Ants in your pants? Nope, grasshoppers.

Okay, "grasshoppER" (singular, not plural). Still a funny story though. We set up our camp on Sunday, right next to the port-o-johns for easy access, parking our bikes and the truck/trailer between the tents and the "thunderboxes," as one of my professors once dubbed them. Also key to this story, if I forgot to mention it before, is that the campground is really just an old cow pasture, complete with dried meadow muffins and what probably amounts to millions of grasshoppers (which are, by the way, a turkey's favorite snack, so we got to see a few flocks in the mornings, munching away on the hillside behind us). Seriously, when you walked through the grass, they would leap out of your way in every direction, like walking through a kettle of popping corn.

So, on Monday morning, my dad and I were doing something with the bikes, and I was squatting next to mine to check something, and when I stood up, I felt something touching my inner thigh. When I reached down and felt the small lump inside my jeans, the little bastard bit me! For those of you who've ever been pinched by a crab, it felt exactly like that. So I start yelling and jumping around like I'm walking on hot coals, grabbing at my pants and trying to shake the little creep out, but he won't let go. So, in my panic, I unbuckle my belt and button-fly and yank my jeans down to my knees, taking just the back-end of my underwear in the process, and sustaining at least another bite. Still cursing my lungs out, I fish the grasshopper out of the folds of the jeans and flick him away into the grass where he could hop freely and go torment some other poor soul.

At this point, I recover enough of my awareness to realize that Meredith and my dad are standing there laughing their asses off and, if it weren't for the port-o-potties directly behind me, I'd be mooning the entire campground. As it was, only a few members of our group heard the commotion and managed to stick their heads out of the canopy/tent in time to see me bashfully trying to recover my pants and what was left of my dignity. Seriously, though, you should have seen the bite marks; they frickin' hurt!

Today was boring and not worth recounting. We're at an EconoLodge in Princeton, I'LL and plan to have "kickstands up" by 8:00 A.M. See you then!

"That's it, man. When I go home I'm gonna find me a new Black Guy."

So, all my dates are gonna be screwed up since I'm so far behind on my blogging, but the days have just been so packed I haven't had the time or energy. In fact, I've been going to sleep earlier and earlier every night except last night. Last night I got to stay up and do the laundry! This hotel had one washer and one dryer for what probably amounts to 300 guests, so it took a while to even get our turn.

We went out to dinner at this awesome restaurant called Carnaval. It's on it's way to being a pretty big national chain, I think, because the concept is so cool and so well-executed. It's basically a Brazillian steakhouse, but you can order seafood or pasta or other regular entrees. However, unless you're vegetarian, I recommend you don't bother with all that. Go for their "Gaucho-Style" dinner. For $25 you get unlimited trips to the hot and cold salad bars (the garlic mashed potatoes knocked my socks off--I had to go back twice for more), and a large, plastic coin that's green on one side, red on the other. Turn your coin over to green and prepare to be bombarded. Waiters with long skewers full of meat--top sirloin, pork chops, prime rib, Parmesan chicken, bacon-wrapped steak of some kind, all out of this world delicious--and warm, cinnamon-dusted pineapple circle the dining room, looking for green coins. If they spy yours, they plop their tray down next to you and proceed to shave off your choice of cut right off the skewer. Every guest gets a pair of tongs to help you take the cut to your plate as the waiter slices it. Plus, they'll bring you plates and plates of coconut-crusted fried bananas. Seriously, if you ever get the chance, you've got to try this place out. Oh, and the bathrooms were GORGEOUS. I felt bad about using them to their intended purpose. The faucets were made to look like old-fashioned water pumps! So cool.

