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

Lunchtime

Waiting for Maria to go to lunch. I rode to town.

More flying time

I let an anniversary get by without noting it back on Aug. 10.

It was on Aug. 10, 2007, that we got our first look at Jonesboro and the staff of the Jonesboro Sun got its first look at Maria.

We made a late-night run to Jonesboro from Crawfordsville, arriving about 2 a.m. and Maria had a full day of interviewing beginning a few hours later.

Neither of us was in a rush to leave our Indiana home, but the Jonesboro opportunity came at a time when things were falling apart in Crawfordsville.

It's hard to believe that a year ago tomorrow is when Maria gave notice to the C'vill paper and we got serious about uprooting our Hoosier lives and moving to the Natural State.

It doesn't quite feel natural yet, but it's getting there.

Waiting

Arkansas medical waiting rooms never fail to amaze me.
The woman sitting behind us is filling out the standard patient questionnaire.
"What does this mean - maiden name?"
Her husband explained.
An older man with a hearing problem is jabbering loudly and being shushed by his wife.
Another woman with a particularly annoying cell phone ringtone gets a call, checks to see who's calling, then decides not to take it. So we get to listen to what seems like a whole minute of her ringtone.

Coffee at Hastings

Blogging from the bookstore coffeeshop.
I drove Maria to work this morning and then headed over to Hastings to return some rental DVDs, get my morning coffee and use their free Wi-fi.
Maria's daughter Morgan is coming to visit next weekend and it looks like she picked a good time to burn the gasoline to drive down.
A gallon of regular was down to $3.45 at Kroger yesterday. Assuming this isn't just a northeast Arkansas anomaly, it will probably be about $20 cheaper for Morgan to drive here from Bloomington at current gas prices, compared with a month ago when regular was around $4 a gallon. Even so, the 822-mile round trip will cost about $120, assuming she gets around 24 mpg.
I may have to make a run to Thorntown one of these days to check on the house. Our Realtor emailed last week to say the lawn is getting mowed, but there are tall weeds growing next to the house that detract from the curb appeal. He also suggested we consider dropping our asking price again and maybe think about having the trim painted. Ouch.
But this albatross is bleeding us of $1,030 a month and the sooner we can stop that financial drain, the better.
So much for whining about money. It is what it is.
Among the rental DVDs I returned this morning was "The Big Trail," a movie chosen mostly by chance. We watched it last night and were blown away.
Director Raoul Walsh shot the film in a widescreen 70mm format in 1930. Walsh discovered prop boy Marion Morrison and renamed him John Wayne because Walsh was reading a biography of Revolutionary War hero Mad Anthony Wayne. It was John Wayne's first film and he looks almost painfully young in it.
The acting is broad and exaggerated in places, an artifact of the silent films many of the actors had worked in. The movie follows the progress of a pioneer wagon train from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Northwest, taking a curious detour through Momument Valley in northeastern Arizona. Wayne plays a wagon train scout whose life bears more than a passing resemblance to the legendary Kit Carson. "The Big Trail" cost a ton of money, being shot at various locations across the American west and was a financial failure, but it was ahead of its time.
The wagons and equipment and harrowing scenes of river crossings and descents into canyons have a look of authenticity that is striking compared with similar films from the 1950s and '60s.
If you're a film buff or just enjoy a good western, give "The Big Trail" a look.

Hanging out

I'm sitting next to this guy, blogging and listening to a Leo Laporte podcast at the bookstore next to Kroger while Maria shops for groceries.

Farmers' Market

Today is Saturday and that means the Farmers' Market is in operation this morning on the ASU farm property.

Rainy Friday afternoon

 

I'm blogging from the Hastings Hardback Cafe at Caraway and Nettleton in Jonesboro and it's raining like a mofo. People are coming in soaked to the skin.

Thunder was rumbling at home this morning and Pete the Nervous spent about an hour crouched at my feet under my desk. We usually leave the dogs out in the back yard/back porch when we leave, but I figured they'd feel more secure in their kennels with the stormy weather blowing through.

