travellingbennetts

Out of Punxsutawney on Day 59, having done Gobblers Knob and learned all about the Groundhog. But first a mechanical crisis, a bolt had come out of the front of my bike, with noticeable wobbling of something that shouldn’t wobble. A bit like virtually every part of one’s post-middle-age body, but unfortunately none of those fall off except hair. It was an M6 13mm bolt. Woah, we are in the land of Imperial. Plenty of Imperial in Walmart, no metric. Let’s try this place – the Tractor Supply Co. Surely just about tractors, and the supply thereof. But tractors need bolts, and maybe they are Japanese tractors? Inside, it was a true hardware place.

This was a “OMG there are a lot of huge urban centres to sneak past” day. Out of Pennsylvania, we entered the vowel states starting with Ohio. Cleveland and Akron used to be part of the industrial powerhouse of the USA and are seriously built up. There was a thin strip of white we could not avoid, but otherwise we stuck to the green.

Turned out the thin strip of white was the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, a bit of park surrounding what was once one of the most polluted rivers in the USA. The Cuyahoga River actually caught fire at least 14 times, but they’d done a good job cleaning it up for our visit. Speaking of fire, it was hot once again, real hot, and unpleasant. Still, we’d achieved No.33 state, which had superb facilities in air-conditioned roadside plazas, and we made full use of those.

Push on. Out of the white spots and onto Lake Erie at Port Clinton. Let’s talk about these lakes for a moment. Our biggest is the Great Lake in Tasmania, 22km by 11km. These lakes aren’t lakes, they are seas. Huge ships motor around them. 400km by 150km and they are joined. Just doesn’t seem possible to have a big ship cruisin’ about in something you can drink. Anyway, the Port Clinton accommodation was way outside town. The standard process when we arrive into a place is to become hyper-attentive to whatever is around and then once checked in to googs the surrounds in detail. Craft breweries is the first thing typed in, luckily these always seem to come up as a recent search for some reason known only to the googs algorithms. Then restaurants, food is part of the food pyramid unless it isn’t accompanied by red wine, so this kills off the fast-food places. Neither appeared at Port Clinton. Let’s type in bars. Starting to feel like Robert Falcon Scott with a relentless blizzard outside and no Wi-Fi. Nothing. Then either a miracle occurs with a close-by BBQ Grill plus Taproom, or at least a well-stocked convenience store. Neither appeared at Port Clinton, so a trip into town to get something from the supermarket. Then eat it out the front of our room where a few gentlemen were gathered. You’re here for what? Shooting championships. Long range rifle. Blokes from Sydney are here as well. Hence not a lot of beers being consumed, it is all about control.

Day 60. More states planned. But first a fair dinkum diner experience in Napoleon, it looked like what we all expect a diner to look like in the USA, assuming we are thinking 50’s and 60’s. After a real diner coffee, into the next vowel state, Indiana, No.34. Not too long spent in No.34, just rode around in the green bit in the north-east corner and avoided the big cities. But it turned out that all roads in this area lead to one place – Rome. This Rome had made an early run to be the big one and added City, effectively pushing Rome Italy back into the small town league. Getting Pope Leo XIV up was huge for Rome City, he was practically born there, and it is only a matter of time before the Vatican relocates. Anyway while we were in Rome City, we did what Rome City people do, and had lunch.

Not far north, and we were into No.35 Michigan. Not far in and we got to one of the most famous motorcycling places on the planet, Sturgis. A huge rally town which attracts thousands of motorcyclists every year. Something looked wrong as we rode in though, there wasn’t even a Harley dealership, and we only saw one motorcycle. Turned out we were in the wrong Sturgis, with the real one being over in South Dakota. Which raises another USA challenge – repeat town names.  Washington, Springfield, and Franklin are literally everywhere. Today we are riding from Franklin to Franklin via Washington, Springfield, Springfield, Washington, and Springfield. Maybe with a detour through Franklin. No dramas ever occur programming the GPS under these conditions. The corn and peas where now constants and had been since Ohio, so a discussion started about how many ears a corn stalk has. We’ve grown corn but a very long time ago, so estimates were drifting between 2 and 6. Let’s stop and look. It’s 2.

