Bob Bacon's
100CCC Ride Report
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Bob Bacon's
|
Bob Bacon
CCC100 Ride Report (long)
Subtitle: Sit
here, twist this, refuel, repeat.
I think I read those simple instructions on a t-shirt but
regardless, there isn’t a more appropriate description of what riding a CCC100
is all about. Or, should I say
it’s what a “perfect” CCC100 is all about.
So many things can go wrong that change that basic scenario.
Last year’s thunderstorms and flooding stranded many experienced LD
riders in Houston. Mechanical problems can cause delays of minutes to weeks and
did, in fact, put a couple of guys out of it this year.
You can only hope that “luck will be a lady tonight!”
Or, can you?
Sun Tzu wrote, “Chance favors a prepared mind.” Those of you who know me understand how much I take that philosophy to heart when it comes to LD ride planning. Most would call it compulsive. Some would say it explains why I mostly ride alone! I over plan everything down to the last detail and then plan for what could go wrong and make contingency plans. I probably spent more time planning this ride than I did riding it, all in an effort to improve my chances of success.
This time luck WAS a lady and the Motorcycle Tourer’s Forum (www.mctourer.com) organized, 4800-mile ride only included a couple of hitches. So rather than bore you with prolific prose on the passing sights, smells and tumbleweeds I want to share with you what I learned. I want to tell you about what worked and what didn’t. Frankly, that’s what I want to know when I read a ride report! But, first we have to set the stage.
The
Ride
CCC100 stands for
Coast to Coast to Coast in less than 100 hours. One could select any route
between the Pacific and Atlantic to accomplish this but the route chosen by the
MTF between San Diego and Jacksonville is the shortest.
I live on the left coast so I choose to start my roundtrip marathon from
San Diego.
This is an
Iron Butt Association (www.ironbutt.com)
certified ride which means that in addition to bragging rights you get a
certificate from the IBA and your name on their internet site.
My wife calls this sort of thing a “pissing contest.”
The
CCC100 is not a race. The time under which you have to complete the ride is the
only inference of speed, but if you do the math and deduct three 6 hour rest
periods from the 100 hours available your average speed need only be 58 mph.
No record of your time to complete the ride are maintained or published.
You can attempt this ride anytime, by yourself or with a group.
The
Equipment
I ride a 2000 BMW K1200LT with the following accessories worth mentioning:
BMW CommSystem with integrated Garmin 2610, V1 and cell phone
No aux fuel tank but I carry one quart of fuel for emergencies
Stop ‘n Go tire plugger kit with compressor
Camelback “Mule”
Low beam HID
Amber (fog) Motolights on Rastermounts (low and wide)
Driving lights – Hella FF75s on BMR Products under mirror mounts
Stuck to the top of my BMW LT tank bag is a homemade acrylic map/itinerary holder. A Littlite brand map light (like you see on a speaker’s podium) lights the itinerary at night. My itinerary listed every planned stop (gas stops, motels, rider gatherings) with estimated time and “adjusted” cumulative mileage to compensate for my 3.4% odometer error. In case of GPS failure I would be able to use this information to help locate my planned stops, but it was also helpful assessing where I was in the overall ride. I carried paper maps as backup but, in this case, the route had so few deviations from I-10 they could be memorized.
Preparations
This ride was planned and staffed by many generous volunteers from the MTF. A lot of the work I would normally do to prepare for an LD ride was already completed, and then some. They offered a list of fuel stops for bikes of every tank capacity and range and verified that the gas stations were open and available 24 hours. They reserved blocks of hotel rooms in Jacksonville and San Diego so we could all be together for tire kicking, bench racing and story telling. The start, midpoint and stop locations had IBA witnesses waiting! How great is that, to pull into a strange city at 3:30 AM and have a guy (thanks Andy!) standing there to shake your hand, take your picture and sign your documents. Welcome to Jacksonville!
