How a bank ought to be

Trailcam mystery

Something is triggering my side yard trail cam every afternoon a little before 5 p.m., but I can’t see anything out of place in any of the resulting photos.

Here’s the pattern of photos I found when I pulled the SD memory card yesterday:

Date	Time	Time	Time	Time
7/24	4:49 p.m.	5:06 p.m.
7/25	4:50 p.m.	4:51 p.m.
7/26	4:48 p.m.	4:50 p.m.	4:52 p.m.	4:54 p.m
7/28	4:46 p.m.	4:50 p.m.	4:51 p.m.

Whatever it is, it took Sunday off.

I took a seat on the front porch with a good view of the area covered by the camera about 4:40 p.m. yesterday and sat quietly until about 5:15 p.m. hoping to see or hear what has been passing through the camera’s field of view with such remarkable regularity, but saw and heard nothing.

Time permitting, I’ll resume my surveillance this afternoon.

Rally wrapup

I finished my post-rally chores this morning, consisting of repacking my tent and air mattress that I laid out to dry yesterday afternoon. I had to pack them wet when I left the Minnesota State Fairgrounds Sunday morning because the ground cloth of my tent captured some water from Friday morning’s rain.

I found my original air mattress inflator right where I left it on my dresser. Now I have two of them, having purchased a new, more powerful unit at the rally.

Here’s an evening photo I shot of some of our bikes parked and covered in front of the canopy that was the centerpiece of our club campsite on the north end of the fairground.

My Jonesboro friend Charlie Parsons entered his 1939 BMW R12 in the Vintage Bike competition and won first place in his division.

The bike is for sale for $23,500 if anyone is interested. You can email him at 143bmw@att.net. I’d buy it in a heartbeat if I could afford it and had room for it.

I spent Monday night at the Hannibal, Mo., Motel 6, parking next to an R1200RT ridden by Jim Minton, an 80-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran from Cape Girardeau, Mo.

We swapped travel stories over dinner at the restaurant next door to the motel. Jim did multiple tours in Viet Nam.

Home again, home again

This morning began with some hiccups in my riding routine, but everything ended well and I made it home from Hannibal, Mo. without serious mishap.

I awoke about 6 a.m., checked the distance to St. Louis from the Hannibal Motel 6 and realized that a departure before 7 a.m. would put me in the middle of the St. Louis morning rush hour.

So I went to breakfast at the restaurant next door and took my time about packing and loading the bike. I was all ready to ride when, seconds after closing the door to Room 110 and leaving my card key on the sink, I realized I’d left my helmet inside. No problem, said the clerk as she gave me another card key to recover my lid.

Moments after I got out onto U.S. 61, I discovered my Garmin Zumo 550 display was frozen and unresponsive to the buttons. I stopped to fuel up a couple of miles down the road and tinkered with it, removing it from its cradle and power source, but to no avail.

So what do you do when you’re trying to skirt the edges of one of the nation’s bigger cities without a GPS or a map? Out comes the iPhone to chart the way home – U.S. 61 to I-64 to I-270 to I-55 to U.S. 67 to Corning, Ark. which is a hop, skip and a jump from home. I repeated the sequence to myself for several minutes as I rode south without the benefit of Miss Garmin’s directions or SiriusXM entertainment.

I was suddenly back to old school touring with just my thoughts to entertain me and it was in this windy silence that I chewed on the problem of a frozen GPS display. And then it struck me: reboot it by removing and replacing the battery.

I stopped 63 miles down the road at Troy, Mo. to examine the GPS and found that none of my pocket knives or my BMW tool kit had a #8 torx screwdriver to remove the battery. Then I noticed an Auto Zone store a couple of blocks away from the gas station where I was parked.

I cruised over to Auto Zone, showed the GPS to the woman at the counter and eventually found the right torx tool to remove the battery. When I replaced it and pushed the on/off button, the GPS booted just like new and I was back in business. But just in case, I invested in a small set of torx drivers that will live in my saddlebag should Miss Garmin have another seizure.

Problem solved for $11 and change.

The rest of the ride was uneventful and the temperature never rose above the low 80s. I gassed a final time at the “Dirt Cheap” Phillips 66 in Deloge, Mo., had a quick McDonald’s lunch next door and rode on home, arriving at 2:16 p.m.