An exciting restart involving a hidden ditch before getting back onto the road, we pushed through to Muskegon. Chosen simply because it is in Michigan, and has a ferry terminal, but it was also promoted to a rest day. The hotel was way out of town, not really a problem. No restaurants nearby, but a liquor store with microwave meals was, so food and drinks sorted. The room hadn’t been fully vacuumed, with a band-aid and dried noodles in the carpet. TV didn’t work. Chances of an effusive review were rapidly fading. But it had an air conditioner that worked and we could look out the window and see the bikes. The usual review see-saw; “the rooms weren’t cleaned properly, but the noodles we picked out of the carpet and turned into a once-in-a-lifetime-Kan’ichi Ozaki-Ramen-miso-experience were delicately balanced against the lack of Say Yes to the Dress available on the TV”.

Day 61 was a Muskegon rest day. As always with rest days, rest is not actually an allowed activity with laundry, niggling motorcycle issues, emails, and the stuff one usually does at work while pretending to work taking precedence. But something huge in Muskegon besides a ridiculously big body of drinkable water – the USS Corned Beef. I’m guessing this was what it was called by locals when like most US submarines in the Pacific theatre in WW2 it was based in Brisbane. The official name was the USS Silversides, and it was one of the most successful of a bunch that made shipping and supply a nightmare for the Japanese. The walk through revealed a lot of things, firstly that when empty submarines of the era were quite roomy. But they would pack so much food and stuff into every nook and cranny it was a congested nightmare.

A major attraction for the men to the service was the food. It was whatever you want on the submarines, hence the lack of space at the start of a voyage. Another interesting feature of submarines is the complexity, with row after row of dials, meters, handles, wheels, and with people sleeping amongst all of it, torpedoes included.

The day included a trip down to the shore of Lake Michigan. Yes we have freshwater lakes in Australia, but none of them have a shoreline that looks like Bondi with sugar sand. First assumption was that they must bring the sand in from somewhere, like Queensland beaches. But when riding kilometres past dunes and sugar sand the realisation kicks in – it is just there.

Cindy’s rear brake pads were replaced in the hotel carpark due to a weird noise, which seemed to fix the problem but only sometimes, weird. All excursioned out, we decided that a Ramen was no longer possible with the low carpet noodles inventory, and no culinary triumph could be teased from the used band-aid, so we’d go into the promising sounding Muskegon Brewing Co for dinner. Onto Uber. Select Uber X, because according to the App there is one a mere 3 minutes away. But as soon as Uber X is selected, it then decides to search for a driver. The 3 minutes estimate was optimistic, with 10 minutes of searching for a driver, then finally connecting with Muhammed in Tarinkot, Afghanistan, 4.5 years away. Trying to stop Uber looking for drivers is like trying to stop the Terminator looking for Sarah Connor, it will never stop, ever, until you’ve paid a cancellation fee. Never mind, pay whatever to get out of it, just glad we have that option not available to Sarah. Call for a taxi. An entrepreneurial sounding chap answers. Yes we can get a taxi to you. OK. Vital questions such as how long weren’t asked, but Jarmail was there within 5 minutes. Jarmail’s taxi was interesting, it had done more miles than our bikes combined, and that was just in the last week. What warmed us to Jarmail was that he had awesome music blaring, and because he looked like Snoop Dog he could be part of it. N-word M-F-word & popping a cap in some M-F N’s backside because they borrowed but didn’t return a hoe, which seems harsh for a garden implement, but we loved it. Huge tip to Jarmail when we pulled up at the Muskegon Brewing Co.

