On the Road to
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On the Road to
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In the Beginning...
It started at breakfast. I had organized the first Fall Eastern Hawk Rally the last weekend in September at Two Wheels Only, and on Sunday morning I sat down with Anthony McElroy, Herb Liner, and Trish McDermott, who were talking about doing an Iron Butt ride -- specifically a Saddle Sore 1000 from Atlanta to somewhere in Florida and back.
I'd been intrigued by this particular type of long distance ride ever since the sixties, when I read about mad Brits doing 1000 miles around England and Scotland in less than 24 hours, but despite lots of long distance riding in the 60's and 70's, I never felt that I had the equipment, or sufficient inclination to do anything about it until this year, when I acquired a used Honda Pacific Coast. Prior to 1999, the longest I had ever ridden in a single day was about 650 miles, from Lexington, Ohio to Atlanta on a 1988 Honda HawkGT. I finished that ride with numbness in my hands that didn't go away for several days, and I didn't look forward to repeating that part of the experience. But a Pacific Coast with a Corbin seat and a throttle lock might make a SaddleSore 1000 doable, perhaps even enjoyable.
Red PC, Black PCLike many wild hare ideas over a meal with friends, nothing much came of this one for a while, although Anthony, Trish, and I exchanged email messages occasionally. In fact, as autumn set in, I thought we weren't likely to pull off a ride until spring. Then, on October 13, Anthony sent me a message, suggesting November 13. We would need unusually good weather to pull off a ride this late in the year, but I agreed, as did Herb. Like me, Anthony has a Pacific Coast, while Herb would be riding a Kawasaki Vulcan. With a date in mind, we started planning seriously.
Anthony's original idea for a route was down I-75 to Kissimmee and back, but on closer checking, we realized it would come up a few miles short. I checked out a circular route, Atlanta to Valdosta to Mobile to Atlanta, but this came up even shorter. Then, while perusing a map of Florida, I followed the turnpike south from Kissimmee, and saw an interchange at Yeehaw Junction. According to the FreeTrip web site, the distance was 524 miles -- just right. And, with a name like Yeehaw Junction, how could we not go? A little bit of web searching revealed that Yeehaw Junction was formerly named Jackass Crossing, and that its claim to fame is the Desert Inn, a restaurant, bar, package store, and former whorehouse that is even on the National Register of Historic Places:
FL -- Osceola Desert Inn 5570 S. Kenansville Rd. Yeehaw Junction 19940103 93001158
Yeehaw! If we left at 4 in the morning, we could ride for 9 hours, stop for lunch, turn around, and be back before midnight.
Scouting Report and Tune Up
With a route and a date in mind, I decided to take a tune up ride, to make sure that I could go the distance (I had no doubts about the bike), and to look for likely gas stops. I left home at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday, November 6. The thermometer read 40 degrees. I was wearing a long sleeve cotton shirt, a long sleeve cotton turtleneck, and a riding jacket with an insulated liner. I had removed the armor from the jacket, and under it I was wearing a Dainese body armor suit, which provides shoulder-to-hips back support. From the inside out, a pair of padded bicycle shorts, Wrangler field pants (1000 denier Cordura over denim), and a pair of nylon wind pants covered my lower half, while a pair of polypropylene glove liners inside 3-fingered gloves kept the hands warm. I also packed a pair of polypropylene long underwear, just in case I needed more insulation.
At the one hour mark, it was obvious that despite all the layers, I wasn't dressed warmly enough, so I pulled off for a cup of hot tea at a Waffle House, the ubiquitous 24-hour road stop in the South. This gave me a chance to pull on the long underwear and 15 minutes to thaw out. Although he sky was starting to lighten as I left the Waffle House, I didn't really start to feel warm until after 8:00, approaching Valdosta, with the sun well above the horizon.
My turn-around point was 333 miles (by the odometer), somewhere between Lake City and Gainesville. As the temperature approached 80, I stowed my outer jacket in the trunk and rode with just the screaming yellow Dainese body armor over the two cotton shirts. I pulled in my driveway at 3:18 p.m., with an odometer reading of 660 miles, feeling good. Nothing hurt. I knew that another 400 miles would require 100% more effort, but felt that I would be able to handle the added distance and seat time, with only the addition of an insulated vest to better preserve my body core temperature during the estimated 7 hours of riding in darkness required for the full distance.
On the Road to Yeehaw Junction
Friday evening, November 12, I rode over to Anthony's house, so that I wouldn't have to add twenty-five more miles in the middle of the night to Saturday's ride. We pushed our departure time back from 3:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. to reduce the time spent riding in cold and darkness, and to make it a little easier on our start witness, Jim Swann. Even though it was a week later into November, the outside temperature was 10 degrees warmer than the previous week.
