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...