Dinner and a few drinks finished and after a long conversation with our server who made us feel like stay-at-homes with his stories of catching buses through third world countries, and not the good third world countries, we were back out the front. Uber X said 1 minute away, until it was selected, then it became 3 light years, and Zee-nod in another galaxy would be here in 78 trillion parsecs. Comfortingly Zee-nod was driving a Toyota Camry, but again trying to set Uber free without incurring a cancellation charge was like getting Julian Assange out of the Uruguay embassy. Eventually it becomes the cost of doing business. Cindy called the entrepreneurial sounding chap again. 5 minutes later, we see Jarmail’s busted-arse van pull in like the golden chariot, just blaring a bit less golden chariot acceptable music. He’d heard the request come up to pick up two Australians at the Muskegon Brewing Co. Didn’t take a genius, he was on it. A hilarious trip home, Jarmail loved the Q&A of Australia v the USA. Another huge tip.

Day 62 was all about getting across the water. Rain started the whole “if I take that bag, with my sandals in the other hand, but with the GPS in the thigh pocket, can I avoid everything getting wet?” time and motion study. Never works by the way, everything’s getting wet, just suck it up. Packed, we headed to the ferry terminal, and even though we were a bit early we weren’t early. They’d started loading cars, and staff on radios were alerting everyone that all the motorcycles booked for the trip had arrived. You’re on last. WTF? Motorcycles are never on last! Check again! Still last. OK, maybe it’s not a drive-thru so last on is first off. That makes us feel better. Until we get on. We are directed into a very tight corner, and then told we need to tie our bikes down with 4 fastenings. A huge selection of cam tie-downs available luckily, but unluckily only a very few aren’t tangled or jammed up. And oh, I should mention that the ferry bowels were 100% humidity caked onto +35°C temperatures. The tie-down points were not in very useful places, so I decided 2 per bike was fine. Lake Michigan was fairly calm after all. No said the crew member, even though you’ve lost 15% of your body weight in sweat getting the 2 on, it must be 4. And as the voyage has already started and passengers are not allowed to be on the vehicle deck while under way, be quick about it.

Up into the close-packed airline economy-style seating, we were actually very lucky to get a seat at all because we were the last to get into the passenger deck by about half an hour. All sworn out, we could slowly evaporate all the sweat and enjoy the facilities and the snacks over the next 2½ hours, or 1½ hours due to the change back into the central time zone. Another quick deviation off the track here while we open the floor for debate about setting time zones. I’ll go first, and then close it out as we are very limited for time. Australia failed at Federation by not taking away from the states control of several nationally important things, and time zones is one of them. As a result, the most eastern capital city in Australia, Brisbane, is an hour behind places halfway across the continent during daylight savings, and so for people who keep normal hours it is the darkest place on earth. None of that nonsense in the US, the lower 48 has three reasonably straightish latitude lines defining four time zones. Some states are cut in half by the zones, but suck it up, it keeps the days normal with the sun coming up and going down at the right times. Having now won the time zone debate, we sailed into Milwaukee and our 36^th state, Wisconsin. Our main challenge as always with urban sprawls is getting away from them, so with the beer city in the rear-view mirrors, we plunged off westerly into Wisconsin. Evandale was a true commute town, and because of the unexpected time zone change we arrived at 2:50pm. Sorry said the girl, you can’t check in until 3:00:00pm, no plus or minus here. Righto, we’ll do a tour of the town which turned out to be very pretty, re-appearing at the safe time of 3:15pm only to find the girl had stepped away from the desk. Let’s not totally lose it until it is time to write the review. Anyway, she did show up, and we took advantage of the new most convenient supermarket in trip history, about 100m away and our old favourite, the Piggly.

So more states on Day 63, this is the start of the whoop whoops area where picking up Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota takes a bit of planning. We dipped down through Monroe and into Wayne. No-one in the group made any comment on such a perfect Aussie name showing up in the USA, except to quietly mourn the lack of towns named Trev, Davo, Mick, or Simmo.