Anyway, we're on the road home, now, and today's going to be an especially long day, so I have plenty of time to catch up on my blogging. We broke camp yesterday morning, partially in the rain, and said goodbye to Lenny and Benny, on their way back to Seattle with Lenny's wife, Lisa. Speaking of Lenny and Benny, I should probably explain the quote in the title of today's entry. Lenny and Benny are friends of Tony and Jap (For those of you who don't know, Jap is, in fact, Japanese, but his initials are actually J. A. P. so it's not a racial slur, I promise.) from Seattle. Lenny is a tall, thin, tow-headed white guy with a wry sense of humor and a really easy-going manner. Benny is shorter than Lenny, but he's a big, sassy black man with quick tongue and slow accent. They are the oddest pair I have ever seen and I love them dearly. One night at the campsite, they were bickering over the day's ride, since Barry had led the group that day, instead of Lenny, who was our fearless leader the first two or three days. Benny was giving Lenny shit about not "respecting his authoritaaay" as leader and Lenny finally just said, "You know what, man, that's it. When I go home I'm gonna find myself a new Black Guy." We all just about fell out of our chairs laughing.

I'm going to try to keep up appearances a little, here, and divide up the posts chronologically, even though the date stamps will be off. Wish me luck. And here's a picture for you: the closest we got to a buffalo all trip!

We Don't Serve Women, So Bring Your Own

That was actually posted on a sign outside a bar we passed the day before yesterday. Awesome.

First of all, I felt a lot better after I got a good night's sleep. I woke up and thumbed my nose at the previous day's self-pity party, chalked it up to PMS, and called it a brand new day. I'd also like to take back what I said about this trip not being what I hoped for. Two weeks is a long time to be on the road, and I'm just bound to have a bad day or two. C'est la vie!

So back to business. And by business I mean a proper blog, not all this whiney, angsty, teenagery livejournal bullshit. In fact I'll probably edit a lot of that out as soon as I'm near a proper computer.

We took our time yesterday morning, not really sleeping in, but at least relaxing more than usual. Dad and I dropped my bike off for repairs at a place in Sturgis, but he ended up being too swamped to be able to take it. At any rate I was without a bike and thus ended up on the back of Mattie's Road King. We headed out around 10, bound for Mount Rushmore and passed through some of the most beautiful country I've ever seen.

Unfortunately, we got stuck behind a bad accident; there are hundreds of thousands of riders here and accidents are bound to happen. This was really brutal though. We didn't see the accident itself but we saw the ambulances rush in and, a few minutes later, watched the paramedics pulled the white sheet and black body bag out of the truck. It was a somber procession as we rode through the scene, as soon as the police began directing traffic. The body was in the left lane, covered up except for a single foot sticking out from under the body bag, and the river of blood trickling down into the ditch. I had a really visceral reaction and had to fight not to throw up. It was definitely sobering. It made us all think pretty hard about why we ride. We do what we love and love what we do, but we have to realize the heavy risk we take every time we get on a bike. To me, it's worth it, especially when I look around and take in all the incredible things we saw the rest of that day.

For the sake of not making one stupidly long post, I'll post this much now and catch up with the rest later.

Things are looking up

I know it's been two days since my last abysmal post but, trust me, things are looking WAY up. I'll post more tomorrow. Here's a picture of Benny on Lenny's mini bike to tide you over.

Have you ever felt so out of place that the smile on your face was to keep from crying?

I don't even know where to begin explaining this day. It was generally miserable with a couple highlights. That about sums it up. This is not a great start to the trip.

To make a short story long, let me begin by saying that my motorcycle doesn't have a windshield. At least, it didn't until late this afternoon. For those of you unfamiliar with motorcycles, riding without a windshield may look really cool, but get up any faster than, say, 55 mph and it's like getting dragged into a dark alley by a bunch of angry Russians and getting the snot kicked out of you. Several parts of our trip today took place at 65-75 mph and all I can say is that I hope that is the closest I ever come to physical and psychological torture in my life. First of all, it's just a straight-up battle to sit upright when the wind is blowing into your chest like that. Second of all, the wind is practically deafening at that speed; I could literally feel my eardrums luffing like a sail inside my head. My ears are still ringing. Third of all, I had trouble seeing, especially after my sunglasses shattered against my skull due to the intensity of the wind. I'm not even kidding; the frame just suddenly snapped against my forehead. I thought I'd been hit by yet another bee or large beetle. Finally, there's a lot of dust in the air over the road, especially when passing vehicles and the bikes ahead of you kick it up and, believe me, that stuff STINGS at 70 mph.