So I brought the laptop along when I came to town for lunch with Maria, looking forward to a few hours of not having to be a doorman for dogs. They both seem to find the sight of a closed back door very disturbing. Regardless of which side of the door they're on, they want to be on the other side and guess who gets to solve their problem for them. Yeah, someone with thumbs. Like me.

I don't recall whether I mentioned it during my road trip last month, but my XM satellite radio, a Delphi Roady 2, crapped out on me on July 16 as I rode from Rapid City, S.D. to Gillette, Wyo. I hit a bump and the sound went all fuzzy. I got it going again briefly by wiggling  the power connection, but it was clearly broken.

I raised the matter at the BMW MOA rally with Sean Franklin, owner of Cyclegadgets.com, and the guy who installed my first XM Roady several years ago. He said the problem was common with motorcycle-mounted Roady units: the solder connection with the power plug had broken. The newer XM units are even more problem prone, he said, advising me against buying the current model.

Of course the ultimate solution would have been to step all the way up to the XM-ready Garmin Zumo 550 GPS and I'm sure Sean would have loved to set me up with it for around $1,000. The Zumo also plays MP3s.

But since my Roady 2 mount is still in great shape, I figured the answer was to find a cheap now-obsolete Roady or Roady 2 online and soldier on.

In the meantime, I completed the trip using my iPod for entertainment, running it through my custom molded in-ear monitors/earplugs as I had done the XM radio. With more than 9,500 songs, I had plenty to listen to. I put it in the map compartment of my tankbag where I could poke the "skip" spot on the control wheel whenever a tune came up that I didn't want to hear. It worked great and, with the exception of the news channels, I hardly missed XM.

Last week, I got around to searching for a Roady 2 replacement online. I found what I was looking for on Amazon.com and bought it, using credit from a birthday gift from my stepdaughter Morgan.

So now I'm playing the waiting game, keeping an eye out for the letter carrier or UPS or FedEx driver headed for my front porch.

The Mick-a-Matic Camera

The Mick-a-Matic camera came out around 1970 and I bought one just for laughs.

The lens was in the nose and the viewfinder was where Mickey's third eye would be if he were enlightened. The camera used the then-popular Kodak Instamatic film cartridge. There was a socket between the ears for a rotating flashcube, good for four shots. The funniest thing about it was that you held it up, covering your face like a Mickey Mouse mask, to take a picture.

Then-Indiana Gov. Edgar D. Whitcomb was considered by some to be a bumbling lightweight and Jim Schweikert, United Press International Indianapolis Bureau photographer, took one of these to a Whitcomb press conference to the delight of the rest of the media.

I think mine went away in a yard sale and I was chagrined to discover today that these things are fetching $40 and more on Ebay.

Committing insecticide

It's high mosquito season here in northeast Arkansas and living near a wooded area in the middle of rice country, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a dozen mosquitos.

Our screened back porch would be a great barrier to mosquitos and other bugs wanting to get into the house except that we have to keep the screen door on the porch propped open so our two dogs can run in an out. And they run in and out maybe 100 times a day.

So the back porch fills up with mosquitos and other bugs. They enter through the open door and fill up the enclosed space. I can't decide whether they just can't find their way out or if they prefer the shade. The mosquitos congregate in the corners and wait for us to open the back door so they can buzz into the house and suck our blood.

There are few things more maddening than the high pitched whine of a mosquito hovering next to your ear, especially if you're about to fall asleep.

Rather than bomb the area with chemicals, Maria decided to attack the problem physically by going after the little varmints with our Shop Vac. The wand extensions make it possible to reach all the way to the ceiling and the suction is sufficiently powerful to yank in every hapless mosquito that gets within about 3 inches of the nozzle.

We quickly discovered it's extremely gratifying to watch those little bastards disappear down the vacuum hose and mosquito hunting with the Shop Vac has become a daily sport at our house.

We also realized that the back porch is a much more target-rich environment. In 15 minutes' time this morning, I bagged more than 200 mosquitos by attacking the swarms in the corners and picking  them off when they try to flee through the screens. That's probably more effective than having a flock of purple martins at work.

Then there's the "big game" of the porch bug world - huge inch-long flies that make a particularly satisfying "thunk" when the suction grabs them and fires them down the length of the hose into the Shop Vac canister. Add the occasional wasp and moth and it's more fun than a video game.