Total mileage for the trip: 1,554 miles.

FYI: this was my 21st BMW MOA National Rally.

Attendance was 5,866.

Saturday morning rally report

Here I am at the Internet Cafe where the phone recharging, Wifi and bananas are free, although a donation is appreciated.

I made the mistake of eating too much too late last evening and paid the price with brutal indigestion about 2 a.m. That, plus the high humidity and lack of a breeze made for a long, uncomfortable night. I didn’t get to sleep properly until I peeled back the rain fly on my tent to let the heat and humidity escape.

I was up with the sun about 6 a.m., chatted with Charlie at the coffee stand he runs and had some interesting conversations with interesting riders from Dallas, Paducah, and British Columbia.

Yesterday was overcast, which kept my tank bag solar panel from properly charging the storage module that, in turn, charges my iPhone, so I grabbed my netbook and iPhone charging cord and headed for the MOA Building.

I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do with the rest of the day, except to say that I have no plans to leave the Fairgrounds.

Charlie graciously agreed to haul my waterproof bag full of camping stuff home in his trailer, so I can made the ride back to Arkansas unencumbered.

I spent a few minutes watching people struggle with rudimentary off-road maneuvers on the GS Giants course and concluded there are a lot of GS riders who should never leave the pavement.

I’d like to think I still have enough of my dirt skills from trail riding courses in the 1980s to show these kids how it’s done, at least on a 650 GS. Doing this stuff on a 1200 GS is like trying to get an elephant to climb a ladder.

Rally report

Howard Mudd is here.

Thursday morning

I slept soundly last night and woke up at 4:30 a.m. feeling reasonably refreshed.

The Clarion Inn has a passable free breakfast built around scrambled eggs and hash browns.

The breakfast room was full of old (older than me) and infirm people, which struck me as odd until I heard the PA system announcing a shuttle bus to the Mayo Clinic. Oh, yeah. Rochester. Mayo’s.

I’m taking my time about packing and loading, since I want to avoid as much of the Minneapolis-St. Paul morning rush hour traffic as possible.

It’s only a 90-minute-or-so ride, so it should be a pleasant morning jaunt.

Arkansas to Minnesota in 12 hours

I had hoped to make it all the way to the BMW MOA rally in St. Paul today, but a half-hour construction delay late in the day killed my enthusiasm and I bagged it at Rochester, Minn.

Still, 659.4 miles is the longest day I’ve done in a few years and that leaves me with only 87 miles to ride tomorrow morning to get to the rally.

Wayne Garrison has our club campsite set up and texted me the GPS coordinates while I wolfed down a BLT and a very tall beer in the Clarion Inn lounge a few minutes ago.

Now I think I’m going to watch a little TV and crash early, since I got up at 4:45 a.m.. today.

Another use for the iPhone

I keep a log of every fuel stop, service, and tire change for my bikes, using a program called For Two Wheels Only.

Normally, I make a notation on the gas station receipt as to the odometer reading, then transcribe the mileage, location, volume of gas and amount paid into the software.

But there is the occasional poorly run station that doesn’t properly maintain their pumps and instead of a receipt I get a flashing message saying “clerk has receipt.”

I’m not about to hike into the station to get my receipt. That’s why I only buy gas where I can pay at the pump. So in those cases, I use my iPhone camera to snap a picture of the dollars and gallons on the pump and the odometer on the bike.

That’s what happened this morning when I topped off the tank on my ‘03 BMW K1200GT in anticipation of an early start tomorrow morning, bound for the BMW MOA rally in St. Paul, Minn. Now, with tire pressures adjusted and oil level checked, all I have to do is load the bike and I’ll be ready to roll at or a little before sunrise.

I’d like to do the whole thing in one day – I’ve done 800-mile days before, but it’s been a few years and the weather is uncertain. The sun doesn’t set in St. Paul until 8:48 p.m., so I’m not likely to run out of daylight before I run out of stamina. With more than 300,000 BMW miles in my rear view mirrors, I don’t have much left to prove to myself or anyone else, and I’ll know when it’s time to get a motel.