To top it all off, I've been having engine trouble with my bike, and occasionally it would "stutter" or cut out completely, usually whenever I had just managed to forget about the last incident. It all just gradually added up and slowly drove me to distraction. I just about snapped. It was a really rough day. We finally wound up at the Harley dealership in Rapid City, where my dad finally bought me a really nice windshield from Memphis Shades, which was on the day's agenda even before I had my little meltdown. The difference was incredible. We got back on the interstate to head back to our campground and I was grinning like an idiot because, for the first time ever, 70 mph didn't HURT. I haven't had that much fun on a bike in ages. Plus my back felt better because I wasn't straining to hold myself up. The icing on the Awesome Cake, though, was stopping at the bottom of the ramp at our exit and seeing the license plate on the car in front of us from Nebraska. I've been "collecting" license plates from all 50 states for the last 3 years, exclusively on cross-country road trips, and I've been ticking off the last few from the Northwest on this trip. Nebraska was the very last one. (Okay, so technically I still need Hawai'i, but I never had high hopes for that one.)

At any rate, I'm exhausted and stressed and depressed and feeling incredibly out of place. I just don't feel like I fit in here, and it's really getting to me. When I get like this I tend to space out and do really stupid things, like accidentally leaving the truck running at the campsite the entire three hours we were down in Sturgis checking out the rally, which just makes me feel infinitely worse. I just keep screwing up, which makes me paranoid that no one likes having me around because, quite frankly, I don't want me around right now. I just want to stay in my tent and sleep and stop bothering everyone, but--oh, yeah--I can't do that either because the wind is so strong in this field it keeps crushing my tent on top of me and whipping it around so noisily I can't sleep. And I have a sunburn.

Anyway, here are some random pictures from the day: Lenny and Benny messing around with Lenny's mini-bike that he bought for his son years ago; the 6:30 A.M. sunrise from inside my tent; and a couple pictures from Spearfish Canyon and Spearfish Falls.

Yeah, the places here have awesome names like Spearfish, Dead Horse Gulch, and Hell Canyon. I'm jealous.

Sturgis or bust

We're so close to Sturgis I can almost taste it. Just in the last few hours, the number of motorcycles on the road has tripled, at least. Frankly, South Dakota just isn't as as pretty as Minnesota. It's just prairie land stretching into infinity, it seems. Flat as a frying pan and about interesting to stare at for six hours. Saw a couple cool things, though: some longhorn cattle and tons of Black Angus (or Black and Gus, as Tommy and I call them), fields of sunflowers stretching out to the horizon, an 80-foot brachiosaurus in a town called Wall, and more billboards than I've ever seen. Seriously, there's nothing else to look at out here so they just line the roads with billboards, every couple hundred feet for hundreds of miles. They're really annoying, actually. Also, we stopped at gas station with a bar called the Busted Nut. No Joke. And we drove through a swarm of butterflies that got stuck in my grille. Just arrived at the campground! Woohoo!

Minnesota makes me smile

Rolling through Minnesota farm country today. It's unbelievably beautiful. Just fields of corn and soybeans and something emerald-colored I can't identify stretching away from the road for miles. Every once in a while I see a crop duster circling above a field or a huge windfarm way in the distance, the wind turbines making their lazy, endless circles in the sky. A crop duster even blew right past us on the left, a few feet off the ground. So cool. We stopped at a gas station and I found the funniest snack. It's a starkist package deal, with a pouch of tuna, a packet each of mayonnaise and relish, a napkin and mixing spoon, a packet of ritz crackers and even a little mint for your tuna breath. I didn't end up eating the mint, though. It looked like a tiny urinal cake.

