Hobbes

Meet Hobbes, a 9-month-old blue Merle Aussie from Connecticut who I met at the campground this morning.

Friday night

After dinner libations.

Friday afternoon

Charlie’s headlight lost its low beam at the beginning of the trip, so he decided to replace the bulb after breakfast this morning.

Unfortunately, he ran into difficulty owing to the fact that his hands (and ours too) are too big to manipulate the parts in the tiny space where the headlight bulb lives.

There was nothing to do but ride down to BMW Motorcycles of Daytona where the service department installed the bulb and charged him a modest $19 and change.

By the time the job was done, we were having lunch thoughts so I led the way to the European Cafe and Schnitzel House on A1A where I had sauerbraten,  Charlie had jagerschnitzel and Tom had meat loaf.

They wanted to go look at biker stuff in Daytona and I fancied a ride up to Flagler Beach, so we split up.

The surf was up, but I didn’t see any surfers. I did, however, find a pelican hunkered down in the grass next to a beach access stairway. I couldn’t tell if it was nesting, injured, or ill, but it let me get close enough to shoot a passable iPhone photo.

I hit the ice cream shop for refreshment, then saddled up and rode up to Palm Coast where I bought a cheap canvas chair and an even cheaper throw pillow at Walmart for my camping comfort. I’ll jettison both when I pack to leave next week.

Now I’m back at the campground clubhouse to use Wifi and recharge my iPhone. I’ll send Charlie a text message shortly to see what he wants to do with the rest of the day.

Friday morning report

We’re nicely set up at the Holiday Travel Park just off I-95 in Bunnell, Fla.

I just finished breakfast at the campground restaurant and, based on the observed ages of the locals and the bikers, it looks like a senior citizens center in here. I have a good Wifi connection, a good night’s rest and a full stomach, so I’m a happy camper.

Two impressions from yesterday’s ride:

1. I fucking hate riding through Dothan, Ala. because of the incredible number of non-synchronized stoplights. I think I’ll take the long way home and ride I-10 to Hammond, La., then cut north to Memphis and home.
2. I love my Garmin Zumo 550 GPS. About 90-some miles west of Jacksonville, I got a traffic alert telling me that I-295 – the route I usually take from I-10 to I-95 was closed. Closed?!?!?! What to do? I fretted and puzzled for awhile, then noticed a button labeled “Avoid.” I pressed it and Garmin quickly rerouted me to the downtown Jacksonville junction of 10 and 95 with no change in my estimated time of arrival at Bunnell. Unfortunately, we hit downtown Jacksonville at evening rush hour which made for a lot of stop-and-crawl riding for about a half-hour. I’ve seen lots of urban traffic like that, but Tom and Charlie – especially Tom – were noticeably less comfortable.

Once we got clear of the heavy traffic, I led us to the last fuel stop of the trip where we topped off and rode another 30 miles to the campground.

We arrived at sunset and, by the time we registered and found a suitable campsite near a port-o-let, it was dark. I figured we’d have to set up our tents by flashlight, so it was no surprise. There was a cloudless sky, so the temperature dropped quickly while we dined on pizza at a little gas station restaurant near the campgrounds.

I could see my breath by the time I crawled into my tent, happy to have a warm sleeping bag.

I awoke about 6:30, just before sunrise, and checked the Weather Channel app on my phone for the local temperature. It was a brisk 37 degrees. My watch has a thermometer function and it showed it was 45 degrees inside the tent.

I was the first of our group up and out of the tent. I told Charlie I was heading for the restaurant and he joined me about an hour later while I loaded up on coffee and recharged my iPhone.

I have no idea what we’re doing today, but I suspect it involves Flagler Beach, Daytona, and/or seafood.

Snug in my sleeping bag

It's dawn and 37 degrees here in Bunnell, Fla. and I'm very glad I brought a warm sleeping bag.
We arrived at sunset, pitched our tents and went to a nearby bistro for pizza before turning in early.
More later...

Ten years and counting

I took delivery of my 2003 BMW K1200GT ten years ago today at Revard BMW Motorcycles in Indianapolis.

Since then, it’s carried me to eight BMW MOA rallies from Burlington, Vt., to Spokane, Wash. We’ve ridden the Pacific Coast Highway through Big Sur a few times, been to the Colorado Rocky Mountains several times, Daytona Beach Bike Week once, and lots of places in between – about 67,000 miles in all.

The bike remains pretty much as I bought it with the addition of MotoLights, which I upgraded from halogen to LEDs last July, and an extra power outlet on the dashboard.

I retired the original Marsee tankbag last fall and replaced it with a Nelson Rigg bag that has a solar panel for charging iPhones and the like. I’ve also added a Garmin Zumo 550 GPS with XM Sirius satellite radio.

I had an aftermarket footpad for the rather pointy sidestand, but it sheared off while navigating the campground at the Return to Shiloh Rally a few years ago and I haven’t gotten around to re-attaching it.

