14 states in 21 hours - no big deal

This story was published in Motorcycle Tour & Cruiser about 10 years ago:

Dom LoDuca, Michelle Thorson, Archey and Theresia Shearer, me, and Bob Knutson moments before we embarked on our 14-state ride.

14 States in 21 Hours

By JOHN FLORA

Six of us went back to work the Tuesday after Memorial Day, 1999, with smug smiles on our faces. While our coworkers spent their holiday weekend in mundane pursuits, we’d accomplished something a bit more heroic.

With both fists thrust into the air in exultation, I led our hardy little band across the Ohio River bridge at Huntington, W.Va., onto the soil of Ohio at 11:30 a.m., May 31, 1999.

It was our 14^th state in 21 hours of riding and marked the successful completion of the first ever Charlie Thomas Memorial Ride.

Charlie, a patriarch of the Indianapolis BMW Club, broke down barriers against female participation by insisting on bringing his wife Martha along at a time when club rides were male-only affairs. Charlie died in early 1998 at the age of 80, but Martha continued as a valued and stalwart member. She gave her blessing to our little jaunt that took us from the Yankee North to the heart of the Confederacy and from the west bank of the Mississippi to the Appalachians.

This demented concept began percolating through my consciousness several years earlier when I saw a guy a rally sporting a T-shirt that celebrated a piddly little seven-or eight-state ride up and down the Mississippi.

What 24-hour route, I wondered, would touch the most states?

After several hours of tinkering with trip planning software, I hit on a loop around Kentucky and Tennessee, including those two states and every state they border, with South Carolina thrown in for good measure just because it’s handy.

The mapping software said it’s possible to ride the loop in less than 24 hours. I turned that idea over in my mind for several months before deciding it was more of a flogging than I cared to endure, especially on the front end of the riding season. I also doubted I’d find any takers among my clubmates and riding associates. So I decided to make the ride over three days, using a stopwatch to track time spent riding.

I proposed the ride in the May newsletter of the Indianapolis BMW Club for the Memorial Day weekend. Happily, five intrepid members rose to the challenge: Dom LoDuca was the first to contact me, then came Michelle Thorson and Bob Knutson. Next, Archey and Theresia Shearer signed on. It turned out to be as congenial a traveling group as I’ve ever ridden with.

According to plan, we rendezvoused on Friday night at the Evansville Motel 6 in the southwest corner of Indiana. Dom and I rode down together and were joined that evening by Archey and Theresia. Bob and Michelle rolled in a little later.

Saturday morning was clear and cool enough for a jacket liner. We saddled up, paused in front of the motel office for a group photo and rolled out onto U.S. 41 a few minutes after 7 a.m. Dom was designated the official photographer of state line signs and ended up snapping all but two in the course of the trip.

Dom led across the Ohio River into Kentucky and we were on our way south on the Pennyrile Parkway. We turned west on the Western Kentucky Parkway and put the morning sun to our backs.

We’d decided to do the ride in 100-mile increments and, according to this schedule Dom led us to a BP station near Eddyville, Ky. We opted for a McDonald’s breakfast next to the gas station.

Leaving I-24 south of Paducah, we picked up U.S. 62 and then Ky. 286, a lovely little two-lane road that took us past farms and houses with neatly groomed lawns. It was a fine sunny morning and everywhere we saw people working in their yards. The road intersected with U.S. 62 at Wickliffe and we followed it north across the floodplain of the Ohio. As we mounted the bridge to re-cross the Ohio River, we could see a more imposing span about a mile to the northwest crossing the Mississippi River.

In about a minute’s time, we were across the narrow spit of flatland that constitutes the very bottom of Illinois and were soaring over the Mississippi. To our left we could see the point where the waters of America’s two greatest rivers meet and merge. A few miles into Missouri, we picked up the last 12 miles of I-57 before it terminates at I-55. Turning south onto I-55, we settled into the ride through the bootheel of Missouri. We paused for fuel and fluids near New Madrid, then followed Theresia south into Arkansas.

