It's been a year and a day since I posted here. It's not like I haven't thought about it. I've actually thought about it more than I should but could never seem to get engaged enough to write. Every time I'd slink away feeling guilty that I didn't have it in me. So a day passed, then a week, and so on. It turned into 366 days and I found myself today coming to the decision that if I wasn't going to write, I should delete the blog. Whenever I come across an abandoned blog I find it a bit sad. Someone had something that was important enough to them that they wrote about it, but then it petered out and died. I didn't want to leave this blog carcass lying around like that and was about to delete it and that is what inspired me to write something instead. "Do not go gentle into that good night" and all that...
I stopped writing because Cannonball seemed to have sucked my interest in scooters right out of me for quite a while. I think I've ridden barely over a thousand miles since I got home a year ago. For a time I didn't think about riding at all. When I did it was only long rides that came to mind. Tooling around for 50 miles on the back roads around home had lost its appeal. I wasn't going to climb on the scooter unless it was going to be for two or three hundred miles. I didn't do that, either; I just thought about it. Sigh.
Other things intervened, too. We bought a new house with a nice chunk of land just before I left on Cannonball and when I got home I started spending all of my spare time on projects around the place. I put in a 3000 sq. ft. garden and fenced it. I cleared some land and turned it into an orchard. I fixed stuff. I spruced things up. It made me really, really busy and very happy. I still felt guilty for ignoring my scooter but not quite so much because at least I was engaged with other things.
Fall and winter passed and I could shrug off scooter thoughts by telling myself it was too cold to ride. Spring is here and it's been a chilly one so far but I've finally begun to ride a bit. It only took a couple of rides to remind me how much I enjoy it. But there's one, big overriding reason why I began to ride again and it's called an Iron Butt ride (technically the Saddle Sore 1000, but that doesn't have the same ring to it).
There are motorcyclists who get their kicks from doing endurance rides. Really crazy endurance rides. And there is a volunteer organization called the Iron Butt Association that monitors and certifies these rides. The entry level is the Saddle Sore 1000 - a ride of 1,000 miles that is completed within 24 hours. (Not enough for you? How about the 50cc Quest - a ride across the U.S. in 50 hours or less? Or the annual Iron Butt rally that goes 11,000 miles in 11 days?)
For three years I've been wanting to do an Iron Butt ride. I actually had one scheduled on the very same date in 2010 as the one I'm about to do but my riding partner bailed on me at the last minute and I opted out instead of going alone. I knew I'd do it eventually but didn't know when. Then talk of a ride sprang organically from idle banter at the end of last year's Cannonball. Not wanting the fun to stop, several of us started to talk about an IB ride in the summer or fall. It never came about but the discussion kept going an a plan began to crystallize.
[more to come...]
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