How I spent my summer vacation - Part II

I left Chateau Balought high in the Colorado Rocky Mountains a little after 7 a.m. Thursday with Dom LoDuca and headed down Colo. 9 to Fairplay.
Dom turned left toward Denver and I turned right toward Colorado Springs as we headed to our respective homes.
Dom's goal was to ride to Marysville, Kans. on U.S. 36 and mine was to reach a Motel 6 at Topeka sometime around nightfall.
I picked up Colo. 94 eastbound from Colorado Springs and headed out across the wide- open, mostly empty spaces of eastern Colorado. The road connects with U.S. 40 and eventually would take me to I-70 at Oakley, Kans.
But it didn't work out that way.
As I slowed for a construction zone about 6 miles west of Kit Carson - some 113 miles east of Colorado Springs - I heard a disturbing noise from my rear tire and felt it go mushy. When I came to a halt near the flagger girl, I tried to put the bike onto the sidestand to inspect the back tire. I found the back of the bike was suddenly so low that I could barely deploy the sidestand. Oops.
When I finally did get it stabilized and dismounted, I found my back tire completely flat and too hot to touch.
So there I was, in the precise middle of nowhere - Kit Carson was the nearest town and it has an impressive population of about 300 and no significant services - under a blazing summer sun with the temperature well into the 90s.
I dug out my tire plugging kit and, with the help of CDOT worker Tom Richards, found the puncture site. I roughed up the puncture location and jammed a rubber cement-smeared plug into the tire. I'd done it a couple of times before on a practice tire at an Indianapolis BMW Club meeting, but never for real. In the meantime, Richards hunted up a tank of compressed air, so I didn't have to use any of my CO2 bottles.
I didn't feel confident that the plug would get me home to Arkansas, so my next choice was to find a new rear tire. I didn't have a way to shop for a tire at non-BMW dealerships, and my BMW dealer choices were BMW of Colorado Springs (113 miles west) or Engel BMW in Kansas City, Mo. (more than 500 miles east).
So I concluded the wisest course of action was to use my BMW/Cross Country Motor Club membership that I renewed earlier this year.
I got a cell phone call through to Cross Country and they dispatched a recovery vehicle from Colorado Springs, telling me it would be about 2½ hours. This was at 12:09 p.m.
Tom Richards escorted me through the construction zone to the Trading Post Restaurant in Kit Carson where I called Maria and reported my dilemma. She called BMW of Colorado Springs and confirmed that they had a rear tire to fit my bike and I settled in with a grilled cheese sandwich, a bag of chips and several glasses of iced tea.
Jeff (can't recall his last name) arrived about 3:20 p.m., having been held up by the construction zone west of town. He slid the flat bed of his truck to the rear and tilted it toward the ground while I rode the bike up the inclined surface until I had both tires aboard. Then he leveled it, moved it back forward and I rode to the front of the bed where he strapped the bike into place.
I told Jeff I needed to get to the BMW shop before they closed at 6 p.m. and he hauled ass across the lone prairie at 70-75 mph while I watched the bike nervously in the side-view mirror.
I called Jim Basset at the BMW shop as we approached town and told him we'd be a little late and hoped he could wait for us. He did.
The techs had all gone home, but Jim did the preliminary paperwork and I signed off on a $404 recovery truck bill that Cross Country is presumably paying. Then I rode to the nearby Travelodge where I booked an $84 room, had a quick Wendy's dinner and hit the sack.
I was at the BMW shop 15 minutes ahead of their regular opening time of 9 a.m. and Service Manager Larry Anderson had my bike on a lift by 9:10.
Larry is a year younger than I, was raised in Chicago and was delighted to learn that I live in/near Jonesboro because that's where he spent summers with his grandparents when he was growing up. Since I grew up in northwestern Indiana, Chicago radio station WLS provided the soundtrack for both of our pre-teen and teenage years. It was kind of like finding a long-lost brother as we batted back and forth names of WLS personalities and features, interspersed with his memories of Jonesboro.
I finally got back onto the road with two new Metzelers (Jim opined that my front tire was cupping and needed to be replaced) about 10:30 a.m.
I gassed at a Diamond Shamrock station on the east side of Colorado Springs and took U.S. 24 up to I-70 at Limon. From there it was an easy drone east to Goodland, Kans. where I stopped for a Wendy's lunch and discovered that my driver's license had vanished from my wallet. I'm reasonably sure I dropped it at my previous gas stop, but there was no point in going back for it. I resolved to ride conservatively the rest of the way home, so as not to attract police attention.
I rolled into the Topeka Wanamaker Road Motel 6 parking lot at 9:15 p.m. local time and noticed three sheriff's department cars in the lot. The desk clerk said they were there to handle a problem with a guest, which made me wonder if maybe I should have picked another motel.
I stripped the bike of everything valuable - GPS, tankbag, saddlebags, etc. - parked it in view of the office, put the cable lock onto the front wheel and hoped for the best.
I was awakened about 5:20 a.m. by the sound of Mexicans carrying on a very loud conversation right outside my door. I dressed, loaded the bike and thumbed the starter button at 6:06 a.m., riding into the hot steamy Kansas dawn.
Breakfast was at the Hardee's at the Topeka service plaza on the Kansas Turnpike.
The rest of the day was mostly a blur as the GPS led me around the west and south sides of Kansas City and southeast across Missouri.
I dropped my sidestand in my driveway about 3:15 p.m., gave my wife a kiss and slammed down two Beck's Dark beers to celebrate a mission accomplished.