Feeling hungover today but it's well worth it for the awesome time we had last night. We arrived at Stevie and Annie's house around 2:30 and just about crashed. I even took a much-needed nap for a couple of hours. They have a beautiful home, about a half hour from St. Paul and Minneapolis, and it was wonderful talking to Annie. She and I just clicked and had some great conversations. I was a little bummed their daughter Katie wasn't there because she's just two weeks younger than me, but they just dropped her off in Boston for her new job. We had a great cookout with burgers and dogs and sweet corn on the cob. Annie even made brownies!

We're really pushing it today, trying to get all the way to Sturgis in time to set up our camp and tents and stuff. It's okay with me today, though. It's such a gorgeous day and this country is so beautiful; nothing can get me down today.

Getting out of dodge in Madison, WI

I meant to post again last night but finding a hotel was such a circus I was too exhausted. Once we crossed into Wisconsin we stopped for dinner in a rest area (or was that still in Illinois? I keep losing track!) And decided to press on for a couple more hours. At a gas station about 50 miles from Madison, we decided to just drive until we reach the outskirts of the city and can locate a hotel. Well, we couldn't find a hotel and ended up in the heart of Madison after dark and then the defication really hit the ventilation. We drove in circles for almost an hour, finding nothing but questionable motels. We even pulled into a place that looked like a total dive, purely out of frustration. I pulled up some reviews for the place on my phone and probably turned white as a sheet. I said to the crew, "We need to leave NOW." Seriously, some of the things people said about this hotel were just horrifying. I can't even mention them they were so vile.

At any rate, we ended up getting our bearings eventually and found a nice Howard Johnson's down the road around 10:00 or 10:30. What a relief! I was so exhausted, I was out like a light before 10:45. This morning I felt loads better but definitely could have slept a few more hours. I can feel myself getting crankier, just craving a little quiet me-time, but I seem to have found a small window, here. Everyone went into Hardee's to eat , but there's nothing on the menu there that I'll eat, so I came outside to type a quick little blog post. I can't wait to get to Stevie's house and get some relaxation time. Two hours to go!

Sorry, no pictures right now, but here's a fun fact for you: the state highways in Wisconsin are not numbered, but lettered. As far as I can tell, single letters (A, B, C, etc...) go north-south, double letters (AA, BC, DG, etc...) go east-west, and triple letters go God-only-knows-where. But don't quote me on that.

Sweet Home Chicago

We're less than an hour from Chicago, now, and hoping to get another four or five hours in before we stop for the night. We're making great time, though, especially since we gained an hour when we crossed the time zone line on the Indiana/Illinois border. We're hoping to get as far as we possibly can today since it's only another 10 or 11 hours to Stevie and Annie's house in Minnesota and we'd like to get there early tomorrow and have the whole afternoon and evening to relax and visit with them. Steve is one of my dad's oldest and closest friends from when they grew up in Milton, outside Boston, and they always have some great stories of their escapades. I'm really looking forward to seeing them; it's been so long!

It's sort of shocking to me, actually, how quickly Indiana passed beneath our tires and was gone. It's actually taken me so long to type this on my phone's little qwerty keypad that I'm now staring at the city scape of Chicago for the first time in my life. After what seemed like endless miles of nothing but corn and soybeans as far as the eye can see, I'm actually stuck in gridlocked traffic in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the country.

Here are a couple pictures of the city as I saw it, as well as a ridiculous display I saw in a rest stop gift shop in Indiana. They're called Roffle Buddies they're just stuffed animals with a mechanism inside that makes them literally ROFL (Roll On the Floor, Laughing), and they emit this maniacal cackle that makes me wonder what diabolical bastard thought a child would enjoy such a thing. Anyway, that's all for now. More soon!

Round One...FIGHT!!!

Well, day one is over and it's been a long one. I woke up to the sound of Tony grinding coffee in the kitchen and had no idea where I was for a moment. Strange blanket, strange couch, strange house: I slowly remember that I'm in Connecticut and that, last night, my dad and his girlfriend, Meredith, showed up at my house at dusk, hurriedly strapped my motorcycle into the trailer attached to the back of my pickup truck, and whisked me away to our rendezvous point at Tony's house in Connecticut, where Matty was already waiting.