With the start point witnessing ceremony out of the way, we let Jim go back to bed and left his house at 4:00 sharp, and headed for our first stop, a 24-hour Amoco station just off I-75. The gas pumps, which Anthony had checked during trip planning, didn't spit out receipts as they were supposed to. The doors to the gas station were locked. What to do? After we stood around for 5 minutes, an attendant appeared, and we had our critical starting documentation -- a receipt with place, date, and time.
Fog had developed overnight. Fortunately, it wasn't heavy, but occasionally thickened, so that we had to slow down. Going through downtown Atlanta, Anthony was keeping closer to trucks than I liked, so I pulled in front and moved over to the unoccupied HOV lane. With Anthony and Herb behind me, both riding bikes equipped with high intensity lights, I could see my own shadow thrown into the fog ahead of me. Had Monday's Atlanta Journal Constitution story about 50,000 animal car collisions a year in Georgia, appeared on Friday, I think I would have kept a distant third.
Our first stop, at a truck plaza south of Macon, didn't go much better than the start. My pump wouldn't produce a receipt, and the clerk inside didn't have a clue how to create one. Documentation wasn't critical for this stop, so we pressed on, but blew 20 minutes in the process.
The rest of the day was stop, gas, walk around, drink some water, chew some food; repeat. The Vulcan had both less range and a slower cruising speed than the PCs, so we stopped more frequently than I would have liked. Around Valdosta the fog burned off, and we got some sunshine. Then, just south of Lake City, clouds returned, and we stayed cooler than expected through central Florida. About 15 miles short of the Canoe Creek service plaza, Herb started worrying about the fuel level in his Vulcan, reached into a saddle bag and pulled out a 2-liter soda bottle filled with gasoline. He discovered that you really can't pour gasoline into a tank while driving down the highway, so we pulled onto the shoulder. He had enough to get to the service plaza. We reached our turn around point, Yeehaw Junction, at 12:27 p.m., only a few minutes behind my estimated schedule. Anthony's GPS showed 523 miles elapsed since our start.
After we left the turnpike, Anthony asked, "Where are we stopping for lunch?"
I said, "Turn right at the stop sign; the Desert Inn should be about a half mile straight ahead."
There it was, looking just like in the pictures. As we got off the bikes, Herb and Anthony looked at me and said, "Are you sure this is where we're eating lunch?"
The Desert InnI walked in through the front door wearing my screaming yellow bug suit. From behind the bar, Donna the bartender said, "Good god, what is that thing you're wearing?"
I said, "Ma'am, we're on a mission. This is a bug suit -- body armor. Have you ever heard of an Iron Butt ride?"
"No, I haven't."
"Well, an Iron Butt ride is when you ride more than 1000 miles in less than 24 hours. We're going to need a witness."
"I can probably do that. But, [pointing to our helmets] if you're supposed to have an iron butt, it seems like you've got your padding on the wrong end."
"The helmet is for my head. But, you don't know what I'm wearing inside my pants."
"And I don't think I want to know. What'll you have for lunch?"
Bartender Donna Pellerin
and the gangThe Desert Inn lives up to its reputation as a mecca for cracker culture. The music on the jukebox, the guys sitting around the bar, decades and decades of accreted stuff give the place an aura that they just can't reproduce 60 miles north in Orlando. We didn't have time for a tour of the bordello museum upstairs, and we declined a calendar of donkey jokes (donkey breeding being one of the other activities at the Desert Inn), but we did buy some T-shirts before leaving.
In addition to Donna, a local carpenter, Milton Shelfer, offered to witness our turn around forms, and we were cautioned on the way out to ride safely. Nice place, nice folks. Fifty minutes is generous for lunch during a SaddleSore 1000, but we were pretty much on schedule, despite slow and frequent stops, and the weather couldn't be much better, so we had no reason to rush.
Anthony and HerbThe return trip was more of the same, except without any glitches at gas stations. We hit the Georgia border at dusk and put on warmer clothing. Traffic had been light in northern Florida, but it seemed like as soon as we hit Valdosta, we had to watch out for SUVs and trucks for most of the rest of the trip. We stopped at McDonough, about 20 miles south of Atlanta at 9:00 to call my wife and tell her to meet us at the Marietta Amoco station to be our end point witness.
Herb split off at I-285 to return to his home in Birmingham, another 150 miles away [He arrived just before midnight]. Anthony and I reached downtown Atlanta at 9:30, when I realized that if I picked up the pace a little, we could reach our final check point in less than 18 hours. The last ten miles went by quickly, in a blur of traffic. At 9:43 I pulled in to the same gas station that we had left earlier in the morning, put the bike on its centerstand, whipped out my credit card, and got a time stamped receipt for 9:44 p.m. Then I hugged my wife. When doing an Iron Butt ride, you've got to have some priorities. We went inside the gas station to finish the paperwork, and finally home. I slept well.
Pretty good ride; maybe I'll do another one some day.
Page maintained by Selden Deemer
Last change date: June 12, 2000