Charlie, doing what a dog does

This is Charlie the basset hound who tagged along with his owner James Jantti, of North Kansas City, Mo. to come to the rally.

Devil's Tower

No UFOs to be seen.
We got slammed with heavy rain, lots of lightning and thunder and violent gusting winds about 12:30 a.m. today.
I don't mind a little storm, but the possibility of hail is a little daunting when you have nothing to protect yourself with but a couple of layers of ripstop nylon. I found myself imagining baseball-size hailstones and wondering how to cope. My best solution was to put on my helmet and get under my Thermarest air mattress. But no hail developed, so it wasn't necessary.
The storm dragged on for about 3 1/2 hours before it blew itself out.
I'd had the foresight to park my bike on a concrete slab in the lee of a big steel electrical box, so it came through unscathed.
Dave Stech wasn't so lucky. His was one of several bikes in the camping area blown over and it cost him a mirror and a saddlebag mount.
My Galyan's/Eureka tent performed beautifully. Evertyhing stayed dry and it didn't wick any water in from the fly.
I got a breakfast sandwich and coffee from a food trailer in the camping area and, after dumping my images at the 8:45 a.m. photographers' meeting, hung out at the campground until Wayne Garrison and Peggy Rose finished their stint as shuttle drivers.
Then Wayne, Peggy, Michigan Mike and I headed for Devil's Tower, stopping for gas at Moorcroft and at a cafe where we all had breakfast - them for the first time and me for the second (I considered it lunch). Then it was up the road to Devil's Tower where I shot several images of BMW MOA rally attendees taking in the scenery.
We returned to the Moorcroft cafe for fried ice cream, then rode back to the campground.
Wayne and Peggy took off to teach their second country line dancing seminar and I read the local paper and drank beer with my fellow Indianapolis BMW Club campers.
Dinner was a cheeseburger and iced tea at the food trailer.
I'm in the cyber cafe to update the blog, then to the ATM and off to the Beer Garden for some socializing and libations.
It looked like we were going to get a bit of rain a few minutes ago, but it blew over and only dropped a few sprinkles. The forecast is for possible storms this evening, yielding to clear skies after midnight.

Travel log time

With my departure for Wyoming only four days away, my thoughts are turning to gathering all of the stuff I want to pack.

That's why I printed a couple of weeks worth of trip log sheets from my For Two Wheels Only software. I've been using FTWO to track my motorcycle travel, maintenance and general operating expenses since 2001 and never leave for an extended trip without a sheaf of log sheets in my tankbag.

Here's the first log page for my ride to Colorado last August showing I left home at 5:48 a.m. and spent the first night on the road at the U.S. Center Motel in Smith Center, Kans., with fuel stops at Crawfordsville, Ind., Monticello and Barry, Ill., Charleston, Mo., and Seneca and Smith Center in Kansas.

The next day saw gas stops at St. Frances, Kans., and Byers and Silverthorne in Colorado, arriving at Tim and Linda Balough's place at 4:20 p.m.

And once again, it shows my gas mileage improves with altitude: 38.22 mpg at Smith Center, Kans., 39.27 mpg at St. Francis, Kans., 43.53 mpg at Byers, Colo., and 45 mpg at Silverthorne, Colo.