This morning we woke up early, just as Jap rolled into the driveway, trying to get a head start on the day, but after we finally worked out the jigsaw puzzle of trying to load everyone's stuff and the coolers into the bed of the truck, a rainstorm swept in and forced us to wait it out for a little over an hour. We drove from about 9:15 a.m. to around 8:45--almost a full 12 hours of riding. The guys were all on their bikes, while Meredith and I rode in the truck, towing just my bike and looking like the biggest couple of lesbos you've ever seen. My MoHo's would be so proud! We traded back and forth with the driving about every other rest stop and did word puzzles together to pass the time. Thankfully we brought a metric s***-ton of CD's so we have plenty of great music for the long drive.

Other than the MONSTROUS tires we saw on the back of an oversize semi and the priceless moment when Meredith saw a couple other bikers pull up behind us and called them "stranglers" (she meant "stragglers"), it eas a pretty uneventful day. We ended up just short of our goal of Cleveland: at a Comfort Inn in Youngstown, OH. All in all, a great first day. Here are a couple pictures of the crew, for your enjoyment:

Testing picture blogging

Had to resend the post email twice. Still figuring all this mobile stuff out. Sorry about the "forwarded message." Didn't feel like retyping it. I'll get all this down eventually!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Ryan Dorsey" <rhdorsey@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 2, 2010 12:28 PM
Subject: Testing picture blogging
To: <go@blogger.com>

This is my dad's sweet Mazda 3 that I get to zip around in while he's getting my truck hitched to the trailer. Just wanted to see if I could post pics on my blog from my phone.

Sprains, stains, and automobiles

So here's a rundown of information from the past few weeks.

1. Sprains

I am on week three of healing after spraining my ankle while shooting hoops with Tommy in the driveway. I am officially without crutch and without brace (experimentally), and seem to be doing very well. It was the second most painful experience of my life, but my knight in shining armor (Tom) carried my sorry, sobbing, wobbly ass into the house and got me an icepack and a vicodin and kissed it and made it all better. Well, a little better anyway. He made me laugh, at least. Neither of us remember if the ball went in after I took the shot which took my ankle, which is kind of disappointing, but I like to think it did.

2. Stains

I'm a red-head! Again! I tried dying my hair chemically a couple years ago and it just kept washing out, but I really loved it. So, this time I tried henna! It's all-natural and actually good for you and your hair, which is sweet. It's extracted from a plant and can be used to stain the skin or hair and when you buy it, it comes as an olive-green powder, which you then mix with something acidic--like lemon juice--and allow to sit overnight. The smell is pretty strong but not overly unpleasant. Really the only major turnoff is that the stuff is the color and consistency of goose poop. My friend Katy literally had to just slather it on my hair, and then I sat like that, with poo on my head, for four hours. It was worth it, though, because the color is GORGEOUS. It looks so natural now that it's had a couple days to mature. I LOVE IT!

3. Automobiles

The epic, whirlwind odyssey that has been my 2003 Toyota Tacoma pickup truck for the last year-and-a-half finally seems to have settle down. After flipping it on the roof in January (an $11,000 repair that my insurance company miraculously decided to take on), having the frame replaced by Toyota in July (factory recall for rust damage to the frame--$12,000), and the various systems and parts I've had to replace due to rust damage spreading from the crappy frame, I'd say my vehicle has racked up over $25,000 in repairs in the last year--about twice the value of the truck itself. Finally, though, all seems to be well and the truck is ship-shape and ready for her 4,000 journey to South Dakota and back over the next two weeks. Go Becky! (I named her after the Dierks Bentley song, "What Was I Thinkin'," wherein "Becky was a beauty from south Alabama; her daddy had a heart like a nine-pound hammer. What was I thinkin'?"


In other news, I got my droid yesterday! Huzzah! Still figuring out how it works (LG Ally), but hopefully I'll be good to go for picture uploads and whatnot by the time I begin my trip. WHICH IS TOTALLY HAPPENING THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, GUYS. Holy crap. I should probably start thinking about packing...