We exited another 100 miles down the road for fuel near West Memphis, Ark. It was lunch time and Bob led the way. We ended up at one of the great finds of the trip – a wonderful little restaurant called Ray’s World Famous Bar-B-Que. We’d parked in front of a Taco Bell, but the seductive aroma of hickory smoked barbecue lured us across the street to Ray’s. My pork barbecue sandwich, with sides of coleslaw, pinto beans and homemade potato salad, was pure culinary bliss.

Well-fed and rested, we sauntered back to our bikes and rode contentedly east across the Mississippi River into Memphis. Never having been to Memphis, I was startled to see the sun blazing off a massive 32-story stainless steel pyramid near the river front. I later learned this is the Pyramid Arena, a sports and concert venue that seats more than 20,000 and stands taller than the Statute of Liberty or the Taj Mahal.

We followed I-240 around to the southeast side of town to the U.S. 72 exit and headed into the eastern suburbs of Memphis. We sweated in the afternoon sun for about 15 minutes in a traffic jam that was the aftermath of a forklift toppling onto the pavement from the back of a truck. It felt delicious to get into the wind again after the slow crawl and we soon crossed into Mississippi. Where I had expected U.S. 72 to be a leisurely two-lane road, we found it to be a mostly complete four-lane divided highway that invited us to rip along at 75 or 80 mph. We spent the rest of the afternoon cruising across northern Mississippi and Alabama before finally drawing rein just west of Huntsville at the home of club members Chris “Cookie Monster” Biddlecombe and his wife Kathy.

Cookie guided us into his spacious garage, then flung open an equally spacious refrigerator stuffed with several brands of beer and wine. The brats were on the grill and we passed a delightful evening basking in the warm southern hospitality of these transplanted Yankees.

We awoke to a cool Sunday morning and an overcast sky. There was scattered rain in the forecast, but it looked like we might be able to outrun the rain as we rode east.

After showers, coffee and juice, we loaded our bikes and posed for a group photo before Cookie showed us a shortcut to U.S. 72 on the eastside of Huntsville. We gassed at the edge of town, said a last thanks and farewell to our host and headed northeast toward Chattanooga.

Pressing on northeast on U.S.72, we broke into sunshine and soon crossed the Tennessee border. We picked up I-24, which loops into Georgia for a couple of miles on its way to Chattanooga, so we let that suffice for our ninth state of the ride.

I found an exit west of Chattanooga that offered fuel and the breakfast spot of Michelle’s dreams, the ubiquitous Waffle House.

Later, as we studied maps over my bike in the parking lot, a young woman walked over from a nearby van and said, “Your bikes are so cool. Would you mind if I had a picture taken with you?”

Seduced by flattery, I invited her to perch on my bike and we all gathered around and smiled obligingly as her boyfriend snapped a Polaroid of the tableau.

Archey led the way back to the highway and set a brisk pace through Chattanooga to I-75 and northeast to Knoxville.

We took a fuel break at Knoxville, then rolled out east on I-40 into the Appalachians and North Carolina. Traffic was fast and heavy as we worked our way through the mountain twisties. We soon found it impossible to maintain our staggered six-bike formation and strung out in a looser aggregation spread out over about a mile.

We as we approached Asheville, we tightened our formation and exited onto I-26 to make our southward run to the South Carolina border.

The two R-bikes were ready for fuel by the time we reached South Carolina and I led the way to a station at the S.C. 11 interchange.

Archey had identified Hwy. 11 as a promising shortcut from I-26 southbound to I-85 northeastbound. It was a delightful break from the superslab. I remember passing a cemetery where every single grave was decorated with flowers and recalled how, to my parents, Memorial Day was “Decoration Day.” That was the day Mom would collect the huge peony flowers from the bushes in our yard. She put them into water-filled coffee cans and we would drive to the two rural cemeteries where her folks and Dad’s parents are buried, so as to decorate the graves.

I smiled as we passed a farm dubbed Strawberry Hill that was literally a forest of flagpoles and American flags. A few miles west of I-85, we fell in behind a couple of young women on Harleys who did their level best to pretend they didn’t notice the six BMWs following them.

We left South Carolina in our mirrors and rode east to Charlotte, picking up I-77. Somewhere in Charlotte near a street named for Billy Graham we passed a Gold Wing couple in t-shirts and shorts. The crimson sunburn on their legs and arms left little doubt that they were in for a painful evening.