The routine is well rehearsed for crossing state borders. We’ll run through this experience in detail. Stopping in South Wayne, we checked out where we were going to cross, a reasonable sized road with a Welcome to Illinois sign according to the googs maps. Back on the bikes, off we went. Then a road closed sign. Hmmm, we need to head south on a minor road. Okay, the US is very state-proud so there will be a sign. We can see the imaginary line appear on the GPS, no dramas. Then the GPS motorbike icon is on the line. Nothing. Not even a deer/cow/call 911 to report drunk drivers sign. We are in Illinois without being able to prove it to a demanding fan base. Nothing to do but plan a plan B. Into the town of Galena at coffee o’clock. This is a nice place, and obviously attracts the weekend crowd, with decent coffee shops and a mineral name that demanded a visit – galena is lead sulphide.

A nice coffee in a very busy place, and we hit the tri-state corner of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa at Dubuque. Dubuque is on the Mississippi, already huge after only a short run-up from its starting point a bit north at Lake Itasca in Minnesota. A quick cross back into Wisconsin and a return to get an Illinois border sign photo, and we hit Iowa, famous for relentless corn, and never-ending soybeans. We met many of them on our way to Clear Lake, chosen because it was about the right distance along the path we were taking.

Day 64 and some googs on Day 63 evening had suggested that Clear Lake was famous as the take-off place for three big musicians, and unfortunately not far away the landing place. Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and Jiles Richardson Jr, better known as the Big Bopper, had been doing the tour from hell in freezing temperatures and weaving around the Midwest states in an early February 1959 winter like Garmin had full control of the route. Some of the musicians had gotten frostbite on the +500km unreliable bus rides, which sometimes backtracked to venues they’d driven past the previous day. Buddy and Jiles had had enough, let’s charter a plane. Richie tossed a coin and got a spot. The pilot had no qualification to fly at night with instruments, the artificial horizon on that plane was upside down compared with the more modern ones, so the plane crashed about 6 or 7 miles out of town. Up a damp dirt road, we got to a sign saying Don McLean American Pie next to a car park. No idea what that’s got to do with anything, the GPS said to keep going. Then it said stop here, on a dirt road with corn and peas and soybeans as far as the eye could see. Did they crash in the middle of the road? Then Cindy explained that the Don McLean song was about the crash – “The day the music died”. Having the song on my playlist and having heard it 17,000 times meant I had to say “Oh, right, it must be back there then”. So back we went to the Don McLean carpark. A long chat with an English family who loved music history and regularly toured around the states to musically important spots helped – they could point out the boggy track at the edge of a paddock of peas, half a mile up which was a very basic memorial.

We pushed on north and crossed the border into Minnesota. No huge changes apparent in what was growing in the paddocks. Stopped for a coffee, which allows another deviation off the riding track. Coffee is America’s favourite drink, everywhere has it. Tea is often available but not as common. Many hotel rooms have a drip coffee machine or a pods machine. There are coffee vans. Servos usually have a coffee machine or prepared coffee, with Colombian or House Blend or French Roast the most common flavours. Cup sizes vary from enormous to humungous, we usually just put a bit in the bottom of enormous. The coffee selection is the easy bit, and one perpetually wishes that one could enjoy black coffee or at least have 3 hours to let black coffee cool down from “surface of the sun” to “mouth burns leaving permanent scars”. So to the diluent selection. Everywhere except the US this is exclusively cow-derived. But the US has at least 25 things that can be put into coffee, many of them utterly unrelated to cows. There will only be a couple of random options at point of purchase. Milk products are 2% and half-and-half, i.e the ends of the dairy fat continuum, but nothing in between. Then a huge array of other non-dairy additives, virtually all of them dripping with corn syrup. Coffee Mate is very common, in an array of weird flavours, French Vanilla is popular but very sweet and an acquired taste. Acquired over 20 years and at the same time as the diabetes maybe. Sometimes we’ve had to buy a small milk in the same servo and added it to our coffees right there on the counter. Sometimes we get a coffee, and miraculously a carton of normal (called whole in the US) milk is in the fridge. The summary for USA coffee is inconsistency.

