Floribama Riders

Day 1: Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri (400 miles)

I woke up at 5 AM, knowing I had to be on the road at 9. The gang was meeting at the Nelson Building around noon Central Time, and the ride took 3 hours, and I did not want to be late. For a few weeks, I had known I had four important tasks to complete before the DR650 would be ready for a 1,600 mile tour on remote dirt trails through Idaho and Montana.

Those tasks were to change the:

• Oil
• Air filter
• Tires
• Spark plugs

I also had to mount a John Deere tractor operator's manual somewhwere low on the bike. This would carry heavy metal tools, helping to keep the center of gravity low on the DR. They say that procrastination arises from one of two fears: fear of success and fear of failure. When it comes to motorcycle maintenance, I definitely fear that things will go horribly wrong.

That is how I came to wake up at 5 AM with none of the aforementioned tasks complete. I decided to punt the ball further down the field on everything except the top two items: changing the oil and air filter. I would carry the tires and the John Deere tool kit with us to Idaho on the trucks, and I would sort out everything once we arrived. How hard could it be to execute a little oil and air filter change?

Well, it turns out that your drain plug washer can grow a little old and smooshed over time. If it's made of anything other than metal, and you turn it in the other direction when replacing it, the washer will crack when you apply any pressure to it. A small crack in the drain plug washer can result in quite a bit of oil loss. I got the bike loaded up and hit the road close to my 9 AM goal.

Picture a black motorcycle that looks like a dirt bike with knobby tires, white fenders and orange hand guards (procured cheaply from a friend). My friend Jeff's red dry bag sat on the back of the seat, held to the bike with two bungee nets. The dry bag was quite a score because it's a fancy Ortleib, a well-constructed bag that cost more than a hundred dollars. Jeff has more than one of them, and thankfully, one already had a small hole in it due to a mishap where the bag fell into the rear wheel of his Hawk 650 a few years ago. I considered a partially damaged Ortleib dry bag the perfect luggage for my trip. On top of the red bag sat two fresh tires, which when combined with the multi-colored bike, gave the impression of a Dust Bowl family heading West during the Great Depression.

I arrived in Birmingham at the Nelson Building, an impressive three-story structure in a swanky office park. I know the Nelson name through riding with the Nelson brothers, Ryan and Zack. Their dad, Stan, started Nelson & Company Engineering, and now they own their office building and sublet floors to other companies. I usually think of my friends as a bunch of goofballs who ride motorcycles, but every once in a while, I realize that many of them are kinda a big deal in their respective industries.

Ryan greeted me, and then I reacquainted myself with Dan B. We got to work loading Lloyd's and my bikes into the bed of one truck. Lloyd and Big Daddy arrived in a cool old green Ford pickup truck. We threw more gear inside the trailers, and we were on the road by 3 PM. One truck carried eight bikes in a trailer, and the other held six. With the two bikes in each truck bed, that brought us to 18 bikes with 17 riders.

Five of us loaded up into the two trucks:

• "Brother" Bob
• Dan aka "Big Dan"
• Greg aka "Big Daddy"
• John "Ice" T
• Lloyd aka "The Poet"

Dan and I would drive together the first day of the trip, and Lloyd rode with Big Daddy and Bob. We stopped for a quick dinner at a BBQ joint, and Dan took the opportunity to check inside the trailers and make sure everything was copasetic. Unfortunately, the custom shelf that held gear above the bikes had collapsed. A few 2x4s and 3/8" thick plywood were no match for hundreds of pounds of motorcycle gear. The 2x4s buckled in the middle and made a V with the bottom point resting on some of the motorcycles. Bob's bike bore the brunt of the weight, and he looked a little pale as he peered into the trailer.

Big Daddy and Lloyd said we should just roll through to Idaho with the shelf like that. Dan said he could not drive far knowing that the trailer was in disarray and that some bikes might get damaged. Bob stayed quiet, but I think he was in the fix-it camp. We found a Lowe's nearby and pulled into the contractor loading dock, near the lumber section. Dan went inside to see about getting some larger 2x6 joists, and the rest of us set about removing hundreds of pounds of motorcycle gear and tools from the FUBAR'd shelf.

After an hour and a half of sweating, grunting and hammering, we were ready to roll. This is TMI for a public blog, but my underwear had not been dry all day. I woke up at 5 AM, worked on my bike, rode to Birmingham in 90 degree weather, loaded up the bikes around noon and then fixed the shelves around 9 PM. Everyone felt sweaty and sticky. Dan changed his shirt three times that day, just trying to keep dry.

We finally rolled into Cape Girardeau, MO around 1 AM, making only 400 miles for the day, but we felt like we had worked out most of the kinks in the trailering system.  We set the weight distribution bar in Dan's trailer to the right level, where it would put pressure on the front wheels when braking. We discovered that the front end of Big Daddy's truck bounced up and down like a pogo stick when you hit certain undulations in the road at certain speeds.

B.D. had put a lot of money into preparing his truck for the adventure. He spent around $1,300 installing leaf springs and new brakes, but the truck needs new shocks in the front for an optimal ride. It's kinda fun watching the hood of the truck bound up and down, obscuring the horizon on occasion. It's kind of like driving down the road in a 10,000 pound bouncy house. I said, "It's fine as long as nothing bad happens," but Bob said the truck got a little hairy last night while he was chasing Lloyd and Dan in the other vehicle. Evidently, if the conditions are just right, the road oscillations can make the front end bounce hard enough to lift the front wheels off the ground.

B.D. and I were sleeping for that little episode, but Lloyd was watching in his rear view mirror and said it was quite a spectacle. I've never seen a 6,000 pound truck wheelie before, so hopefully I'll be awake for the next one.