Breakfast at 07:00 with the usual crowd, more or less, with extra helpings of bacon for dessert. Warchild happened by and hinted that moving our bikes from the garage out to the newly barricaded street would be A Good Thing To Do, as soon as we were able. That got most of us moving.

I grabbed my helmet from upstairs and took the bike around the block for a quick top-off to replace the gallon or so from yesterday’s ODO check. Back in the starting area, folks were really jamming their bikes in close together, I thought. I left a good four feet between my bike and my neighbor.

That mission complete, I had a few last-minute supplies to procure and headed out in search of a pharmacy. Alas, there are not many establishments open for business early on a Sunday morning in the land of Mormon, and that included the small old-school pharmacy just down the block from the hotel.

So I continued on a leisurely stroll back to Smith’s market, snapping a few more scenes from the deserted streets of Provo as I ambled along. A helicopter came flying into the valley and over the store, breaking up the morning stillness as it landed nearby (at a hospital?) A cool moment, though probably not good news for someone.

 

 

Time began to pass more slowly today: most of our i’s dotted and t’s crossed, there was nothing left to do but wait for the rider meeting at 14:00. As more riders began to migrate their bikes over to the new starting concourse, a few of us went up in to the garage roof to get a decent look down at the area. I was still a bit preoccupied with how close the bikes all were, and went back down to shift mine a couple feet to allow some breathing room. We did have the entire block to spread out after all. As unlikely as tip-overs are, they have happened during this event, and I was not eager to be written up as a victim of the next one.

The 14:00 rider meeting was held in an auditorium off the south lobby and cell phones were collected on the way in. We heard a bit from Lisa, Dale, and Bill Thweatt covering the normal stuff such as:

• Bikes impounded tomorrow morning at 07:30 in the new starting area. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who noticed the crowding-up issue in staging, as Dale also encouraged us all to s p r e a d  o u t the bikes a bit more, since we had the whole block to work with.
• Be at your bike with key AT 08:00 for the final ODO check and ID card punch, along with approval to depart along with the rest of the riders at go-time.
• Storage logistics for items being left at the hotel.
• Checkpoint 1 arrival expectations and procedures, etc.

Jeff Earls took over and covered all the standard information we needed to know about the rules and claiming bonuses during the rally. As he now has a few years of these talks under his belt, like any engineer he has tweaked his process, and was able to curtail most of the sillier questions by mentioning them within his written spiel, covering the meaning of daylight in a way that brooked no misinterpretation. 🌘🌗🌖🌕🌔🌓🌒 As in 2019, the deciding factor was being able to discern distant objects or skyline in the photo as proof that there is daylight in the sky. This is a fairly generous definition and one that would prove extremely relevant with the number of daylight-only bonuses in this year’s rally.

Immediately following the meeting, Tobie Stevens and other staff helped herd all of us onto a flight of stairs for the ‘Class of ’21’ start group photo.

Now came the wait after all that  “hurry up”. Two hours until the start banquet would begin, so more tire kicking, double and triple checking this and that, making sure the room was mostly packed up with the laptop connected to the TV and ready for routing later tonight.

The banquet dinner was delicious, a wonderful caesar salad with a couple meat choices and veggies (hard to come by as road food for the next couple of weeks). Finish that off with a nice slice of cheesecake, though the lack of coffee was a bit surprising with the hours of routing work ahead of us. Jim (fromFL) sat at the table and his Panamerica made for some good dinner conversation. I hadn’t actually read much about the bike and was impressed after hearing more about it and his brief experience with it so far.

Lisa Landry got up and kicked off the rally business portion of the meeting, welcoming and congratulating us all for making it to the start. She acknowledged the huge loss of all the international riders who couldn’t be with us this year due to the pandemic travel restrictions still in place. I think we ended up starting with around 78 motorcycles this year, down 25 from 2019.

Soon enough, she commenced with the handing out of rally packs in order of rider number, with a suggestion that we “hustle up” to the front when called so as to keep things flowing. Jim Owen ran up to get his packet, setting a precedent for all the riders that followed to not waste any time, even after Lionel’s unfortunate, if enthusiastic laydown on the carpet. 🙂

Numbers for this year were once again assigned based on each rider’s IBA membership number, with the exception of Wendy Crockett, who received #1 in recognition of her 2019 win, and Jim Owen receiving #2 in honor of his unmatched two victories in the event. For a few moments I had flashbacks to ’19 and thought I’d be called up last again, before someone reminded me that I had a three-digit number now. Oh yeah, that.