Having the right of way means nothing

This came to me from a member of the BMW Riders Association of the Mid-South.
Judging by the voices, it sounds like it was made in China.

I can see for miles

Reading the BMW Owners News over lunch, I noted the 25th anniversary of the water-cooled K bike will be celebrated at the BMW MOA rally this month.
The author of the article claimed some expertise on K bikes with 80,000 K bike miles in his mirrors.
That started me wondering about my K bike mileage. Turns out that I have 200,412 K bike miles on my '91 K100RS, '03 K1200GT and Maria's '94 K75S. Add totals from my '81 R100RS and my '71 R50/5 and I have an estimated 310,412 BMW motorcycle miles.
But the same issue of the BMW Owners News puts my miles in perspective with a story on Mac McHugh, who has more than 1 million BMW miles.

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.

Chasing the wild goose

I'm grabbing a quick Wendy's lunch at a Pilot truck stop on I-40 just west of the Mississippi and Memphis after a fruitless ride to Best Buy.
I was told yesterday that I could pick up the old hard drive from my laptop, only to discover today that the Geek Squad kid was mistaken. The drive remains at the Sony Service Center. I can pay to have the data retrieved, but I can't have the drive back.
Oh, well. It's a nice day for a ride.

Tootle the horn trumpet

Good advice from a 1935 Japanese brochure, in English, explaining the rules of the road to foreign drivers:
"At the rise of the hand of a policeman, stop rapidly. Do not pass him by or otherwise disrespect him. When a passenger of the foot hove in sight, tootle the horn trumpet to him melodiously at first. If he still obstacles your passage, tootle him with vigor and express by word of mouth the warning, 'Hi, Hi!' Beware the wandering horse that he shall not take fright as you pass him. Do not explode the exhaust box at him. Go soothingly by or stop by the roadside till he pass away. Give space to the festive dog that makes sport in the roadway. Avoid entanglements of dog with your wheel-spokes. So soothingly on the grease-mud, as there lurk the skid demon. Press the brake of the foot as you roll round the corners to save the collapse and tie up."

A public service announcement

Motorcycle, scooter and moped sales are up sharply this spring as drivers look for a way to ease the pain of ever-increasing gas prices.
While that's good news for the motorcycle industry, there is a downside.
It also means more untrained and unskilled riders on the streets and highways.
The best way to learn the skills and strategies of two-wheeled survival is to take the Motorcycle Safety Foundation's rider courses. The MSF's RiderCourse for motorcyclists is available nationwide and more than 4.3 million riders have graduated from it. There is also a MSF ScooterSchool program, but it's only available in nine cities so far.
Some state-level MSF programs are already operating at capacity. Indiana's training sites have waiting lists. Other states, like Arkansas, lack adequate state funding.
It's clear that the need for rider education is barely being met and will become even more critical as more and more untrained riders flood the market.
And the sad fact is that an untrained rider is an accident waiting to happen.
If you - or someone you know - are thinking about two-wheeled alternatives to your gas-guzzling car, please go to http://www.msf-usa.org/ find the nearest RiderCourse training site and sign up. The MSF provides the training bikes. It helps if you have a helmet, but they have loaners, so all you have to do is show up.
If you're sticking to four wheels, go to http://www.forcardrivers.com/, the new MSF site with vital information for car drivers on how to look out for motorcyclists.

