a book, I was asleep by paragraph three.

In the morning, my jaunt to the bathhouse got a little exciting. The toilet paper dispenser was mounted oddly high on the wall and also apparently broken. When I tried to get it to do its job, instead the front cover fell open onto my head, and I reacted without thinking and slammed it shut. Unfortunately my right thumb was in the way.

I wandered out of the bathhouse in a painful daze, bleeding copiously.

"Rogue," I called. "I need your first aid kit."

"Okay," she said, and continued cleaning up the tent. I didn't know where to look, so I stood and waited. After a minute I called again.

"Hey. Where do I find it?"

"Up here," she said. I climbed up to the campsite.

"What did you do?" she asked.

"Tried to cut the end of my thumb off," I answered.

"How?" She sounded incredulous. "Do we even have anything sharp enough for that? What were you doing?"

I was stuck between laughing and crying and couldn't answer.

"Oh my god, you're not telling me. That's bad."

I rinsed my thumb and Rogue bandaged and taped me up as best she could. I quickly learned to operate the stove, and then to pack my luggage, and then to put on gloves and drive with limited use of my right hand.

Whisperlite Stove: the Demise

That night was a chilly one, and I had to steel myself to step out of the tent in the morning. I'd brought my sweater into the tent but not thought to insert it in my sleeping bag, so I was momentarily more cold after putting it on. Rogue rolled up the bedding while I set up the finicky stove. We'd forgotten to make another attempt at finding an O-ring, but it had worked once, so I saw no reason it wouldn't work again.

It did work. Much too enthusiastically. The second I had it lit, the flaming gas dropped from the stove to the surface of the picnic table, through the table to the ground, down the braided steel line to the pump mechanism, and all over the sides of the bottle.

"Put out the table," I ordered Rogue while I grabbed the stove and dropped it on the asphalt. The only thing I could find to smother the flames was a canvas bag, and I put it over the stove and held it down while flames shot out the sides.

I realized the gas was still on, but I couldn't turn it off, as the valve itself was on fire. After a few moments of struggling to grip it through the bag, I stopped the flood, but then the bag was on fire.

"Should we step on it?" Rogue asked.

"Go for it."

We each stood on a side and glared at the fiasco on the ground, trying to suffocate the disaster with our thoughts. After some moments, I carefully peeled back the far edge of the bag, waiting for it to flare up again. The fire was out, so I pulled off the bag.

And the stove came with it. The pump mechanism had melted into a grotesquely twisted remnant of its former self and was fused to the scorched edges of the now-useless canvas bag.

I picked up the whole mess and walked two campsites over.

"Good morning," I greeted the guys closest to me. "You want a laugh? Check out what I did."

"I thought I saw something on fire," one of them said, inspecting my prize. "You want to borrow my stove?"

We did that, and experienced the pure joy of effortless cooking, followed by hot coffee and perfectly boiled oats. Then we headed to Cabela's for a new stove.

Weiners in Virginia

On Tuesday morning I set up the Whisperlite stove to make breakfast and quickly realized that it had a problem. One of the O-rings was either missing or damaged, so while gas got to the stove and produced flame as planned, it also poured rather copiously down the sides of the bottle, and I had to keep pumping it every couple of minutes to keep the pressure up. I set the windbreak up to act as a flame-break, and it was enough to keep the entire bottle from igniting. It required more prodding than I would've liked, but coffee and oatmeal were eventually made and consumed. Rogue, who had never had any kind of oatmeal before, decided that steel-cut oats were an acceptable food source.

The rain was gone. We stopped at Target for a replacement gasket for the stove, but couldn't find one and moved on empty-handed.

Day 2 occurred entirely on Interstate 81, except when we were stopping for gas. I've ranted about I81 before and how much it sucks to ride, and Rogue spontaneously came up with the same complaints; it's only two lanes, and there are approximately 2,300 tractor-trailers per mile.

That night found us heading into Hungry Mother State Park to make camp. The route in was complicated, and I was glad to have GPS or I would never have found it. On the up-side, though, there was no highway noise, and the twisting back roads were beautiful. We made a loop around the Oak Creek side of the campground, chose a spot, and put our kickstands down.

