In many areas of human pursuit, that which gladdens our hearts and fills our spirits with joy can also bring the greatest of sadness, often when least expected. This was the case for my wife and I when we learned, last December, of the tragic death of Reagan Walters (above).
Reagan died in a motorcycle accident. She was out with her husband Brian, riding her new motorcycle, and doing what she loved to do. That it was her last outing will remain an enduring reminder that we practise a pastime that carries some inherent risks. I am left thinking that there is a risk/reward curve and we simply place ourselves on it at a point we feel comfortable. Nonetheless the risk remains and tragedy can be as close as the next bend in the road.
Reagan was cherished, not least by Brian who was also joint Rally Master for the Heart of Texas Rally 2015. The event this year was dedicated to her memory, and she will remain in our memories long after the trophies are awarded and the riders have gone home.
Let's Ride with Reagan through 54 hours of Texas!
Many readers here are now familiar with the type of event this piece describes. We are about to embark upon a Long Distance Motorcycle Rally. For those not so sure what this is, and especially if you are expecting booze and boobs in the pictures below, then I am sorry to disappoint you; this is not Sturgis!
What we have here is a scavenger hunt. The winner will be the rider who planned the best route over the next fifty-four hours, managed to ride it and had good fortune with matters outwith the control of the rider. Attached to my windshield is a picture of my family, including the cats with the scary eyes. They are a comfort when it gets tough, and it does get tough, and a reminder that my first and only real priority is to get safely home to them when this event is done.
The start location was Fredricksburg, TX, a nice city that was a five hundred and fifty mile ride from my home in deepest Oklahoma. Two things were preying on my mind prior to leaving. I have had little riding this year, and felt completely out of condition for the prodigious effort about to be demanded. Add to that the fact that a 54-Hour Rally is a true multi-day event, and it would be my first. I'm all about exploring limits, but biting off more than one can chew has a tendency to prove embarrassing. These events begin long before the riders assemble at the start. They really begin when the rally-pack arrives, with a satisfying plop, in your inbox. You then have the details necessary to begin plotting a route designed to gain maximum benefit from the opportunities the Rally Master has provided; and try to avoid some of the pitfalls he has put in there to tempt the foolhardy, or just unwary.
I know this particular RM well, and he has a noted tendency to like playing games. All in the interests of the riders having fun, of course, but games nonetheless. So I planned a modest route of just over two thousand three hundred miles. It was a decent option with a points total that would not be easy to beat if I could pull it off. That's two, one thousand mile days and a couple of hundred miles the third morning. Should be manageable. I could have been more aggressive ... but games!
Arriving at the start of a Rally is always fun. We are a varied community that has a lot of contact via social media, etc, but opportunities to meet in person are rare. It is a time I enjoy a great deal. Looking at bikes, telling lies and drinking beer, trying not to feel too nervous about the next morning. I arrived with only a modest back-ache, so I should be okay in the morning.
The Rider's Briefing, a traditional event where the riders get to hear how all their weeks of planning has been entirely wasted, was held that evening. James (RM) had a game for us, because of course he did. He was offering the chance to throw away your carefully constructed route, one designed to maximize the points available, and go off on some wild goose-chase which involved, among other things, about a five hundred mile ride to bring him some beer!
Seriously though, he had designed an elaborate alternative to a traditional route which had some obvious advantages, but also carried an element of risk. Normally I am all about this kind of thing, but on this occasion the points he seemed to be offering were not enough to exceed a well-planned route. In the end Jim Orr, the ultimate winner, took the challenge. I was correct too, there were not enough points but these events are a combination of circumstances, and I wasn't good enough to grab all the points on my route. I will admit to a great deal of respect for the "geocaching" type alternative that James thought up, and also admit that the words "hare-brained scheme" crossed my mind too.
Six AM arrived too soon, as it always does, and the riders lined up at the start. In the video below James can be seen waving a clipboard and looking important, while Brian Walters has the enviable job of ensuring we all leave speedily, but in a safe manner. He is here deploying the famous "Point and Go" technique. I have the camera and am heading first for a bizarre piece of sculpture called the Medina Apple.
This was an easy grab of a standard type of bonus, many of which are unusual or interesting items at the side of the road. From here I was off to IHOP for breakfast, and 2400 points. James had included big points for meal breaks at specific restaurants in fairly tight time windows.
After breakfast it was time to buckle down and get the first long haul taken care of. This was a two hundred and fifty mile ride west on Interstate 20 towards Fort Stockton and its famous Road Runner.
