Riding Season Wrapup

I tried to extend the 2018 riding season as long as possible, but it came to an end around Thanksgiving weekend. The weather had turned cold in late September and never really warmed up again. What with northeast Wisconsin receiving 24 inches of snow in late April it made for a pretty short riding window. But the season did have its highlights.

The Slimey Crud Run west of Madison, Wisconsin, has been a ride I have been anxious to experience. Family commitments have prevented me from taking part, but this year I was able to participate. It is held the first Sunday in May and this year the weather was perfect. I rode over to visit some of my old haunts at Fort McCoy before going south to Madison on Saturday. After spending the night on the west side of Madison I arrived in Pine Bluff in plenty of time to check out the multitude of bikes that showed up. A friend I met there seemed to know every twisty road from there to the destination in Leland, so we had a great ride. The ride home featured more curves and it was an excellent motorcycling weekend.

Post Headquarters at Fort McCoy

This S1000RR had all the goodies on it

My brother and  I rode up to Duluth, Minnesota in June for our aunt's funeral. We stopped at his friend's farm in central Wisconsin on the way. It was a great reminder of just how labor intensive it is to operate a family farm. It made me think that many people who rail against Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), or corporate farms, may have never experienced life on one of the family farms they rhapsodize over.

July brought a trip to Iowa for the BMW International Rally. It was held at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines, a beautiful rally site. The weather was brutally hot, but we enjoyed the ride and the rally.

This was a good stop on the way to Des Moines

While these were all rides on my 2011 BMW R1200 GSA, I did get out on my Harley Davidson over the summer. It is not equipped for long trips and overnights like the Beemer, so they were all day rides.

One that I particularly enjoyed caused me to write a couple of letters to my state representatives. On a rare warm day in May, my route took me west on Highway 21, north on Highway 45, and south through the Menominee Indian Reservation. I must have passed a half dozen waysides that were closed along with an unoccupied ranger station on the Wolf River. My state senator's office wrote back saying that some of the sitesw were closed for budgetary reasons and others would open after Memorial Day. A recheck in the summer showed that some of them did open up.

I also took the Harley down to Bike Night in Menasha  a couple of times. All in all it was a good summer on the big Dyna.

One of the closed waysides

The last big ride of the season was in September. I took the BMW into southeast Wisconsin in search of some Rustic Roads. Over the course of two days I rode seventeen of them and put on about 550 miles. I spent the night in Waterford. Most of them were paved, but there was enough dirt and gravel to make it interesting for me.

Rustic Road Five on a misty morning

The bikes are under cover and hooked up to the battery tenders for the winter. While I sometimes think it would be nice to be able to ride year round, the winter break provides an opportunity to look back on the rides past and begin to dream of the rides to come. Yesterday I created the 2019 Vacation folder in my email account, so plans are already being made.