Not-so-wildlife

I pulled the SD memory card from my new Moultrie trail cam just now to see what kind of wildlife it photographed since I last checked it Saturday morning.

Something triggered it at 9:52 a.m. yesterday but a thorough examination of the photo failed to show what set it off.

I had dumped a bunch of birdseed in front of the camera for bait, but I may have aimed it too high to catch squirrels or other critters feeding.

So this self-portrait is all I have to show so far.

Operator error

Riding home from the post office this morning, I found I couldn’t get the cruise control to work on my 2003 BMW K1200GT.

Oh, shit, I thought. I don’t need this kind of problem on the eve of a 750-mile ride to the BMW MOA rally in St. Paul, Minn.

This is the third or fourth time the cruise control has crapped out since I bought the bike in early 2003. It always came back on its own after I stopped, shut off the engine and restarted it. So I rode on home and parked in the garage in the hope that all would be well when I rode again.

Fast forward to 1:20 p.m. when I set out for a free dark roast coffee at Starbucks, cashing in an empty coffee bag. I turned south on U.S. 49, got up to 60mph and flipped the SET button on the cruise control (it’s that gray thing on top of the left control cluster that looks kinda like a little tongue sticking out of a larger gray plastic piece). The gold cruise control indicator light stayed dark and cruise control failed to engage.

Crap!

I switched the cruise control off and on and off and on to no avail. It occurred to me that the problem might be a blown fuse, but the little red LED next to the gray tongue was glowing, signifying cruise was definitely getting electricity. WTF?

Then I noticed that the toe of my right boot was resting on the rear brake pedal. Application of the front or rear brake cancels cruise control.

I scooted my foot a couple of inches off of the pedal, thumbed the SET/RES tongue and… sonofabitch! The cruise control engaged and the gold indicator light came on.

Feeling like an imbecile, it dawned on me that the previous cruise control “failures” were also due to the same kind of operator error.

So now I don’t have to worry about a malfunctioning cruise control. But there is the matter of having to stab the starter button repeatedly to fire a cold engine. It took 7 pushes to start the bike this morning. The good news is that it eventually starts and almost always starts on the first push whenever I try it later in the day.

And there’s also the matter of managing our cash flow to accommodate the cost of the upcoming trip. I calculate it will cost about $140 for gas. I can eat cheaply – maybe cheaper than I could at home. The rally fee is already paid, so the only remaining expense is maybe $120 or so for lodging to and from the rally. It’s a 13-hour ride, so it’s theoretically possible for me to leave at dawn coming and going and ride the whole distance in daylight. That assumes no delays from traffic, fatigue or weather.

We shall see.

BTW, the Starbucks baristas and their noisy grab-ass behavior is very annoying this afternoon. The only time they shut up is when a customer orders.

St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church–Lebanon, Ind.

Click on the image to see it full size.

Another look at Automatic

Automatic is a module that plugs into a car’s data port and monitors driving behaviors and routes and sends the information to your smartphone.

I got mine from the Amazon.com Vine Program. You can get yours for $99.95 at automatic.com.

It logs each trip separately and gives you week-by-week tallies. I use it all the time in my 2004 Lexus RX330, including July 7-12 when we drove to Indiana to spend time with Maria’s family.

We drove to the rural Amboy home of Maria’s brother Kerstan on July 8 and the map above shows our route from his house back to her parents’ house in Thorntown.

The usual route involves taking two-lane Ind. 47 east from Thorntown to four-lane U.S. 31, then north to Kokomo where it’s two-lane state and county roads to Kerstan’s farm.

Wanting to minimize nighttime driving on two-lane roads, I chose a somewhat longer route back to Thorntown. I gassed at the intersection of Ind. 18 and U.S. 31 at Bunker Hill, then drove north to Peru where I picked up the new four-lane Ind. 24 southwest to Logansport where it connects with the even newer four-lane Ind. 25 continuing southwest to I-65 at Lafayette. From there it was a quick hop over to four-lane U.S. 52 down to Thorntown.

I was pleased to see the Lexus averaged 29 miles per gallon on this drive, compared with the EPA estimate for the RX330 of 26 mpg.