As soon as Bee tipped sideways, she started vomiting coolant steadily into the road. I wasn't concerned for her, as I knew I'd overfilled the tank the day before, but I didn't have anything to clean up the spill and felt bad leaving it there.

We bought a bundle of firewood, and then spent the next two hours trying and failing to have a campfire. The rain had clearly come through before we did, and everything was soaked, even the plastic-wrapped wood from the sheltered hut. Several applications of white gas and a lot of playing with leaves and tinder got us just enough flame to cook rice.

Rogue found a couple of toasting sticks and we got into a pack of hot dogs. The pathetically glowing bed of coals warmed them to a disturbing approximation of body temperature. I'd eaten half of mine, straight off the stick of course, when we heard the noise of several engines and a group of riders on cross-tour bikes came pouring into the campsite. They paused in the road while the leader of the party got the lay of the land, and I stood in the trees at the edge of our picnic table and stared.

I counted up seven of them as they buzzed into the campground and then all milled in different directions like confused ants. For several minutes they roared around aimlessly, and then one of them put down a kickstand two sites over from us, and the others followed suit.

"You gonna go say hi?" Rogue prompted me, laughing. "Or are you just gonna stand there with your weiner out?"

I'd forgotten the meaty blob on a stick in my hand. The sight of a bright orange KTM had erased all thoughts of dinner from my mind.

We waited for them to get their helmets off and then went over to make friends. They were mostly from Arkansas, and were excited about the many miles of gravel roads they had found that day. I drooled over the bikes for a few minutes, and then we wandered off to shower.

We spent the rest of the evening at their picnic table, swapping travel tips and road stories. A couple of them had clever stoves that screwed right onto the top of a small fuel bottle, and they used them to heat up cans of soup, no dishes required aside from a spoon. It was the most efficient camp dinner I'd ever witnessed.

Pennsyl-rainia

Somewhere in Pennsylvania the sky clouded over and it started to rain. Rogue applied the old rain suit I'd given her, then decided it billowed too much to be worth the effort and took it off again. We stopped at a hardware store for white gas for the stove, and then a Target for dinner supplies.

"I don't know if it's my riding skills or the bike," Rogue said, "But I'm sliding all over the road. I literally slid sideways through that stop sign back there."

"That's not you," I said. "That's definitely the bike." Back in July, I'd gotten oil on the back tire during a rain storm and almost slid through a busy intersection. I thought we'd collectively done enough dry riding to clean the tire, but apparently not.

"I'm really not okay with this," she said, and I agreed and hunted down a nearby campsite. We were only 50 miles short of the day's goal anyway, and an oily back tire on wet roads is no joke. Harrisburg East Campground was the closest, and we rode slowly to it.

I knew as soon as we rolled in and saw an adorable lodge and a pool that it was going to be expensive. At $40 for a single night in a tent site, it was more than I'd ever paid for camping, but an intact Rogue and Hades were worth it. We parked the bikes in the woods, as the tent sites didn't have driveways, then got a bundle of firewood. I mucked with the fire pit while Rogue remembered how to set up the tent.

It wasn't long before we had a cozy bedroom under a tree and steaming bowls of soup and Rice-a-Roni on the picnic table. The rain had paused long enough for us to enjoy the fire. Rogue went to take a shower and came back with a report of a beautiful bathroom and fifteen minutes (timed) of hot water in the shower. I was definitely impressed with the shower house; it was big, clean, and well-lit, and the water was hot enough to take most of the knots out of my back. It didn't rain again until we were zipped into the tent, and from the cozy insides of our sleeping bags, we didn't care.

I Made a Mess in New Jersey

The next item on my agenda was to add an unnecessary 30 miles to our day by getting on the wrong highway. "I know the way from here, I don't need the GPS." Except that I've never actually gotten on 91 southbound from home before, and apparently the entrance is on a different street than 91 northbound, where I usually go. We made a giant triangle east, then north, then south, and basically started back at square 1 with fewer miles in the tank.