The Carolinas do a wonderful job of decorating their interstates with flowers. Both states had huge patches of flowers growing in the median and at the roadside, planted all in the same colors. Every few miles we’d be greeted by a brilliant splash or crimson or almost painfully bright yellow. The colors were so vivid, each time a flowerpatch came into view, it was a startling, pleasant surprise.

The sun hung low over the western mountains when we made our last rest stop about 60 miles south of the Virginia border.

Once into Virginia, the road began to climb into the mountains again. As we ascended into the cool air, we could look to our right and see miles and miles of farmland stretching off toward the Atlantic coast.

Eight miles north of the border, we exited and rode up the moutainside to gas at a BP station and check in at the Fancy Gap Day’s Inn.

After unloading the bikes and settling into our rooms for a few minutes, we hiked a short distance down the hill to a goofy little pizza shop/gift shop with an Andy Griffith’s Mayberry theme. The centerpiece of the place was a black-and-white 1960 Ford Fairlaine police cruiser painted like the car Andy and Barney Fife used to keep order in the ‘60s sitcom. We set up at a picnic table outside and, in due time, were served piping hot pizzas that left a few of us with that dreaded “pizza burn” on the roofs of our mouths. We strolled back up to the motel and turned in early in preparation for the final day’s ride.

Archey appeared at Dom’s and my door about 6:30 a.m. with a cup of coffee to report many of our neighbors were members of a Ferrari car club, heading home from a big meet. We watched the trailered sports cars roll out as we loaded the bikes and fired the engines a few minutes after 7 a.m.

It was a gorgeous clear morning and, because of the altitude, a bit chilly. As we rode the crest of the mountains we hit patches of fog, which I quickly realized were actually little clouds. Virginia is only about 60 miles across at this point, so it was just a short time before we started looking for the West Virginia border.

We slowed for the Big Walker Mountain tunnel, a 4,220-foot long tube. A short distance on, we plunged back into darkness in the even longer 5,412-foot-long East River Mountain Tunnel. We emerged blinking in the bright West Virginia sunshine. I later learned the Virginia-West Virginia state line lies somewhere within the tunnel.

Over the years, I’ve thought I could tell a subtle difference in the terrain and topography as I passed from one state to another – a shift in the landscape that surely must have influenced the early surveyors when decided where to draw the state lines. I was reminded anew of this observation once we crossed into West Virginia: the mountainsides seemed steeper and the road twistier. Over the next several miles to Beckley, I wondered if West Virginia riders ever wear out the middle of their tires.

I was getting hungry and remembering Sunday’s Waffle House breakfast as we rode into Beckley and I started looking for an interchange with fuel and some down home eats. I found one that advertised an Omelett Shoppe, Waffle House’s alter ego and hit my right turn signal to lead our little parade to gas and breakfast.

We walked in on the heels of a major feeding frenzy: most of the tables were open, but still covered with other people’s leavings. Our blonde waitress bustled around and got us set up with clean tables and menus, all the while reminding me that the possessive form of “Y’all” is “Y’all’s.”

Back on the road, we pressed on north to Charleston where the morning sun blazed brilliantly from the golden dome of the state capitol buildling. We turned west on I-64 and found a straighter road than we’d seen this day as the mountains yielded to the lower ground of the Ohio River Valley.

At Huntington, we took Exit 6 to access the bridge over to Ohio and our 14^th state. With our group back in a tight staggered formation, I led the way across the bridge and into Ohio. We pulled over next to the “Ohio Welcomes You” sign for photos and high fives all around.

From there we followed U.S. 52 west toward Indianapolis and home.

As I rode the last few miles, I wondered if Charlie Thomas would have enjoyed our little jaunt. I think he would.

The Riders

John Flora, 53 (7/14/45), newspaper reporter, 1991 BMW K100RS

Dominick LoDuca, 56 (6/3/43), timeshare facilities representative, 1994 BMW K75RT

Bob Knutson, 29, (2/21/70), Microsoft employee, 1982 BMW R100

Michelle Thorson, 27, (12/12/72), Microsoft employee, 1974 BMW R75/5

Archey Shearer, 46, (11/26/52), Sawmill salesman, 1992 BMW K100RS

Theresia Shearer, 45, computer trainer for electric utility, 1991 BMW K75S