I added a bracket to the underside of the luggage rack to attach a passenger backrest, but I can’t remember the last time I used it, since Maria hasn’t ridden pillion with me in years.

I also bought a pair of oversized saddlebags for longer rides, but packed tightly enough for the last couple of rallies that I was able to go with the color-matched stock bags.

The GT has been a splendid motorcycle, but it has never felt as comfortable as my old 1991 K100RS or Maria’s ‘94 K75S. That said, I look forward to many more miles in the saddle before I contemplate a new ride.

Long, cold day

Prattville, Ala. - Waking up at the Quality Inn after 9 hours of deep sleep from an exhausting day of cold riding.
My new Gerbings controller blew a fuse and knocked out the GPS. I replaced the fuse and rode without heat in temps in the 30s and low 40s.
Got separated from Tom and Charlie in Birmingham traffic but later found them at a rest area about 30 miles south.
Dinner and beers at Ruby Tuesday. A FaceTime chat with Maria and off to bed around 8 pm.

Ready and waiting

The bike is loaded and I'm sitting here with a cup of coffee wondering why I got up so early.
I set an alarm for 7 am but I was wide awake at 6, so I hit the shower and started getting ready. Now I have almost an hour to burn before I leave for the fuel rendezvous.
I reviewed my departure day blog entry from 4 years ago and noticed it was 10 degrees colder when I left for Daytona on March 3, 2009 so I guess I should stop whining. I'm better equipped now and I'm riding with friends.

Poised for takeoff

The bike is packed and loaded and ready for a frosty 8:30 a.m. departure.

I’m meeting Charlie and Tom at a gas station in Jonesboro where we’ll top off our tanks and hit the road for Daytona Beach Bike Week.

I don’t relish riding out of here in the low 30s and if I had my druthers, I’d wait a couple of days and leave in the 50s, but we have a schedule to keep, so I’ll dial up the Gerbings heated jacket liner and gloves, switch on my heated seat and just deal with it.

We expect to make it to Birmingham or Montgomery, Ala. by tomorrow evening and ride on to Daytona – Bunnell, actually – Thursday.

In the meantime, Maria has company staying with her, is heavily armed and protected by a particularly powerful and fierce bulldog.

St. Anthony

There are a lot of things I love about being Catholic and the help of St. Anthony is one of them.

St. Anthony of Padua is the patron saint of things that are lost. I have found that an appeal to St. Anthony to help me find some lost or misplaced article pretty much never fails.

It happened again this afternoon when I was in the process of tearing apart my dresser drawers for a couple of items.

I asked St. Anthony for a little help and less than a minute later the items turned up in a place I was sure they couldn’t be.

I’d still be looking if I’d stayed a Presbyterian.

Organized, at last!

Every kitchen I’ve ever seen has a “junk drawer,” a drawer where odds and ends accumulate, usually in a jumble that makes it a challenge to find any particular item and a hassle to put big things – like rolls of aluminum foil – back in so you can close the drawer.

We visited Lowe’s last night in search of a solution and came home with a box of two spring-loaded bamboo dividers for $14.98 + the exorbitant Arkansas sales tax.

The results are impressive – to me, at least. A place for everything and everything in its place.

How long we can maintain this order before things descend into chaos remains to be seen, but we really like the way it looks and Maria wants to try the same treatment on the miscellaneous kitchen tool drawer – the one that houses ladles, whisks, spatulas, meat thermometers, cap snafflers, the famous Spouto, ice cream scoops, and myriad other gadgets.

I can’t imagine that stuff getting organized, but I’m prepared to be surprised.

We marched forth on March 4, 1985

Twenty-eight years ago today, The Indianapolis News’ zoned suburban editions went live.

I was chief of the Metro North Bureau, covering Boone and Hamilton counties from a circulation office in Carmel.

Jerry Graff covered Johnson and Shelby counties and Mike Ellis covered Hendricks and Morgan counties. For some now-forgotten reason, the decision was made to omit Hancock County to the east of Indianapolis from the Metro project.

The three of us had been working in our new bureaus for a month, building a backlog of feature stories and getting the lay of the land since early February.

We were equipped with Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop computers – the first practical laptops in the history of computing.

The Model 100 had a built-in 300 baud modem that could transmit over telephone lines. The eight-line LCD screen made writing and editing a bit of a challenge. Incredible as it seems by today’s memory standards, the 24K of RAM was plenty for our day-to-day writing needs. You could also connect a cassette tape recorder to the Model 100 and transfer files to the tape for later retrieval. The Model 100 ran on four AA batteries with an optional AC converter power source.

As primitive as it was, the Model 100 intimidated the hell out of reporters from smaller papers who were still stuck taking notes with pen and notebook. I loved it because I could get quotes down with greater accuracy and speed.

(I still have my Model 100. A friend rescued it from the dumpster when the office was being cleaned out after my retirement.)

I volunteered for a bureau job because inept management had poisoned the atmosphere at The News City Room in downtown Indianapolis and I was eager to have 15 miles between me and the craziness.