I planned on a 225 mile maximum range and selected stops that were anywhere from 224 miles apart to as little as, on the last leg into Jacksonville, 170 miles. Then on the return to San Diego I planned to use the exact same stops in the hope that familiarity would translate into efficiency. It did.
In the GPS I set waypoints for each gas stop, motel and rider gathering.
Process
LD riding is more about efficiency than speed. It’s about minimizing the number of stops and the length of each stop. Maintaining a high level of efficiency takes focus, which I believe is what they mean when they say that LD riding is a mental game.
I had my stops timed down to about 6 minutes if a bio break wasn’t necessary. I try to stop at the newer gas stations that have pay at the pump capability. I always carry a couple of credit cards in the breast pocket of my Cycleport for fast access and because one card always gets shut down by the fraud department of my credit card company.
While the gas is pumping I pull out another protein bar, open it and stage it in my tank bag. I also reset the trip odometer as a backup to the fuel gauge and the LT’s “on board computer” that displays how many miles left in the tank. That’s three ways to measure remaining fuel.
On the back of the pump generated receipt I record the odometer reading and time in my home time zone. I don’t maintain a log during the ride. I complete the log afterwards. Anything that needs to go into the log I write on the back of the receipt and they go into a pocket with a Velcro flap on my riding pants. Every night I move the receipts to the top case luggage bag for safekeeping. If it’s raining I keep them in an inside jacket pocket.
I carry everything I need so no stops at the Mini-mart are necessary. The only time I ever got off the bike was if I needed to use the “facilities” or if the windshield was so bugged up that I had to wet some paper towels and wipe it down. That’s not recommended for the windshield but one of the compromises you make if you want to see where you’re going.
With a grease pencil in the tank bag the acrylic surface of the itinerary/map holder makes a perfect ad hoc writing surface for a checklist of non-standard things to do at the next stop (i.e. clean face shield, change to sunglasses, etc.). I have CRS and need all the reminders I can get!
At motel check in I make one trip to the room with luggage, helmet, gloves and the Camelback. I include the gloves and helmet to help dry them out from either rain or perspiration. I use motel ice to fill the Camelback when I arrive then top off with tap water the next morning before I leave. At check out I take a towel soaked in hot water (use the ice bucket to carry it) and let it sit on the windshield to soften the bug guts, then wipe it down with a dry towel and take the towels back to the room returning to the bike with all my gear.
Just before I started the ride I used www.weather.com to survey the route. A little known feature of their web site is that when you enter an interstate number in the field labeled for zip code you will get weather reports for all the major cities along that route. You also have the ability to look at forecasts up to 10 days into the future along that interstate (yeah, like that’s accurate!).
The
unexpected…
Trucks in lane #1 are not allowed in California but apparently they are everywhere else! Now, I don’t mean the trucks passing each other at a whopping .025 mph on a two lane (each way) interstate. That’s ubiquitous! I’m talking about three and four lane interstates in or near towns. It was a surprise and slowed my progress in a small way.
I saw more troopers in TX than in all the other states combined. And they weren’t just sitting there; they were practicing their handwriting and handing out performance awards by the dozens. I’m also not used to instant-on radar and its presence calls for slightly more conservative speeds than normal for me.
The only threatening item on the weather forecast for this April ride was scattered thunderstorms around Houston (imagine that!) on the return leg of the CCC100. This time the forecasters were right; only they weren’t very “scattered”. They were concentrated in the Texas hill country around San Antonio but extending all the way from Houston to Junction. This persuaded me to pack it in early on day three about 120 miles short of the halfway point and lengthening the fourth and last day of the ride. Other than that the weather was delightful. Highs never exceeded 86F with mild humidity and the lows in the mountains just east of San Diego only got down to 44F but only for a short while.
