Day 5
Start: Cranberry Twp, PA at 8:26 AM
End: Topeka, KS at 3:10 AM
Length: 1000 miles / 53 mph average
Here's about where my rally started to go downhill.
I didn't sleep particularly well, even though we were at a checkpoint. I didn't get to sleep until after 1 AM, with scoring taking me to the wee hours, then working on my bike and repacking until even later. Getting up and ready for the 6 AM breakfast wasn't easy. We got our new
Leg 2 rally packs with bonus listings, and I headed back to the room to plan. This was always going to be an interesting leg of the rally. We had to get from Pittsburgh to Sacramento in less than 3 days. We were given the rally packs at 6 AM east coast time on Friday, and needed to be at the Rancho Cordova Marriott by 8 PM pacific time (11 PM east coast time) on Sunday. That leaves a total of 65 hours to go a minimum of 2,460 miles. In the iron butt world, it's quite doable, with only a 37 mph average required. But it's certainly not a walk in the park. It also means that there is a pretty hard limit on the excess fun you can have bonus chasing on this leg.
In the rally packs, there were two large bonuses available on the leg. One of them involved a string of 34 Pony Express stops. Each one was worth a small to moderate amount of points. But get them all, and you get a 10,500 point bonus. There was also a bonus at the top of Pikes Peak in Colorado. This was somewhat far off the main route, but it was worth 8,666 points by itself. I quickly discounted the Pony Express route, as I saw that all of them were daylight only bonuses. That meant that if you miscalculated the smallest amount, and didn't make it to one in daylight, you were stopped there until the next morning, or you had to decide to forfeit that 10,500 point bonus. Some of them looked like gotchas to me, with long twisty routes off the main route to reach them. I also discounted the Pikes Peak bonus, as it looked like it added too many hours to the route the few ways I calculated it. I strung together some of the medium to large bonuses in my plan, and headed out of the parking lot at 8:24 in the morning. The first bonus in that plan was the
Pennsylvania Trolley Museum. 403 points, and not that far from home base.
I showed up a few minutes after 9, and was somewhat surprised (and worried) that there was only one other motorcycle in the lot. I had expected quite a few more, and that made me think I had been tempted by a sucker bonus. Looking at the details, I saw that the bonus wasn't open until 10. I had seen that before, but hadn't realized I'd get there so soon. I vacillated between staying and leaving, but eventually decided to stay. A few more riders then arrived, so if it was a sucker bonus at least there were a few more suckers to commiserate with. The museum opened at 10, but some employees arrived a few minutes before 10. We had to get a picture while riding the trolley between two particular points of the track, and we arranged that ride for the 9 or 10 of us that were there with the employees of the museum. We took the required pictures while riding the trolley, worried the entire time that we had wasted too much time on this particularly short leg. Here's a stressed me trying not too look overly stressed:
Once underway, the next stop for me was a 507 point marker commemorating Lindbergh landing his Spirit of St. Louis in Moundsville, WV. Easy bonus, mucho points:
There were still a handful of riders close by at this point, as we had all left the Trolley museum at the same time. Next on the agenda was the American Motorcycle Hall of Fame at AMA HQ in Pickerington, OH. This was entertaining in at least one way, as the GPS kept making me loop around an offramp and get back on the highway. I looped around twice, and came upon another competitor doing the same thing. It took me a third try to finally find the correct small street that led to the Museum rather than back to the highway. Once we made it into the museum, they informed us that the motorcycle we were instructed to take a picture of was no longer on display. They had checked with Iron Butt HQ already, and gave us a program with a note to show that we had been there at the location. This probably saved us a reasonable amount of time compared to taking even a mini-tour, so the substitution probably helped, if only in a small way. This was one of those locations where you wish you really did have more time to explore instead of needing to immediately get back up to warp speed, so I hope to find my way back there sometime.
The next bonus was probably one of the most frustrating of the entire rally.
Eddie Rickenbacker was one of the most well known fighter pilots and all-around bad-ass of the 20th century. He happens to be buried in a cemetery in Columbus, OH. We were instructed to take a picture of his gravestone. The cemetery was quite large, and quite confusing. I was given a map when I entered, but was helped out by a worker there who led us by truck to get to the gravesite all the way near the back of the site:
All is well so far, but then came the fun in trying to leave the site. I kept getting myself turned around in the cemetery, finding myself in front of Rickenbacker's gravesite over and over again. It was becoming quite claustrophobic. I ran into Donald Jones, who was also looping around and around with no apparent exit. It seems the location is designed to be intentionally confusing, and it was designed well.
I eventually ran into another worker, who pointed in the general location of where I needed to go, and after some more trial and error, I found the back exit. Not fun by any stretch of the imagination. It felt like tons of wasted time, and this bonus was tiny points-wise, so it felt doubly wasted. I was not in the best frame of mind at this point, and just felt like I was putting myself behind the 8-ball in this leg.
Once on the main road, I aimed the bike at
Hare Chevrolet, in Noblesville, Indiana. From the rally pack:
Quote:
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The United States longest-lived family-owned vehicle retailer Hare Chevrolet has been in business for over 160 years, giving them the title of the “Nations Oldest Transportation Company”. The saga began in 1847 when Wesley Hare started building wagons, carriages and buggies out of his log cabin in Noblesville, Indiana. His primary market was the steady stream of Americans heading west to California to pan for gold.
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There is a great mural over many of the interior walls of the dealership, and we needed to take a picture of it. The employees here were very friendly, and quite interested in this unique long-distance event that had sent a few riders in their direction.
The bonuses seemed to be spreading themselves further and further apart, as I aimed to the next one on my list, a marker commemorating a Bi-plane / Train race in Mt. Pilaski, IL. It took me a few hours to get there, and as I got close I came upon Ken Meese heading in the same direction. We pulled up to the marker together, and took the same picture of the marker below:
We both agreed that there were no more daylight bonuses available to us, as it was already 8 PM and we really were out in the middle of nowhere at that point. As we left separately, I was really starting to feel down about my route choice, my progress so far on the leg, and I wasn't sure how to fix what I felt to be the problem. When I made it back to the major highway, I stopped on the side of the road and took out the computer. I knew how many points I was supposed to meet to reach finisher status on this leg (11,000). I was afraid that my route wasn't going to get me there, and I wasn't making enough progress on it in any case. I looked again at the Pikes Peak bonus, which was 8,666 points all by its lonesome. I looked at the times it was available, and calculated how far I was from it at that point. It looked doable to make it there by early afternoon if I rode hard and didn't take that long of a rest stop. I recalculated things a number of times to make sure I wasn't mistaken, and eventually firmed up the plan. I put the computer away, plugged both GPS's to Colorado, and got the bike moving. I made it to Topeka, KS before really feeling like I needed a few hours of sleep, and checked into a Motel 6 there at 3 AM.