Anyway back on the riding track up through some towns with odd names. Sleepy Eye was probably the one that most brought into focus the oddity, even though it was named after the Sioux Chief Sleepy Eye, and he was named that because he had a sleepy eye. No hiding from harsh nicknames out there. Finally called it a day in Granite Falls. This wasn’t just a roughly the right distance town, this was a town with something important, Old Rock.

It isn’t the world’s oldest rock anymore which explains why it was so hard to find, there aren’t signs directing the tourist to it. A minimum of 203 million years was unfortunately added to the Granite Falls gneiss age by the Acasta gneiss complex north of Yellowknife in Canada. The Canadians also hold the North American record for the lowest temperature, time for the USA to get serious and take the competition seriously. Enough gneiss, we found our way to the hotel just before it absolutely bucketed down. Over the road to the supermarket, dinner was sorted but we were into one of those “can’t sell grog in the supermarket or servo” states so a trip up the road on the bike to the liquor store to get a wine. Luckily we were there on a Monday night because the liquor store is shut on Sundays. Minnesota is a tough place. Best make for the border.

Day 65 and a couple of Dakotas to be ticked off. Firstly along the lakes north of Big Stone City that separate Minnesota from South Dakota, very pleasant riding and no people to disturb the tranquillity or the big stones which appeared just when I was calling BS on the BSes.

Rolling up the border and bouncing briefly back into Minnesota for lunch, we tried to stay off the interstate for as long as possible, which meant we didn’t get a very convincing border sign when we crossed into North Dakota, but we discovered that it was full of progressive and self-reliant people. Then up to a “because of the song/TV miniseries/movie” city – Fargo. Let’s firstly state that if you want to get an impression of Fargo, don’t watch the movie except to learn the language. They do really speak like that. This was an unusual hotel, it was Brewhalla. Voting to go there was strongly influenced by a big campaign from the IPA party. We checked in at the bar, which included a big free drink of anything on tap. An IPA was chosen. The bottom floor was all restaurants and bars, and the second floor was all bars. Nothing could go wrong.

Day 66 started with the Fargo visitor’s centre, because this has the actual woodchipper from the movie. There is even a woodchipper outside in case the visitor’s centre is shut and Fargo fans need a woodchipper. In we went, the girl was keen to help show us the features of Fargo and its activities and sights. Sorry, just here for the woodchipper. She wasn’t surprised and went back to work while we did our business with the woodchipper.

South and west was the order of the day, and the roads in North Dakota are a bit like those in Kansas – it is a grid so we could either ride south, or west. We generally alternated down through Kindred, then across to Lisbon for a coffee. The people out here are very friendly so we ended up in some long conversations, and someone left their iPhone on the table. Coming back 15 minutes later, it was still just sitting there, no-one had touched it and they assumed the someone would come back. Love the country towns. Continuing on to Lamoure, and our second decommissioned nuclear missile someone had purchased and put into a park, this one a Minuteman LGM 30 with a warhead of around 1Mt TNT, once sitting on the northern border of North Dakota during the Cold War.

This was beautiful country to ride through, lots of lakes and birdlife and cows. The grass grows thick everywhere, and they even cut it along the sides of the roads outside their properties to make hay. The winters are pretty brutal in this neck of the lack of woods, so getting enough feed for the cows is very important. And as everyone knows, riding along on a motorcycle results in obsessions. Let me take you through the obsession process. It starts with “Wow it would be cool to get a photo of the bike alongside one of the long paddock hay bales”. For the next 50 miles the long paddock hay bales are on the other side of the ditch and getting bogged and having to be rescued make it less attractive. But occasionally there is a high spot and the bales seem to be accessible. The obsession is always challenged by the speed we are doing, 65mph means that the perfect hay bale shot flashes past, and there is inevitably a huge throbbing pick-up a micron behind us and preventing a U-turn. Obsessions seem never able to be satisfied, until suddenly the hit appears.