Sounds great

My quest for a good motorcycle sound management system began when I started touring.
Back in the early 1980s, I stuck a couple of earbud earphones under my fullface Bell helmet so I could use my Sony Walkman as I rode my first BMW – a ’71 R50/5 – to Michigan.
It was more of a distraction than entertainment, because the earbuds wouldn’t stay put and I had to crank the volume up too much to get over the sound of the wind noise.
When I made my first ride to the West Coast in 1986, companions Tim and Linda Balough introduced me to foam earplugs. During a break somewhere west of Kansas City on our first full day on the road, I reached into my jacket pocket and fished out the plugs Tim had given me earlier. Twenty miles later, I was a believer. I could hear everything I needed to hear, but just at a reduced, less alarming volume.
The stress of wind noise muted, I quickly discovered I could ride more miles a day and not feel as fried when I reached my destination.
Over the years, I experimented with a variety of earplugs. I found the EAR brand a bit too large for my ear canals and in later years favored the Hearos brand because their smooth finish made for easy insertion.
After swimming at the thermal pool at Glenwood Springs, Colo., I discovered earplugs go in easier and seal better if they or your ear canals are wet, so I got into the habit of giving myself a stereophonic wet Willie every time I put in my plugs.
But I still longed for music to fill those long stretches of superslab I traverse every summer in the West.
I bought a set of Bass Monster helmet speakers from Collett Industries Ltd. in Canada and installed them in my helmet. Added to the wind noise, the Bass Monsters were just too much for my un-plugged ears. But I also found that my Walkman’s output couldn’t drive the speakers hard enough to be heard clearly over earplugs. I’d ride down the interstate trying to hear music that, given the muting of earplugs, was slightly more perceptible than a thought.
Then, I discovered the Boostaroo – a $20 stereo amplifier about the size and shape of a Bic lighter – that kicked the Walkman’s output up to a usable level and also had multiple input jacks, letting me add my radar detector to the mix.
At last, I had a system that seemed to work.
The problem, however, was that I’d just changed the mix – the ratio of wind noise to music – and I was still bombarding my eardrums with too much sound. Our ears, after all, are designed to spend most of their time picking up subtle stuff like the gurgling of a stream or the rustle of leaves in a forest. I’d already noticed a touch of tinnitis – chronic high-pitched ringing of the ears – and worried I might end up with serious hearing loss if I didn’t find a better solution.
A few years ago, I noticed Bob Weis, an Orlando, Fla., audiologist at one of the BMW MOA national rallies. Bob makes custom-fitted earplugs, using an injection molding process that produces a plug that is a perfect fit for each customer’s outer ear and ear canal structure. But what really caught my eye was the option of installing stereo speakers in the custom plugs.
After missing connections with Bob at a couple of rallies, I finally caught up with him at the BMW RA rally in the summer of 2003 at Red River, N.M. For $20, he made me a temporary pair of color-coded (red for right, blue for left) plugs with the understanding that I could send them back to him after using them for a month or so and he would cast permanent medical grade silicone plugs, with or without the stereo speakers.
Later that day, I discovered Marilyn Navia, an audiologist from Miami, who was doing the custom formed stereo plugs – called in-ear monitors – on site.
With another three weeks on the road in front of me, I was eager to get the finished product, so I plunked down $170 worth of VISA plastic and Marilyn shot my ears full of colored silicone. I picked up the finished product later that day, along with a storage case called a Hearing Aid Saver – a cylindrical plastic case about 3” tall and 2” wide with silica gel in the bottom to protect the monitors from moisture damage.
Tim Balough had just had MotoLites installed on his F650, so we went for a ride to try out our new purchases. We did a 90-mile loop east and south to Taos and back and I was immediately amazed and impressed.
Without music, these are the best earplugs I’ve ever used. The noise attenuation is somewhere in the 25 decibel range – not quite as much as the -30 db Hearos, but still quite effective because of the perfect fit.
When I plugged in to my Sony Walkman MiniDisc player/recorder, I was all smiles. On the way across Kansas a few days earlier, I’d been struggling to hear clearly over the wind noise and Hearos with the volume cranked all the way up and Boostaroo-ized. Now, I was actually turning the volume down. Way down, like below half-volume, and still hearing the music perfectly. It is, without question, the best sound I’d ever heard on a motorcycle.
(The MiniDisc player/recorder has since given way to an XM satellite radio receiver and an iPod.)
I can't help comparing this minimalist arrangement with the full zoot stereo system on big touring bikes, notably the BMW K1200LT with its 6-CD player/changer hogging luggage space in the right saddlebag. I have to think I’m getting better sound and better hearing protection without the added bulk and weight of hauling the equivalent of a home stereo system around on my motorcycle. And, it’s an investment – under $500 total - that stays with me if and when the bike is sold or retired.
I gave the system a good workout the next couple of days, riding from Red River down through Albuquerque and across western New Mexico and Arizona to Kingman the first day and then across the California desert and Central Valley to Gilroy the next.
I found my breaks were shorter and less frequent and, quite unexpectedly, noticed my seat stayed much more comfortably much longer. Music as an anesthetic for the posterior? Maybe I could get a grant for some serious study of this phenomenon.