And when we run out of bugs to suck up, we blast a shot of Ortho insecticide into the nozzle. Hahahahahaha! Let's see you buzz in our ears now!

Back to the classroom

I've agree to teach a multi-session digital photography class for the local senior citizen center and I've been going through our thousands of images looking for pictures that illustrate the various concepts I want to discuss.

Like for instance this shot that Maria took of her niece Sarah. It's a great example of a silhouette created by shooting a subject in shade and exposing for the sky.

Free Wi-fi!

Since Indco Cable can't maintain a TV/Internet connection to our house this morning, I decided to take my laptop to the public library and use their Wi-fi to do my Internet business.

We decided it would be wise for me to drive Maria to work this morning because she's still a bit dizzy from yesterday's attack of vertigo - the apparent result of inner ear congestion.

So imagine my chagrin when I pulled into the library parking lot at 8:10 a.m. to find the place closed with a sign on the doors announcing that, effective Aug. 4, they will be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.

I went in search of free Wi-fi and found it at the Hardback Cafe at Hastings at Nettleton and Caraway. It's a very pleasant environment, although I'm not crazy about their choice of music on the PA system. I'd use my iPod, but I don't want to be completely oblivious to my surroundings.

I've decided to sell my modest collection of East German military uniforms - a mix of army, air force and border guard stuff. Among the items I listed this morning is this Luftwaffe major's uniform - trousers and tunic with decorations - that appears never to have been worn. I had to do a bit of Google searching to determine that it, indeed, the insignia for a major on the shoulderboards.

I don't have any reason to think this stuff will bring big bucks on Ebay. A scan of completed sales of East German uniforms turned up lots of failed sales and low selling prices. Whatever. I just want to turn it into cash and free up the space in the garage where the big mover's wardrobe box is sitting.

Kroger

I didn't expect to see this price again.

Indco cable strikes again

I called again yesterday to complain about a bad TV signal and skechy Internet connection.
So the whole connection went out last night as we were sitting down to watch the Olympics.
Gotta go to the public library this morning to do my Internet business.

Waiting room hell

We're stuck in the First Care waiting room this morning because Maria has vertigo and we're forced to listen to this woman's loud voice as she talks on her cell phone.
She's talking to a friend who is planning a trip and just put in a request for a carton of cigarettes if the friend goes through Missouri.
Aaaaaaaaaaaahhh!
Damn! She just got another call after 2 minutes of blessed silence.
Too bad cell phone jammers are illegal in the United States.

No Internet, no cable

Indco Cable of Batesville, Ark. has failed us again.
We lost our cable service about a half hour ago and, of course, there's no one in their office to take our call.
So much for my Ebaying or watching the Olympics tonight.
I'd dump them for satellite service except that they're my only option for high-speed Internet.
The cable offerings are pathetic - no HD content, lots of flaky Protestant religious channels and no Comedy Central.

Working on Flickr.com

I just finished posting a gallery of images from the late '60s, the '70s and the '80s of friends and colleagues at The Indianapolis News. Just click on the Flickr.com thing on the right side of the page to view them.

Camo goes mainstrean

Calvin Klein camo briefs at Dillard's.

Damn those homonyms!

I found this a few years ago in the National Archives photo collection.

(Click on the photo for a bigger version.)

63 years and counting

  Today is the 63rd anniversary of the destruction of Nagasaki in the world's second atomic bomb attack.

The results were so horrifying that no nuclear weapon has been used in war since then. But there is little doubt that Islamofascists wouldn't hesitate to do this to us.

The B-29 that dropped the Nagasaki bomb was named Bockscar and it's on display at the U.S. Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

One size fits all

Here's the replacement driver's license I got from the State Revenue Office (no DMV or BMV in Arkansas) last week, with identity theft stuff obscured.

I'd hoped to get a new photo, but they just knocked out another copy from what was already in the computer database.

Notice anything missing from the information? Like weight and hair color? I suppose it's no longer politically correct to reference race or ethnicity, so I didn't really expect to see that here, but why eye color and not hair color? In my case, hair color is pretty easy to distinguish, despite the crappy photo, but it could get tricky with shades of black and brown hair.