Determined not to screw it up again, I did so immediately by missing the first entrance to the Merritt Parkway. Fortunately there's another one a few miles on, so no more loops of stupidity (loopidity?) happened that morning. From 15 we hit 287, which I had predicted would be a parking lot, and I was right. We jumped in the breakdown lane and did a steady and thrilling 20 miles an hour until traffic cleared.

In New Jersey, we stopped for gas. State law doesn't allow car drivers to fill their own vehicles, but the rule doesn't seem to apply to bikers, as no has challenged me on filling my own tank there. I swiped my card and was standing at the pump, waiting and rocking out to something in my helmet, when I felt liquid pouring on my foot. I looked down and was shocked to see gasoline fountaining vigorously from the tank, where the pump shutoff valve had clearly failed. I stepped back and jammed the nozzle back into the pump. Everything was dripping. I got the station's attendant.

"Do you have something to clean up a spill?" I asked. "Some cat litter, maybe?"

"No," he said with a smile, and I stared at him. Gas stations are required to keep cleanup supplies on hand. He stared back at me, still smiling oddly. After a moment I grabbed the windshield scrubber and started washing the gas off Bee. The attendant went back in his house, and Rogue and I shook our heads at each other and left. It took a good 30 miles for the stench of gas to stop flooding my face with every breath.

Dipstick

It was 40 degrees when we woke up at 5:30 on Monday morning. I made coffee and breakfast while we loaded the bikes and layered on long underwear, hoodies, and gear. When the gear was bungeed and the zippers were zipped, I pumped my fist and we started our engines. Well, Rogue did. I pressed Bee's starter and listened in disappointment while she cranked and then died with a whining noise.

That's a standard feature of the Bumblebee, but she did it so many times that eventually the battery died. We had jumper cables in hand (thank you, Cider) but I had to remove all of my luggage and the seat to get to the battery. Once we hooked her up, the starter stopped working entirely.

Two hours later, I had found a blown fuse, traveled to the auto parts store, replaced the offending part, successfully jumped the bike, packed a whole kit of fuses into the last inkling of space in my luggage, reloaded and strapped everything, and was actually able to roll out of the driveway. We rolled straight back to the car store so I could get a portable jump pack and some oil.

Out in the parking lot, I pulled the dipstick and poured oil all over the engine bars and the ground, because the bottle was a wide-mouth and the filler was not. Rogue went inside for paper towels and a funnel while I looked for a clean patch of asphalt on which to park the dipstick. Not finding one, I decided to prop it in the mouth of the oil bottle, but I didn't double-check my plan first. The dipstick dropped into the bottle with a bloop, and I stared after it in vague horror.

"Rogue," I said when she reappeared. "Guess what I've done now."

"Oh god," came the reply.

"Guess where the dipstick is."

She looked around - at the bike, at the ground, at me. "Where is it?" she asked. "Skipper, where is the dipstick?!"

I couldn't talk; I just pointed at the bottle of oil. The two of us sat on the ground, and I rested my forehead against Bee and cried with laughter. Eventually Rogue fished out the dipstick with a hook pick from Hades' tool bag, and we were really on our way.

Team Nyan Cat: The Beginning

Some time early this summer, I learned about a rally called Lace, Grace, and Gears, which was to occur in Texas in September. I posted it to Facebook and asked who wanted to go with me, not actually expecting any companions to come out of the woodwork. But Rogue jumped on the thread and said she was in. Only one problem: she hadn't yet ridden a motorcycle at more than 15 miles an hour or outside of a parking lot.

Long story short, we fixed that. I lent her my Shadow 500 and we started riding around together, but Kestrel died after only a week. I'd known she had some engine issues, and they reared up and shut us down. Neither of us had time to tear apart an entire bike, so I lent her Hades.

I was a little concerned about putting her on a 1200 only two weeks into her riding career, but as Cider said, "A cruiser is a cruiser." Within a day Rogue was doubting her ability to ever ride a small bike again. She dropped Hades twice in parking lots but otherwise had no issues.

Fast-forward to Monday September 26th, the morning after the biggest game our team has ever played. Are we resting? Hell no. We're loading luggage on my bikes and setting my GPS for Texas. We're both exhausted and I've come down with a head cold, but we're pumped for a grand adventure.