Motorcycle record-keeping software

Product review in the March 2001 issue of Motorcycle Tour & Cruiser page 85

By John M. Flora

If you're anything like me, your motorcycle records are chaotic at best. When my bike was new, I tried to keep orderly accounts and stuffed the paperwork from services into a file folder. But over the years, I got sloppy. The paperwork, often as not, landed on my desk. There it sat, until it got in the way one too many times and was pitched.

That left me guessing how many miles I rolled my last set of tires. Could it really be 7,000 miles since my last oil change? How long ago did I install that aftermarket shock absorber? Wouldn't it be nice to have that information a mouse click away?

That's what David Portugal thought when he created For Two Wheels Only Motorcycle Management Software. A 40 year-old Gold Wing rider from suburban Chicago, this computer consultant and software writer created the FTWO program to fill his own needs. Last year, he logged over 28,000 miles, which included a tip to Alaska and the Arctic Circle.

David's program, which comes on a CD-ROM and runs on the Windows platform, lets you track every conceivable detail about your bike or bikes. The idea is to save money and time spent tracking maintenance records, accessories purchased, trips, events attended, and more.

The maintenance section lets you record all the parts and labor data from dealer services. There's a folder for tire information that calculates the cost per mile of your tires. (The Dunlop I just retired from the front wheel of my '91 BMW K100RS went 7,940 miles at a cost of 2.1 cents per mile.) The Insurance folder gives you a way to access details of your policy quickly and track rate changes.

Perhaps my favorite is the Trips/Events folder, where I can create a daily diary - complete with a photo for each day of the journey, a "notes" field for a running account of the tour, and data fields for mileage, tolls, food, lodging, recreation, and so on. This folder includes a trip/event summary that looks at the daily diary entries and compiles totals for the entire trip, including the cost per mile and per day.

If there's a downside, it's that you have to keep a thorough log as you go. For the Fuel folder, that means jotting down your exact odometer reading (required by the program), the amount of gas, and the cost of each fill-up. You also can record the name and location of the station, the octane, and how you paid. The good news is that the program helps you get into the habit by providing printable forms for the data, which you can stuff into a pocket or tank bag.

You also can print out detailed reports of all of the bike data you amass over time. And, the name notwithstanding, there's nothing stopping you from using FTWO to keep records on your four-wheeled and other vehicles as well.

David says that motorcyclists like the program for lots of different reasons. But his largest constituencies are folks who customize and/or restore motorcycles and want to track part sources and prices. And, of course, touring riders like me who want to record their trips and keep meticulous maintenance records.

The software installation went smoothly on my Win98-equipped PC. And even inexperienced computer users should get up to speed quickly on this straightforward program.

When I first clicked through the folders and saw the level of record keeping it entails, I thought it was a bit (well, maybe a lot) obsessive. But that was last night.

Tonight, I can't wait to finish this review so I can get back to reconstructing my vacation expenses from my last ride to the Coast in the Trips/Events folder.

May 28, 2008: As a footnote, I'm still using FTWO to maintain my motorcycle records seven years and another bike later. And I still love it.
You can get a 10-day free trial copy of FTWO from David's website.

More "tired" than I realized

I was poised to call Grass Roots BMW Motorcycles in Cape Girardeau, Mo., this morning to book service time for a new rear tire and a check of engine/transmission seals on my BMW K1200GT in anticipation of an active 2008 riding season.
But just to be sure, I went down to the garage and checked the tread depth on my Metzeler M6 Roadtec back tire.
To my astonishment, it was within safe tolerances. I say astonishment because my records indicate that tire was installed May 23, 2006 by Twin Cities BMW in Savoy, Ill., a suburb of Champaign-Urbana. That means the tire has rolled more than 10,400 miles. That may not sound like much in a world where radial tires on cars routinely go 40-50-60,000 miles, but 10k is a lot of miles on a motorcycle tire.
Why? Motorcycle tires have to work harder because bikes lean where cars don't. A motorcycle tire has to work in more dimensions than a car tire and that generates heat and heat is what kills tires.
So, assuming the seals aren't seeping substantially worse than in '06, I can put some more miles on the back tire before replacing it and dealing with the seal issue.
The front tire was put on last Aug. 38 by Foothills BMW in Denver and only has about 3,000 miles on it, so I'm good to go.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I just returned from lunch with Maria and, with her help, puzzled out why my rear tire has so much tread.
"Didn't you have an extra tire set aside?" she asked.
Of course! That's it!
In the final days of Revard BMW Motorcycles in Indianapolis, Dec. 14, 2004 to be exact, I bought a rear tire at dealer cost and stashed it in the garage until I needed it.
I keep (almost) all of my motorcycle records on For Two Wheels Only, a motorcycle-specific computer program, and neglected to log the fact that I had Grumpy, my Thorntown neighborhood bike mechanic, mount that tire last Aug. 7. So it only has about 5,000 miles on it instead of the 10,400 I calculated earlier. And I also recall that Grumpy didn't notice any problem with leaking seals last August.
So the mystery is solved and my seal anxiety is assuaged.