This was an incident free few hours on a warm Thursday morning. Speeds are high out here, eighty five miles per hour being the normal speed limit. So set the cruise control, kick back and enjoy the ride. I was busy minding my own business when a brown SUV roared past. As it did so, the car coming in the opposite direction lit up like a Christmas tree. Oops! I see the car slow in my mirrors and cross the median. Now I am hoping that it is the SUV that attracted the ire of the cops, and not me. I ease over to the right, slow just a little and try to be as inconspicuous as possible. I was thinking that the SUV driver must have seen this, and would be well-advised to stop and wait rather than make the police car chase him down. I was rewarded when the cop went right past me and pulled the car over. You don't like to see it, but you like it less when it is you they are wanting a chat with!
This is a bit weird, but it is Texas. It's a bird, a very large bird and it just sits there for no apparent reason. It appears to be running yet I can see nothing even remotely resembling a coyote in the vicinity, Wiley or not! An easy picture though, and a few more points for the growing total.
Before turning north for the long haul up to Amarillo, I have a cluster of three bonuses to collect in the Alpine, Marfa, Mt Locke region. I love this place. This is not the Texas of John Wayne or Second Amendment vigilantes. This is the Texas of artists, free-spirits and the kind of individual expression that warms my soul. As the United States is a conglomerate of peoples, life-styles and attitudes, so is Texas, and this Texas is a place I could make a very happy life.
Fort Stockton is also in the window for lunch. These meal stops are a compulsory thirty minutes, so I grab a cookie from Subway and hang out long enough to get a second one for the timed receipt. That will go in the tank bag for later.
So far everything is going swimmingly. Pride, as they say, comes before a fall and what I didn't know then was that I was about to be ... er ... swimming! almost literally. About ten miles short of Alpine the gathering clouds decided to burst. When I say
burst, I mean rain of almost Biblical proportions. Not your regular, warm summer welcome cooling rain, but winter rain, cold rain, rain so disturbing that I could have sworn there were folk at the side of the road building boats and leading animals aboard!
At one point I stopped at the side of the road to attempt to put in the waterproof liners to my jacket and pants. The wind made that impossible and there was a danger of losing the items, so hard was it blowing. I gave up the unequal battle and settled for getting cold and wet. I made it to Sul Ross University, and the life-size statue of a Longhorn (why?), and then on to the Aerostsat Balloon. This was a welcome sight, a little odd but felt in-keeping with the general area, where odd is normal and they reserve normal for Dallas and Houston. I have had to slow quite a bit in the rain, and now I am concerned that if I attempt Mount Locke I will miss important time-checks later in the day. I am also concerned that while the road up to the McDonald Observatory is well-made, and fine in decent weather, the approach is slow and it is likely that the speed will be reduced even further in the inclement conditions. I make the decision to cut that bonus, and I head for Midland, TX, the next stop on my route.
After a short break for coffee, and another 2400 points, I head for Big Springs, there to get a photograph of a replica of the Statue of Liberty. I am on schedule at this point. The rain is behind me and I have dried out, well all except for my feet that are wrapped in waterproof boots ... that aren't. apparently.
My next target is Robert Bruno's Steel Plate House. This is my last daylight only bonus, worth 3000 points and is the main time-check I built into day one. Get there in time, and I am on time! The sun finally dips below the horizon when I am just a few miles short of the location. This doesn't bother me as daylight only means sunrise to sunset, plus or minus thirty minutes. I have plenty of time. What worries me is that it is cloudy, and getting dark much more quickly than it normally would.
I drive right past two Texas Heritage Trail signs. They are worth two hundred and fifty points but I don't think I have time to stop for a photograph and still get a good daylight shot of the House. This was a major mis-calculation on my part, and I will own it here. WHile it is true I was only skipping two hundred and fifty points, that sign would have been the fifth (in the end), and with it would have come a four thousand point bonus! The sign was actually worth more than the House. This is a lesson learned. All that stuff about a bird in the hand .... yadda, yadda.
Made it! For all you budding Rally Riders, here is a brief lesson on taking photographs of bonus locations. In the above two pictures, the only difference is that the one on the left has the flash ON, while the picture on the right, clearly a daylight shot, was taken with the flash turned OFF.
In the end I was scored by a guy with a generous spirit, and because he could see the red in the sky he would have allowed either picture. You might not be so lucky because I can think of two reasons why that photograph could potentially be dis-allowed, so why take the risk? Learn how your camera settings work, it could save a great deal of pain later. The actual view was somewhere between the two pictures. It was considerably gloomier than the one on the right, but by the rules it was still daylight, being about ten minutes after the official sunset.
All is going pretty well so far. I know I'm a bit behind but nothing I can't recover from. I have four more bonuses to get today, the last of these is actually at the location of my planned Rest Stop. It's now around 8.30 PM, so let's get back on the road. (Note to self:- I was not behind at this point. Although I had dropped Mt Locke, my plan had me arriving at the Steel Plate House at 8.39 PM, so by the clock I was actually about ten minutes ahead).