And what about weight, not that I'm happy about being heavier than I should be?

Take away the photo and all this says about me is that I'm a 63-year-old 5'10" male with brown eyes. Not very specific, is it?

So much for our preoccupation with IDs and homeland security.

What next?

You know it's gonna be a strange day when your Amish brother-in-law calls at 4:54 a.m. asking you to get online and make an Ebay bid for him because his computer has a problem.

And the phone connection is a little sketchy because he's on his cell phone and is standing on his porch in the pre-dawn darkness in his underwear.

And he puts me on hold while he takes a call from a trucker who needs help from the towing service he operates.

And the time my computer booted up and was ready to run Internet Explorer, the auction closed.

I'm going back to bed.

Time's fun when you're havin' flies

Lauri hands out a Pride Point certificate at the Journal Review company picnic on June 22, 2007.

That was only about 13 months ago, yet it seems more like 13 years or even another lifetime.

Hello, Crawfordsville

We have more than 1,000 images on file with PAI Networks, a stock photo agency, but so far we've only sold one image in the past seven years.

Just for the hell of it, I went to www.painetworks.com and was startled to see one of my shots of the Montgomery County Courthouse is in the scrolling gallery on their home page.

No money, but nice to see someone noticed.

You can see our stuff if you go to www.painetworks.com and click on "1364 photographers" at the bottom of the home page, then scroll down to "flora, john m" and click on my name. Next, click on "Editors Quick Pick" at the top and wait for the images to fill your screen.

Great-grandmother's kitchen table

  Maria's project during my two-week motorcycle trip last month was the stripping and refinishing of the kitchen table we inherited from my mother.

The table's original owner was my great-grandmother Elizabeth Ray Dietz who was a farm wife in Carroll County, Indiana.

Elizabeth and her husband John lived near the small farm community of Deer Creek. She was born in 1844 and married John G. Dietz on Feb. 11, 1871. I know the date, because I have the original marriage license. John Dietz died in 1918 at the age of 79. That was during the great influenza pandemic, but I have yet to determine his cause of death. Elizabeth died in 1923 also at the age of 79. Both are buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Carroll County.

The table has a center leaf, which Maria also stripped and refinished, but we're using it without the leaf for the time being because it fits our breakfast nook better this way.

Maria confined her efforts to the table top, leaving the undercarriage in its original condition. In the process of stripping, refinishing and applying polyurethane, Maria discovered indentations in the table top indicating it had been used for cutting out sewing patterns.

I think she did a spectacular job on the table top.

My mother once told me she had fond memories of sitting at her grandmother's kitchen table as a child. She would have been 8 years old when her grandmother died. Mom, by the way, lived to be 86.

That's Ruthie, the Wonder Dog, under the table.

Better than change under couch cushions

I'm taking a break from a serious paper chase this morning.

I check the Indiana Attorney General's unclaimed property website occasionally and this week's check-in turned up about $725 worth of stuff, most of it in my late mother's name.

To claim the money, I have to come up with documentation linking her with the last two addresses associated with the unclaimed property - which happen to be my two previous addresses.

I've tracked those documents down. Now I have to find something with her Social Security number... hey, wait, it's probably on her death certificate.

Yep, there it is.

Now all I have to do is take all of this crap to a Notary Public and get the form notarized.

I also found a loose $11 and change that PayPal apparently owes me.

If you ever lived in Indiana, click the graphic and see if you have any unclaimed assets. If you have no connection with Indiana, try your home state's unclaimed property website. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Search for the ring

Maria's wedding ring has gone walkabout again.
This happened about a year ago when we lived in Thorntown and it turned up in her jewelry box in a spot where she never put it before.
We suspect the ghost of my mother, since the central diamond in the ring came from Mom's engagement ring.
We skipped trash pickup last Tuesday morning so Maria could root through the trash bags on the bottom - the ones containing stuff that was thrown out around the time of the ring disappearance.
So the trash continued to pile up in the dedicated trash hauler's bin and since we've had a week of temperatures in the 90s and 100s and heat indexes as high as 110, the trash and garbage got very rank and naturally there were maggots. Lots of maggots.
She put on latex gloves and rooted through the bags this evening. I helped pull several bags out and very nearly gagged.
But the search failed to yield the ring and the search goes on.
In other developments, I got a $150 bill for my Emergency Room visit over Memorial Day weekend for my Swiss Army knife wound to my left wrist.
Studying the bill, I discovered the hospital billed my insurance carrier more than $1,100 for the services.
Holy shit. It didn't feel like $1,100 worth of medical care.