Avoiding Kroger

I'm avoiding Supermarket Hell.
Maria has mercifully excused me from shuffling up and down the aisles at Kroger, so I'm hanging out next door at the bookstore and listening to a Leo Laporte podcast.
No big Memorial Day plans - certainly not on the order of what I did about 10 years ago when I led a 14-state motorcycle ride with five Indianapolis BMW Club friends.
We started Saturday morning and did a lap around Kentucky and Tennessee.
The sequence was:
Indiana
Kentucky
Illinois
Missouri
Arkansas
Tennessee
Missippi
Alabama
Overnight at Huntsville
Georgia
North Carolina
South Carolina
Virginia
Overnight in northern Virginia
West Virginia
Ohio
We put our tires in all of these states in about 21 hours of riding.
Later, we figured we could have added Pennsylvania and still do it in under 24 hours.

The picture that won't die

Twenty-two years later, this picture just won't go away, Tim.
This is Tim Balough, borrowing some gas from wife Linda's R100CS, to get his K100RS to the next gas station.
We were on our way home from the 1986 BMW MOA Rally in Monterey, Calif., and Tim had just led us through Salt Lake City. His gas gauge had fried out and he was using his odometer to estimate his fuel level. Bad idea.
Linda and I had been eyeing gas stations at several exits, wondering if Tim would pull off. We were using helmet-to-helmet commnicators at the time and finally Linda called to Tim, "When are you planning to stop for gas?"
"Right about now," said Tim, as he rolled to the berm, out of gas.
For the record, we made it to the next gas station and passed a pleasant evening in Vernal, Utah, home to a whole bunch of anatomically incorrect concrete dinosaurs.

Stuff from the dresser drawer

I dumped the contents of my top dresser drawer - where I have accumulated decades worth of odds and ends - into a box when we were packing for our move from Indiana to Arkansas last fall.
I opened the box over the weekend to see if there was anything there that I might find useful. Not much, really, but a lot of interesting things and memory triggers poured out.
Like this photo.
This is me with my first serious BMW motorcycle - a 1981 R100RS - in the summer of 1986. It was shot in the back yard of our home at 5009 N. College Avenue in Indianapolis. I think my son Steve shot it.
I'm wearing a gray Brown Riding Suit that I bought for the July ride to the BMW MOA national rally at Laguna Seca Racecourse near Monterey, Calif. By today's armored textiles standards, it was pretty flimsy and I'm damned lucky I didn't need it for crash protection. But it was reasonably comfortable through a wide temperature range.
I was the second owner of the graphite gray R100RS and it had about 17,000 miles on the odometer when I bought it from Cycle Werks in the late summer of 1985. It had more than 80,000 miles on the odometer when I sold it in late 1991.
The stockade fence in the background is long gone. Steve and I tore it town with the considerable help of Steve's friend Abe Benrubi. You may know him as Ben Tomasson on ABC-TV's "Men in Trees." He was also a regular cast member in the early years of "ER" and has been in a bunch of movies and commercials.
Here's a photo of Abe from later in 1986 when he played Charlemagne to Steve's Pippin in the Broad Ripple High School production of the musical "Pippin."
Broad Ripple, you may recall, is also the alma mater of David Letterman and Jane Pauley.
I also came across this photo booth picture of Dr. Paul Mark Wadleigh, a professor of communication at Washington State University in Pullman, Wash.
Mark is a longtime friend from our days in the Transcendental Meditation program. He helped me negotiate some tricky emotional territory during my divorce in the early 1990s.
This photo is dated Jan. 1, 1980 and was shot in a drugstore in Seattle.
Now that he has his Ph.D., Mark is much more serious.
I also found my old I.D. badge from the mid-1980s at The Indianapolis News.
When I started my career at The News in February, 1967, nobody needed an I.D. badge and people could walk into the newsroom without any real interference from the security guards. To my knowledge, there was never a single incident of a visitor attacking anyone or causing trouble.
Nevertheless, somebody sold the company on the idea that we were in grave peril and needed to be shielded from our readers and the people about whom we wrote. The last time I was in what used to be known as the Star-News Building, I had to be escorted up to the second floor newsroom by a security guard.
We all thought it was somewhere between silly and paranoid to impose such security measures at the time. I still do.