The Automatic device is touted as a fuel economy coach because it scolds you if you brake or accelerate hard or drive over 70 mph. I ignore the device’s preference for a 70 mph speed limit because it’s not practical for Interstate driving.

No Chinese chicken for my dogs!

Dog food and dog treats from China have earned a bad reputation in recent years, sickening and killing hundreds of dogs.

Purina’s Waggin’ Train is among the brands cited and Purina claims to have tightened its quality controls on chicken jerky tenders from Chinese sources.

Even so, I was shocked to find the product in the pet food aisle of Sam’s Club today. No matter what their claims, I will never feed my dogs any pet product that comes from China.

Even if it is 100% real, whatever the hell that means.

The trump card was dealt 69 years ago yesterday

I subscribe to a few World War II-related Facebook groups and every now and then someone posits a scenario they think could have altered the outcome of the war in Europe and let the Germans win.

Sometimes it’s the failure of the D-Day invasion, or a German victory in the Battle of the Bulge or some other pivotal battle. More frequently it involves the earlier appearance of the Me 262 jet fighter in greater numbers, countering the Allied air offensive.

None of these would have prevented an Allied victory.

Want to know why?

It involves something that happened 69 years ago yesterday. The detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert.

Depending on who you believe, the Germans failed to appreciate the potential of an atom bomb and devoted insufficient resources to it or – more improbably, reached the point of a couple of nuclear tests but were far behind us in developing an operational nuclear weapon.

Either way, as of July 16, 1945 the United States held the trump card that could defeat any enemy on earth almost instantly.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were designated as potential atomic bomb targets in advance, but I have never read of any such designation for German cities. Maybe that’s because British Bomber Command did such a thorough job of flattening German cities that by May, 1945, they were out of significant targets.

But my point is that, given the Manhattan Project and the absence of Axis nuclear weapons, Allied victory was assured no matter what the Germans and Japanese did.

New Trail Cam!

I bought a Bushnell trail cam in the spring of 2011 and mounted it on a tree in our side yard.

It worked OK, but I thought the functions were needlessly complex and the on-off switch was wonky. So wonky that it only lasted a few months before I sent the camera back to Bushnell for a replacement.

The replacement only lasted a year or so too before its on-off switch quit working.

So I put this Moultrie MCG-12589 5 megapixel trail cam into my Amazon.com wish list.

And, thanks to my son Steve’s generosity, it showed up on my doorstep yesterday as a birthday gift.

Thanks, Steve!

You can’t hit a home run every time at bat

“Weird Al” Yankovic is releasing eight new videos in eight days.

Yesterday’s release was the second in the series of videos from his new album Mandatory Fun and it was one of the funniest, smartest WAV videos ever.

I hung around the house this morning to see today’s release and it turns out I needn’t have bothered. “Foil” is vaguely amusing, but just vaguely.

So now I’m sipping coffee at Panera waiting to take Maria to a late lunch at 1 p.m. (Her office breaks for lunch from 1-2 p.m.)

The weather here is deliciously cool for mid-July. For the second day in a row we have temperatures in the 70s and sunny skies, thanks to a high pressure cell loaded with cool Canadian air.

Riding in to town, I met a guy on a BMW R1100RS loaded for touring and heading north, almost certainly bound for next week’s BMW Motorcycle Owners of America national rally in St. Paul, Minn. I can only hope the weather will be this nice when I leave for the rally next week.

Red Gold!

We love Red Gold tomato products because they are delicious and they’re from Indiana.

Here’s a link to their online merchandise: http://redgold.mpisecureordering.com/index.php?page=shop.browse&category_id=105&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=53

Absolutely hilarious and long overdue

Watch it full-screen and turn up the volume.

That’s loyalty

Longtime Indianapolis BMW Club friend Martin Radtke recently put out an email request for a copy of the original club logo, not mentioning why he wanted it.

Having edited the club newsletter for ten years, I still have lots of club-related graphics in my archives, so I sent him a high-res image of the emblem that represented our club for many years until BMW Motorrad decided to dictate logo style to BMW motorcycle clubs.

This is what Martin did with it. Martin was an early member of the club and has many fond memories of the men who founded it back in the 1960s.

I hope he and Darlyne don’t need this monument for a long, long time.