All is well as I leave this place, the weather is fine, I'm feeling good. Just two hundred and forty miles more and I can visit with the inside of my sleeping bag for a few hours.
The sculpture of a buffalo is next up. It is on a college campus and I arrive late n the evening. Loud music is playing on the concourse as I park illegally and walk the fifty yards for the picture. A girl offers to hold my flag and informs me that I am not the first rider through here. This is my first indication, since six AM this morning, that other folk are actually in this event too!
I get the picture and walk back to the bike. As I am putting in my jacket liner (it was getting cooler) the campus police arrived. At first concerned that I might have broken down, they are really here to shut down the music. Pretty soon I'm back on the bike for the eighteen mile hop over to the next bonus, the somewhat bizarre 2nd Amendment Cowboy. Please don't ask me why, I have no explanation other than to say this is Texas, and move on.
The wind is blowing something fierce by now. It is tricky to get the bike into a safe position for a dismount, and even harder to frame a shot that will capture Mr Cowboy, and my Rally Flag, in a way that will later get the points. I am conscious of it being nearly eleven thirty at night and I've been on the road since six. Not far to go but the need to be careful is uppermost.
With only one hundred and twenty miles left for the day, and one bonus (the remaining bonus location for the day is at my overnight stop) everything is going according to plan. I'm always surprised by this, when it happens. Eighteen hours, many stops and about one thousand miles and I'm right where I planned to be .... it's spooky!
From here it should be a quick blast east on Interstate 40, leave the Interstate to grab the Indian Massacre Memorial, then drop south to the John Wayne Statue and my Rest Bonus. Not so fast young Bracken! The one annoyance of the trip so far is that my phone is not working. I can make and receive texts, surf the internet to my heart's content, but as for the phone actually, you know, making phones calls ... well not so much. This bothers me quite a bit. I have a wife and kids at home and they like to hear from me. In particular, I like to call Jodie especially when the going gets tough, and it was about to become very tough indeed.
As I left Amarillo the fog descended. When I say fog, be under no illusions. I am not talking about a light mist, or even a moderate reduction in visibility. No, that would simply be a minor inconvenience. What we are talking here is fog. Serious fog, thick fog, fog that says go more than twenty to thirty miles an hour and you might die fog. The sensible person gets off the road at this point. Generally I am sensible, but there really was nowhere to go. So I slowed to a crawl, worried more about one of the big trucks hitting me from behind than actually running into anything myself. The Hyper-Lite LEDs on the back of the bike are going to earn their keep tonight. I keep a very light touch on the brake lever to light them up one hundred percent, and hope that is enough.
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Then it started raining. Well why not? After all I am now behind schedule so I may as well be wet too. Reminding myself that this is supposed to be fun, I plough on. Eventually the little hussy that is my GPS tells me to leave the Interstate, and I willingly comply. The speed those trucks have been going past me is, to put it mildly, frightening and I do not want to be a feature on the local news. It's worth mentioning here that my two GPS units have been squabbling with each other. Rather like the problem of the fork in the road guarded by two brothers, one of whom always lies ... well you know it ... these two siblings have been arguing all day. Thus far I have listened to the new one, with its new maps and large price-tag. Have to justify that purchase somehow. They were fighting now. The new one wanted me to exit, the older, wiser and better looking (it has to be said) rival insisted I carry on Interstate 40 a little while longer. The new one won.
A few miles of rainy fog later I am instructed, by both units this time, to take a right turn and drive eleven miles. What is the only thing missing so far? A gravel road, and it is with little surprise that I now find myself on one. So let's recap. From a strong position of being on plan and on time I am now about an hour over time, it is foggy, raining and I find myself on a dirt road somewhere in the Texas Panhandle. Then it began to hail, because of course it did!
I got the photograph, you can see it above complete with hail. This is a low point. Really low. My mind turns to home. Warm dry clothes, warm dry bed, good coffee and it's all just four hundred miles away. I could be there by breakfast time. It can be very easy to simply give up at times like this. Many do and I hear their stories with a great deal of understanding. I remind myself that I am not that guy. This is supposed to be hard. Were it not so there would be little attraction in the first place. In events like this there are going to be times that test you mentally, physically, emotionally. This is why I do it. Not from some masochistic desire to be cold, wet, tired and hailed on, but for the spirit that endures, keeps going when it is hard. The ability to make accurate risk-assessments when the pressure is on and the body is done. If it is safe to continue, then on we go. I programmed the next bonus location into the GPS, and turned away from home.
I arrived at the Loves Truck Stop that houses the John Wayne Statue shortly after two AM. That is two hours late and will have serious implications for the next day. For now though I have to remain here for four hours. It's time to get some sleep and worry about anything else in the morning.
Riding With Reagan - Part II
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