‘Bout midnight saturday night I was about ready to swear off rallying and write a scathing review of the Hiawatha rally. Deservedly so, as a few too many drunken loudmouths next tent over kept keeping me up, and dawn comes around 5 am this time o’year. They finally expired and I got about 4 hours of fitful sleep before the sun put a stop to that. Drank a couple big cups o’coffee to caffeinate myself into consciousness for the 250 mile trip home and was walking back up the hill to break camp… When a couple fellow riders came down the hill in search of me, my lost wallet in hand. Yup, these good folks saved me from having to siphon gas and survive on granola bars and left over bananas for 250 miles!
Other fellow riders had been reminding me of next weekend’s Iowa Rally, and would I be going? Thankfully the rains provided an excuse for my missing the GR3 rally, or I’d have had to explain my absence there too. And was I going to the BMWRA rally in Michigan? Took about halfway home for me to figure it out, but no matter how hard I try to ignore it, I’m a lifetime member of an unorganized organization of riders that have found riding around the country to a never ending buffet of weekly rallies is one of life’s finer delights!
Call us “rally rats” or whatever, we’re havin’ fun and we don’t care. But sadly our numbers are dwindling as elders aren’t able to travel anymore and millennials don’t seem to have discovered motorcycles yet. So it’s our duty to ride and rally ’til we can’t, keeping the tradition alive ’til the young take our place. Seriously… Motorcycles are an ideal “intermediate technology”, being half the price of cars. Greener too, motorcycles use half the fuel of cars and thus produce only half as much of them evil greenhouse gasses, and motorcycles have an even smaller manufacturing, parking, and garaging footprint. Easy on the retiree’s or millennial’s travel budget too, for less than $100 I can ride and camp for the weekend, enjoy some good food and great rides, and even better friends.
So yes, I’ll be riding to the Iowa BMW Rally this weekend, and every other rally I can make. And along the way I’ll do my best to infect any and all millennials, bored retirees, and anyone else with rally rat fever… This is too much fun not to share!
GearheadGrrrl 