After everyone had their packages, Jeff took over the show and explained the theme for this year’s rally as “Miles of Progress” – visiting sites of important first-of-kind innovations throughout American history. We were given the OK to open the packets and place the enclosed ID badge and lanyard around our necks. Now we’re in it!

The rally book this year came as professionally color printed and double-sided glossy pages, with a keepsake leather portfolio embossed with the 2021 IBR logo. This would serve as our functional rally book as well as being in lieu of receiving a bound copy following the rally. My first thought was “that thing is HUGE!”. Luckily, we were not required to use the portfolio during the rally. Nice as it was, it was a pretty bulky item that wouldn’t fit into my on-bike process, so I immediately planned to store it with the small bag of clothes and other items I was leaving in Provo during the rally.

 

As Jeff explained, one of the twists for this year’s rally was the division of bonus locations into rally-wide and leg-specific. We had in our initial packet the Leg 1 bonus section of the book, as well as the 49 rally-wide bonuses, one per state plus DC, that would be valid to capture during every leg of the rally. Salient points included:

• We should be targeting about 12,000 points for Leg 1 to track towards finisher status.
• They estimated that the top 20% of riders at the finish would be Gold medal finishers, with silver as the next 20%, followed by bronze.
• Rally-wide bonuses:
  • could be claimed during any leg, but only once during the rally.
  • must be claimed on the leg during which they were visited.
  • cannot be re-claimed if denied on a previous leg.
• In addition to each rally-wide bonus’ point value, there was a progressive bonus structure for every five that you successfully claimed. IOW collect five states and be automatically awarded additional points, make it to 10 states and get an even bigger extra bonus, and so on. Each successive level you reached was named after a job position in a scientific research program, from “Dabbler” up to “Nobel Laureate”.
• Leg-specific bonus point values would significantly increase in later legs, even outweighing the progressive bonus values for the rally-wide bonuses.
• While the Leg 1-specific bonuses lay generally along the path of travel between the Start and Checkpoint 1, we could expect the same for Leg 2 bonuses between Checkpoints 1 and 2. Then Jeff continued, the Leg 3 bonuses would be “dispersed out west and among the rest of the country” (or words to that effect). Well the specific wording in that last part (delivered casually and masterfully by the routemaster) turned out to be critical for listening comprehension and overall routing strategy. Though I did notice the different wording, my brain still registered it as meaning primarily “the rest of the country between Checkpoint 2 and the Finish” (which of course turned out to be far from the case when Leg 3 rolled around).

After covering a couple specifics and corrections, riders asked just a few questions. Thinking about Butt Lite IX and the swag mug that was required for a certain bonus, I asked whether riders would require any of their swag bag items in order to successfully claim a bonus on any leg in the rally. Jeff said no, which was a relief because I was pretty much packed to the gills!

Finally, we were unleashed to head to our rooms and figure out just where in hell we’d each be headed off to in the morning. As usual there was a backup at the elevators, though everyone is patient and polite about it. I made it into the 2nd or 3rd load, wished everyone else luck as I departed on my floor, brewed some coffee, and got down to business.

Here was the initial spread of bonuses, including Leg 1 and rally-wide, that we had to work with.

With the recent dearth of rallies to ride and full schedule at home/work, I was feeling somewhat rusty with my routing prep workflow, and took extra time to make sure I did everything correctly. I had everything sorted and up in Basecamp after about an hour and got to work on a route.

About a half hour later, I was surprised by a knock at my door – it was Jeff and Lisa stopping by, asking for a look at how my plans were coming along. I was a bit surprised and flattered, but had heard that RMs will sometime pay these visits to podium finishers to get a feel for how their gameboard may unfold the next day. I was still fleshing out my initial Plan A strategy for the leg and hadn’t made much progress. They of course couldn’t offer any feedback so their visit was brief, but it was appreciated and nice to see their interest.

Based on Jeff’s reveal that later leg bonuses were worth a lot more, I was feeling that the rally-wide state bonuses would be somewhat important as differentiators, but not necessarily critical to placing high in the rally. A route to the northwest caught my eye, and I spent the rest of the night fine-tuning it with different scenarios.

On some rallies I end up created 4 or more completely different routes to compare, but this one seemed to maximize points so I just kept tweaking. I felt like skipping out on the points clusters that were available on this leg to go south would place too much emphasis on the rally-wide state bonuses and was a big gamble, not to mention a much bigger ride for the same or less points. I was up until past 01:00 finalizing a plan, creating my route cheat sheet, and getting everything packed up for the morning.