Riding to Chili's

Maria had to work at the paper for awhile yesterday, so I fired up the John Deere and mowed the lawn.
With some daylight left, we decided to take the K1200GT out for a ride. We followed the Crowley's Ridge Parkway up to Paragould for a light dinner at Chili's.
No beer, thanks - we're riding.
Unsweet iced tea.
Around here you have to specify or they might bring you iced tea that's heavily laced with sugar.

Superman's hometown in downstate Illinois

With the weekend upon us, what better time to reprise a weekend ride story that I did about 10 years ago for Motorcycle Tour & Cruiser?

It was the weekend and I wanted to go for a ride.

Then it hit me.

What better place could there be for a mild-mannered reporter for a large metropolitan daily newspaper like me to go than Metropolis?

That's Metropolis, as in Illinois.

Metropolis, as we all know, is the mythical home of Superman and the folks there play their comic book connection to the hilt. I'd read about Metropolis' Superman fixation in Roadside America – a fabulous compendium of tourist attractions and cultural goofiness and I promised myself I'd go there someday.

This, I decided, was the day. Consulting a map, I realized a trip to Metropolis is a serious day ride from Indianapolis. The round trip amounts to about 600 miles. Undaunted, I picked up Ind. 67 on the southwestside of town and followed it through Spencer and on to Vincennes where I connected with U.S. 50 and headed west toward Illinois.

As I crossed the Wabash River on the Red Skelton Bridge, I reflected that this is the same U.S. 50 that LIFE magazine once dubbed “the loneliest road in America” where it traverses Nevada. Some friends and I blazed down that highway at slightly sub-sonic speeds in July, 1986, on our way to a BMW rally in California and decided it was one of the most exciting roads in America.

A few miles into Illinois, I exited U.S. 50 to head southwest on Ill. 1 through Mt. Carmel and Carmi to pick up U.S. 45 and took it to I-24 and the sleepy little Ohio River town of Metropolis.

It was mid-afternoon by the time rode by a colorful billboard sporting a flying Superman that welcomed me in the name of the Metropolis Chamber of Commerce.

Metropolis, Ill., looks more like Smallville – Superman's boyhood hometown – than it does the sprawling clone of New York City where Superman/Clark Kent hangs out in comic books, films and TV series. It's an inconsistency the folks in Metropolis apparently choose to ignore.

After a few minutes' search, I found the town square where a colorful 15-foot-tall bronze statue of the Man of Steel gazes down Market Street from behind an iron fence. The statue guards the city hall and stands on a pedestal celebrating “Truth – Justice – The American Way.” I parked my bike next to the fence and dodged a land yacht full of elderly tourists to line up a photo of Superman and super bike.

Diagonally across the street from the statue is the Super Museum – a 50,000-item collection of Superman stuff amassed by Jim Hambrick. It was recently named by AAA Auto Travel as the top small-town tourist attraction in America.



Inside, I found myself staring at a dizzying array of Supermanalia. Besides the obvious things like collector pins, t-shirts, sweatshirts, ball caps, shot glasses, thimbles, key rings, squeezy plastic coin purses, comic books, postcards and figural scissors there were unexpected items. There were red and green bottles of Kryptonite Super Hot Sauce with a sign warning, “You’ll run for water faster than a speeding bullet!!!” On the shelves below were rows of Kraft Super Heroes Macaroni & Cheese, offering a choice of Superman, Batman or Wonder woman.

Making my way through the forest of gee-gaws, I found Hambrick’s daughter, Carrie, 20, minding the store from behind a counter that controlled access to the fabulous museum that lay beyond.

Dressed in black, Carrie projected a Gothic style, complete with multiple ear piercings. She looked up from her Anne Rice novel to take my $3 museum admission and answer a few questions.

“What’s your biggest seller here?” I asked.