"Cheap" is a relative term when it comes to sunglasses

It's been several months since the Dillard's Discount Center closed and the 10-cents-on-the-dollar clothes deals went away.
The regular Dillard's in the Turtle Creek Mall was never a very appealing shopping venue for me because of their insanely high prices.
Nevertheless, Maria has gotten some good deals on sale merchandise and it was with that thought in mind that I agreed to check out their offering of men's sunglasses last week.
I was in the market for a new pair of shades because of a bonehead move on July 14 when I left my favorite pair of Oakleys in the left breast pocket of my motorcycle jacket when I threw my gear into my tent at a KOA Kampground in western Iowa. The tankbag was the prudent place to put them.
Thrashing around in the middle of the night, I heard a disturbing couple of crunches and snaps, which turned out to be the destruction of my unprotected plastic sunglass frames.
I learned earlier this summer than Oakley won't repair plastic models that are not in current production, so the broken shades went into the trash.
I bought a pair of red-framed cheap sunglasses, complete with the word "Turbo" on the wings, at the BMW MOA rally a few days later, but Maria thought they looked cheesy and insisted I get a proper pair of shades.
So, imagine my delight when I found this pair of Ray-Ban RB 4087 shades marked down from their original $119 to $55 and change.
The RB 4087 doesn't have a sexy name like some other Ray-Ban models, like the classic Wayfarers, but it suits me just fine and I've always kinda wanted a pair of the Italian-made Ray-Bans.
I haven't tried them under a motorcycle helmet, but I'm reasonably sure they'll work fine.

Sunday morning recap

The Crowley's Ridge Parkway tour, including Frierson Lake and Crowley's Ridge State Parks turned out to be a pretty good idea.

We let the kids use the playground at the lake while we sat in the shade, then meandered up the road to Crowley's Ridge State Park where Jim took the kids swimming.

Jim and Lauri took us out to dinner Friday evening at the Whole Hog Cafe, an award winning Jonesboro barbecue place where Lauri got this shot of me after finishing the fabulous whole hog platter.

We came home and finished up our week-long marathon pirate game with the kids, then introduced Jim and Lauri to our favorite western, "Open Range."

We were all up by 7:30 a.m. on Saturday, helping Lauri and Jim load their car for the trip home. They rolled out about 9 a.m.

Both boys had hours of fun playing with our two dogs and we wondered how long it would take for them to broach the subject of getting a dog. Lauri called from the road to announce that it took the kids exactly 45 minutes to ask if they could get a dog.

She didn't say what the answer was.

This week

Sorry about the lack of posts this week.
Lauri and Jim and their two boys are visiting and it's been a pretty active week.
They arrived about 3 a.m. Monday. I don't recall much of what we did on Monday other than a late breakfast at Cracker Barrel.
Tuesday's big event was the Nature Center at Craighead Forest Park.
Wednesday was travel day and we journeyed to Memphis to tour the Gibson guitar factory, lunch at B.B. King's place on Beale Street and browse the shops there.
Lunch was excellent, but the waitress moved slightly faster than a glacier and we worried that we wouldn't get away in time to make our 3 p.m. Gibson guitar factory tour. But we did and it was fascinating to see all of those hollow-body guitars are hand-crafted.
Maria and Lauri went fabric shopping and sewing while Jim and I took the boys to see Wall-e, to the Harley-Davidson shop and to Circuit City to ogle the GPS units and home theatre stuff.
This morning's activity is a tour of Crowley's Ridge Parkway from KAIT Road north to U.S. 412 with stops at Lake Frierson and Crowley's Ridge state parks.
It's been blazing hot most of the week with temperatures in the upper 90s and a heat index of 105-106.