On the road again

I'm off this morning to Cape Girardeau, Mo., and GrassRoots BMW Motorcycles to get a new battery for my '03 K1200GT. It's one of the new (in 2003, anyway) gel batteries and has performed well for the past five years. However, when I tried to start the bike Sunday afternoon after about four weeks of idleness, the battery was too weak to fire the engine. I put it on the trickle charger and within a day it was registering as fully charged. Nevertheless, I know that batteries can fail at inopportune times and I'm loathe to head for the West in a couple of weeks with a five-year-old battery that may or may not be good.
It's 145 miles to GrassRoots, so I'd better get moving.

BMW RAMS club meeting

We went to a BMW club meeting yesterday in Cape Girardeau, Mo.
This being a regional club, the monthly meetings are scattered over a wide area. The membership center of gravity is around Memphis, but this being the Mid-South with its extended riding season, there's no reluctance to ride 100 miles or more to a meeting.
Unfortunately, yesterday's forecast was for severe weather in the afternoon, so we chose to drive rather than ride. The destination was Grass Roots BMW Motorcycles, which is a BMW-only dealership and a damned good one at that. They are very supportive of the BMW Riders Association of the Mid-South. They served up a delicious pork steak lunch, handed out a bunch of door prizes and gave us 10% off anything we cared to buy. I found a nice summer-weight Fieldsheeer High Flow Mesh jacket for $99.95 and Maria took a shine to a cap.
The round trip mileage made it an investment of about $29 in gas, compared to about $16 worth of gas if we had ridden my K1200GT. But our read on the forecast turned out to be right and we would have done the last hour or so in rainsuits.
Now I have to go grocery shopping at Sam's Club and Kroger, so I'll leave you with a scan of the club patch.