Over the border into South Dakota, we kept up the south and west zigzagging until we could west no more due to the Missouri River. A south through Mound City, named mound because of the mounds and city because it has 71 people living there. We were in our usual formation, me up the front deciding whether west or south was best, and Cindy about 400m behind taking photos on her Go-Pro of me deciding. We were in bottoms land, a bit swampy and there was nothing of any particular interest to see or any convenient spot for a restroom break. So when I looked in the rear view mirror and she wasn’t there I thought “Hmmm, that’s weird.” I stopped. Maybe a minute went by. No sign. Maybe a bear had become hopelessly lost and had wandered onto the road? A mother deer and Bambi? I’d better turn around before I start thinking about flat tyres or mechanical scenarios. Back north toward Mound City and through some rain I’d just managed to avoid on the south journey, the sight of two police units on the side of the road with lights flashing got the “Uh-oh” started, but then quickly snuffed out because Cindy’s bike was parked neatly on the side of the road. I’ve had a few motorcycle crashes, and not one of them ended up with me in hospital and the bike parking itself with the side-stand down. Cindy was wandering down the side of the road looking in the grass. Nuh, still clueless, is she helping someone recover their pet ferret? How did the someone get between us? How on earth did the police get there so quickly? Cindy took a break from looking in the grass to explain. She had her iPhone in her jacket pocket but had forgotten to do the zip up. The Spotify playlist was going well. Then suddenly she felt something hit her leg, and the Spotify playlist stopped. Right, that makes sense. But what about the two police cars and flashing lights and two officers also looking in the grass? The iPhone has crash detection, if it thinks you’ve been in a crash and you don’t tell it you haven’t because it is lying somewhere on the side of a highway, it calls 911 and gives the location. Seriously?

Unfortunately the iPhone had decided that it had done its job in getting the Mound City Sheriffs out so quickly, so went to sleep. Multiple efforts were made using the helmet to try to turn the music on while wandering down the road, and using my phone to Find my Friend. We’d never activated this a-bit-control-freak App and we needed Cindy’s iPhone to allow it which was real helpful. After about three-quarters of an hour things weren’t looking too iPhone favourable, so I said to the officers that we’d keep at it and they might as well get back to Mound City to continue interviewing the 71 suspects for whatever mischief had occurred last night. No can do they said, we cannot leave people on a highway because without the flashing lights, those people will probably get run over. But we only need one unit, so one of us can leave. Off went one sheriff, while we were getting to the “Where is the nearest Apple store?” stage. Then we see the sheriff who had left wildly waving from about 200m up the road. What, had he just started accelerating away and heard a John Denver song drifting up from the grass?? No, his dispatcher had sent the location of the iPhone signal, they hadn’t realised it hadn’t been found. Apparently the iPhone claimed it was 10m off the road in a swamp overgrown with bullrushes. Some vector analysis suggested bloody unlikely with something leaving a motorcycle at 70mph most probably heading in a similar direction and not taking a sharp right turn into a swamp. Then the officer looked down next to side of the road rather than into the swamp, and lo.

Effusive thanks to all involved and offerings to Annoying Appus, the god of iPhones, and we were on our way again. Straight into the heavy rain I’d avoided on the first attempt. Never mind, the euphoria provided a dry warmth for the remainder of the ride into Mobridge, so named because it has a bridge over the Missouri River and someone in the county office was on a creative naming streak that day. Didn’t care, we were still fully pumped about the iPhone experience.

So here we were in Mobridge. A celebration dinner at the local bar and grill, ironically discovered on the iPhone, and we could prepare for both Day 66, and the rest of the trip. There was a bit of focus on the latter starting to come in, because we had some appointments to keep in Colorado in the near future. But that’s a story for next time.