I awoke on Friday too early for the breakfast buffet, so made some coffee in the room and chilled for a bit, reading online and watch the sunrise over the mountains, overlooking empty city streets. Nice start to a down day.

I left Tim to his morning plans and headed down to enjoy a nice 07:00 breakfast buffet with fellow early arrivals Gerry, James, Tom, Marty, Lew, and Buddy. The heat wave continued to be a popular topic of conversation. Marty joked that regardless of where the bonuses ended up, he was “going to Helena”, apparently one of the cooler locations on the current weather map.

The sobre mesa extended for a while, as I took advantage of the opportunity of having nothing and nowhere to do or be. It’s great to have time to chat with so many folks from around the country whom you rarely get to see in real life without a clock ticking. Enjoyed good conversation with Paul Partin about the 2019 rally. Then Jim Owen took a chair, followed shortly after by Jeff & Cathy Earls, so of course I had to stick around a bit longer! Even though I’ve met and know these guys a little bit now, still honored to be able to sit and chat with such successful long-time veterans of this hobby, even just about day-to-day subjects like retirement, moving houses, and building-a-friggin-plane-in-your-garage. Yeah, normal stuff.

After a leisurely couple hours, I finally got up from the breakfast table to take care of a few errands. Yesterday’s fork light repair with JB Weld appeared to be holding well. I gave it a couple wraps of Gorilla tape for good measure, while the epoxy continued to cure, and called it good. Then I geared up and headed back out onto the mean streets of Provo. 😉

I procured a gallon of oil from a local AutoZone, to change at the finish before heading home. Topped off the fuel tank as well as the air in both tires, which had started off a bit lower than I normally run them before I’d left home. So far, the new TPMS unit had been rock solid, with the rechargeable monitor battery lasting the entire three day trip. I added it to my list of “things to charge” in hotel rooms, but at least I knew it could go a few days on a charge if needed.

In the meantime, my buddy Gerry was going through the wringer with staffer Brian Roberts & Co. at the pre-rally fuel tank inspection station on the top floor of the garage. I stopped by to offer moral support. James had been thoughtful enough to provide a pop-up canopy for Gerry, so he wouldn’t need to bake in the sun while siphoning his custom oversize FJR “Frankentank” in order to get a full and proper measurement on its capacity.

Though everyone already knew that these tanks are nowhere close to the 11.5 gallon limit for the event, the demands of the scientific process must be satisfied. Gerry was good-natured about it afterwards (as usual) and just happy to get through the process relatively unscathed.

I did a bit of tire-kicking in the garage, looking over the bikes that weren’t covered up.  Steve Giffin was out there, trying to address a fuel vapor-lock issue on his FJR. He’d apparently taken the Rallymaster’s advice, gotten his back issue looked at, and was feeling better, which was bad for the rest of us. 🙂

Jason Jonas and Chris Sakala had a station set up with laptops in the lobby, for riders to verify their spotwalla.com tracking was working, so I stopped by and finally got to meet Mr. Jonas (creator/maintainer of Spotwalla) in person. Great dude and I thanked him for all his efforts on that site, which has become synonymous with LD ride tracking. He always gets a few bucks from me each year and I encourage all users of the site to donate to show their thanks for such an amazing and useful tool.

More and more riders were arriving today, including my buds Ken and Marc, who’d stopped short of Provo yesterday to take care of some maintenance items. A few of us helped get Marc’s truck & trailer situated in the garage, then I cooled my heels back in the room for a bit. Tim had apparently moved out by now to commandeer his own quarters, leaving his area neat as a pin, with a George Wyman sticker and calling card left on the credenza for me. I checked on things back home and caught up on my travel notes until getting a text from the guys to hit a local Mexican place for drinks and a late lunch.

Joe Vera’s is your typical tex-mex restaurant (my favorite), with friendly staff and very tasty salsa. We pulled some tables together, chit-chatted, and had a terrific mid-day meal. I opted for their carne asada tacos and a nice margarita on the rocks with decent tequila. We speculated about the upcoming rally and where we’d be at that time in a few days from now (likely NOT enjoying  tacos and margaritas).

After the meal, we took a walk to Smith’s supermarket, a few blocks in the other direction from the hotel, so the guys could grab some supplies. I relished any opportunity to walk and stretch my legs, keeping in mind I’d be pretty much immobile in the saddle for almost two weeks. I’d heard rumors of a great ice cream shop nearby, so after dropping off purchases at the hotel, some of us headed back out into the afternoon heat.

Rockwell Old Fashioned Ice Cream Co was also situated in one of the cool historic storefronts, with huge plate-glass windows, a rack of candy jars, sheets of freshly made cones, and a cooler full of delicious-looking from-scratch ice cream flavors.

The large group of women-of-a-certain-age immediately before us in line thought the ice cream looked good too, as all six of them proceeded to ask for sample spoons for just about very flavor in the cooler. C’mon ladies, this isn’t a private party! Luckily we were not on the clock, or I would have offered to buy them all something if they would just mooove.

Eventually their herd moved off to graze on (small) dishes of ice cream in a corner of the restaurant and we got our turn. They had some cool (and not-so-cool) flavors, and I had to go with the Honeycomb, which the server said was their most popular, with real chunks of honeycomb swirled in there. It was indeed delicious, quite a different taste combination. We sat down at one of the barrel-shaped tables in the shop to enjoy our treats and shoot the shit. Eric Bray, a formidable rally competitor, had decided to tag along on this excursion, and I always enjoy the opportunity to talk with him and pick his brain about all things rally-related.

The rest of the day was down time, greeting more new arrivals, relaxing in the room, checking and rechecking stuff, and just making conversation with any and everybody who wandered by. I was pleased to meet Ben Ernst, a big rookie from Texas, who is somewhat new to the rally scene but already had a strong winning percentage within the few events he’d entered. Just based on a feeling I had from those results and his online commentary, he was my other dark horse pick for a podium finish. A nice guy and I congratulated him on his success thus far.

I also met another rookie, Mike Brooke, whom I’d met online via the forum. Also a super-nice guy, I wasn’t sure what to make of his approach to the rally, which seemed to be bucking all tradition and “conventional wisdom”. Not only was he was riding a Suzuki Hayabusa sport bike in the rally, which seemed destined (at the time) to be making a difficult journey even harder, but he was insisting on using a cell phone for a rally camera. That would by necessity involve several additional steps to retrieve the unmodified photo image files to an SD card for presentation at scoring – all when you are usually exhausted and your thinking is foggy at best. Not knowing much about Mike at the time, I assumed it was just a matter of someone running the bike and equipment they happened to own, which is totally cool. It wouldn’t become clear until later that these decisions were all part of Mike’s very intentional plan and methodology for running his incredible rally.

I love this period of calm before the storm in the rally hotels, when you still have some stuff to do, but the shit ain’t real yet, so there’s time to just gawk and talk. Most of us northeasterners were pretty full from the excellent lunch and ice cream and decided to forgo our planned dinner meal at a local biker brewery/restaurant. Registration was tomorrow, so I caught up on the first official rally update report of this year’s event, written by a mystery scribe, then hit the sack early.