Managing Editor Frank Caperton conceived the plan for zoned suburban editions, but he worried we might have trouble filling the space allotted to us. One of his solutions was to publish school lunch menus. I thought it was a desperately stupid idea when there was an abundance of real news to be reported and so did my colleagues. We never ran a single school lunch menu.

But even with the new product, The News remained the unwanted, neglected sibling of the morning paper, The Indianapolis Star.

In an effort to introduce the new zoned editions, it was decided to sample the paper for a couple of weeks – deliver it to homes of non-subscribers to give them a chance to see our coverage of their areas.

The obvious way to accomplish this would have been to give News carriers extra copies with instructions to deliver them to homes of non-subscribers along their routes.

But there apparently was concern on The Star side of the building that we might take some of their subscribers, so the company went to the extra expense of creating a master list of people who didn’t subscribe to either paper as targets for sampling.

And rather than use News carriers, the geniuses in circulation chose to hire temporary carriers to deliver the sample papers.

But the unmotivated minimum wage temps had trouble getting the papers where they were supposed to go.

I realized this when I found several bundles of News sample papers in the dumpster outside my Carmel office.

I reported it, but nothing came of it and the sampling campaign was a failure.

I was still startling people in Boone and Hamilton counties 10 years later with the revelation that The News had a special edition just for their counties.

Despite the lack of support from circulation, running a suburban bureau was great fun, especially after I built up a cadre of stringers – part time correspondents who helped to cover governmental meetings and wrote the occasional feature story.

I ran the Metro North Bureau until October, 1995 when The News was merged with The Star and I got folded into a larger bureau covering Boone, Hamilton and Madison counties from Carmel.

And the fun began in earnest 28 years ago today.

I frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

Our tenant paid his rent on time.
Letting him use PayPal was a stroke of genius.

Hey, Wayne!

Here’s my longtime BMW friend and newly minted BMW MOA Ambassador Wayne Garrison at a gas stop along I-70 a few miles east of Topeka, Kans.

We rode from Breckenridge, Colo. to Independence, Mo. that day (and night) in 1995. We left the BMW Club chalet in Breckenridge around mid-morning because it takes awhile for the sun to warm things up at that altitude and we still made it a 700-mile day.

We made it home the next day – a relatively easy 500-mile ride.

My home county sheriff and combat pistol instructor

Ken Campbell, sheriff of Boone County, Indiana, demonstrates why the ban on high-capacity magazines does nothing to compromise the firepower of bad guys and dispels the fantasy that bystanders can jump a shooter when he stops firing to reload.

Maria and I took Ken’s excellent pistol course when we lived in Indiana. Ken is also an instructor at Gunsite Academy, the premiere combat pistol training facility, in Paulden, Ariz.

Police Log Comics

The Carmel (Calif.) Pine Cone weekly newspaper carries a police log with a twist – comics illustrating one of the police reports.

You can read this week’s issue of the Pine Cone here and you can see previous police log comics at policelogcomics.com

Hanging with Happy Jack

Waiting for dinner.

Queen of the Lightning Bugs

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

Mark Twain

A woman I dated back in the 1990s has become a blogger. She and her husband live in Florida and she writes about their life in their seaside condo and their time away from home in their RV. She’s a retired teacher, but you wouldn’t know it from her writing. Mark Twain would call her the Queen of the Lightning Bugs.

Mission accomplished

I borrowed Maria’s Lexus key, rather than use channel lock pliers to operate the disembodied key shaft that was once my key, and drove to Lexus of Memphis where I had a new master key cut.

It comes with a one-year warranty, which tells you that they expect it to break eventually.

Anyhow, I now have a fully functional car key again.

Lexus stuff

You’d think a supposedly classy company like Lexus could make a sturdy ignition key, wouldn’t you?

I’ve gone through two key shells since I got this car in December, 2011. The problem is that the shell, which houses a remote control that locks and unlocks the doors, lowers the windows, and raises and lowers the tailgate isn’t strong enough to handle the torque forces involved in starting and stopping the engine.

My key shell started disassembling itself last night when I drove to Firehouse Subs to get dinner for myself and Maria.

And it came completely apart this evening when I prepared to drive up to the Paragould Papa John’s Pizza to collect the free pizza I earned.

The key shaft broke out of the shell when I tried to turn the key clockwise to start the car, leaving the shaft in the ignition. Fortunately, I had a set of channel locks handy, so I was able to start the car and later stop it and extract the key shaft.

This is, of course, an unacceptable state of affairs, so I’ll drive to Lexus of Memphis tomorrow to have a new key assembled. (It’s an exotic key that can’t be replicated at the corner hardware store or the local Toyota dealer – Lexus being a Toyota product.)

The one bright spot was the discovery that Siri, the artificial concierge who lives in my iPhone is smart enough to know what to do when I tell her, “Call Lexus of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee” when I didn’t have Lexus of Memphis in my Contacts list. She went out and found the number and placed the call.

How cool is that?