“T-shirts, magnets… I’d say these Kryptonite rocks are third,” she said, gesturing to a pile of shiny green rocks, each about the size of a child’s fist. The sign next to them announced, “Kryptonite Meteor Fragments from Superman’s home planet! Glows in the Dark! $3.95 each.”

“What are they?”

“Original Ohio River rocks,” Carrie said with a smile. “Painting them is part of my job. I paint them first in dark green, then I take a light green and go over it. Then I take an even brighter green and do a little bit. Then I put glow-in-the-dark paint on them, then I spray them with clear acrylic and then I, like, sprinkle glitter on them and spray them again. It takes about an hour.”

Next to the rocks lay a stack of year-old special Superman Celebration inserts from the local paper, The Planet. Since it’s a weekly, they can’t call it the The Daily Planet, but everyone gets the idea. Metropolis celebrates its Superman connection every year on the second weekend in June with a blowout that draws about 50,000 visitors. The festival has featured appearances by Noel Neill and Jack Larson who played Lois Lane and Jimmy Olson on the 1950s Superman TV series and Margot Kidder, who was Lois Lane in the more recent Superman movies.

The celebration is a big deal at the museum, Carrie said, when serious Superman collectors gather for a dinner and an auction.

“Some of them even walk around in Superman costumes,” she said. “They call themselves the League of Justice.”

The late Kirk Alyn was the first actor to play Superman in a 1948 movie serial and the elder Hambrick worked as his manager in the early 1980s. The Hambricks lived in California then, Carrie said, and “Kirk Alyn was always at our home. He was like a family member… Superman is like my grandfather.”

Turning the image of a grandfatherly Superman over in my mind, I thanked Carrie for sharing and entered the museum section.

The museum is an amazing jumble of valuable Superman memorabilia and toys and Super clutter. The discerning eye will pick out the knitted costume George Reeves wore in the ‘50s TV series. Turning the corner, my heart skipped a beat when I spotted Clark Kent’s horn-rimmed glasses from that series. Suddenly, I was back in the third grade with my first pair of nerdy eyeglasses, telling myself I was really just using them to hide my secret identity.



There’s Helen Slater’s flying harness from the 1984 Supergirl movie, a life mask casting of Marlon Brando's face in his role as Jor-El, Superman’s dad, and some actual “crystals” from the Fortress of Solitude. Mixed in are odd items like Superman suspenders and belts, all kinds of Superman toys, a huge assortment of Superman wrist watches… it goes on and on.

You can even step into a 1960s vintage phone booth, complete with a dial pay phone, and imagine yourself peeling down to the familiar red, yellow and blue costume.

A couple of headless plywood Superman cutouts stand outside the Super Museum as an invitation for passersby to have their heads photographed on Superman's body.

Metropolis got serious about its Super tourist potential in 1972 when plans were unveiled for a $50 million Amazing World of Superman theme park. The project fell through, however, for lack of investors.

In 1986, civic-minded Metropolisites raised $1,000 to install a cheesy-looking seven-foot-tall fiberglass likeness of Superman on the town square. According to Roadside America, vandals wanted to see just how bullet-proof the Man of Fiberglass was and shot him full of holes.

Seven years later, townspeople bought hundreds of engraved paving bricks to raise $120,000 for the present two-ton effigy of the cartoon superhero.

Metropolis' other major attraction is down at the riverfront where Merv Griffin's Riverboat Casino is berthed.

I decided to pass on the casino and, instead, headed toward the north side of town on my last quest of the day. I found it just north of the Metropolis Good Samaritan Nursing Home – the street I knew had to be somewhere in Metropolis.

Lois Lane, of course.




The Super Museum & Souvenir Store, 611 Market Street, Metropolis, IL is open from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. or later every day of the year, holidays included.

Back to Devil's Tower

I'll almost certainly pay a visit to Devil's Tower while at the BMW MOA International Rally at Gillette, Wyo. in July.
I shot this the last time I was there - in July, 1995, when I was riding Western highways to Portland and to the BMW MOA International Rally in Durango, Colo.
My first visit was in 1990 during the 'MOA rally at Rapid City, S.D.

Time to get back to Big Sur

Digging through boxes in the garage this afternoon, I found the one containing most of our photo albums, including this great shot of Maria with the Big Creek Bridge and California Hwy. 1 in the background. It's from her first trip to Big Sur in July, 1997.
We're long overdue for a return.