In certain sections of the ride I was able to sustain higher than normal speeds with a commensurate reduction in mpg. This created the need for one gas stop more than I planned. If doing this ride again I wouldn’t use the same estimated quantity of miles per tank to determine the location of every gas stop. I would adjust that range depending on where I was. Face it, there’s a lot of nothing out there in parts of CA, AZ, NM, TX and FL. It’s especially critical when riding in BFE that you not run short of gas before your planned stop. Available fuel can be as far as 25 miles away and that’s a long walk. Another side effect of the constant speed over four, 18 hour days was the engine and traffic noise. I never before felt the need for ear plugs on the LT but on a ride like this I would wear them.
Although I never really “felt” tired (more on that later), while driving at night with no horizon for orientation I did experience the illusion of riding up or down a hill when I wasn’t. This seemed to depend on where I had the windshield set. If it was set high enough that I was looking through the windshield it would seem I was on an up hill climb and vice versa. Also at night with no point of reference the trees on the sides of the road sort of blurred, lacking texture and detail sort of like the graphics of some video games that involve motion through narrow spaces. I’ve related this experience to some cross-country truck drivers and they confirm that I’m not alone in this sensation. The remedy for me was to momentarily look up at the sky and see some stars and the moon or to look directly at the side of the road to discern the detail. The saving grace in all of this was that I knew what was going on and took steps to mitigate it.
Finally, I mentioned a couple of “hitches” on the trip and one of those was my headlights going out when I was about 2 hours short of Junction on the first night. I was in and out of traffic using my high beams as appropriate when suddenly both high and low beam headlight went out and my driving lights came on. I have my driving lights on a relay slaved to the high beam headlight but they were on regardless of the high beam switch position and they wouldn’t go off! They are great driving lights and in conjunction with the amber Motolights, I had ample light to continue the ride but probably too much light for oncoming traffic. It was interesting that not one motorist flashed their lights at me. I’m guessing they were so confused by the four light, bi-color configuration of what was approaching from the opposite direction they didn’t know what to do!
I called Raffy, the LT HID expert, back in Sacramento to get his advice and he suggested it was probably a lose ground wire or possibly melted wires. How was I going to deal with this? I didn’t carry spare wire, let alone any tools or connectors. Note to self: add some electrical stuff to the tool kit.
Fortunately, the next morning for breakfast I was meeting some friends in Boerne (about an hour down I-10 from Junction). I called Dick Largen and left him a message to bring all his electrical gear. I suggested we could turn our breakfast into a quickie tech session and, hopefully, get this fixed. After all, I only budgeted 45 minutes for this meet up! The next morning at 8:00 AM fellow LT riders Dick, Dave Moore and Monte Rogers (aka: the Texas Wrecking Crew) all met me in the Denny’s parking lot at Hwy 46 and I-10. After some discussion of our options we decided to take the bike to the real experts at Rhine West BMW in San Antonio. Thirty minutes later we were there and they immediately went to work on the bike (thanks to Dick pulling a few strings) while the crew and I went to breakfast.
An hour later when we returned it was fixed. A loose ground clip on the high beam bulb that somehow tripped the HID ballast into cardiac arrest was the cause of the problem. The tech’s solution to this was to reattach the high beam lamp ground wire and unplug the main wiring harness to the light, wait a few minutes and plug it in again. Violla!! Fixed!!! Thanks again guys. It seems that nothing that goes wrong, stays wrong for long with this crew on watch.
We all know that staying hydrated is critical when doing long distances on a bike. I’ve always used a Camelback device hanging from my luggage rack and sitting on the passenger seat. The feed tube was always clipped onto the gas tank and was a clumsy arrangement. This time I took the advice of someone on the LD Rider list and attached the bite valve to a retractable key chain holder attached to the bike below my right leg. That is a great solution! It was never in my way and just releasing the bite valve restored it to it’s proper place.
Just as important as hydration is nourishment. I’ve tried everything from beef jerky to Big Macs without much success. I define success as the ability to retain a mental alertness and not feeling hungry. The routine I settled into on this ride was stopping for a full breakfast (eggs, bacon, hash browns and coffee) at my mid-morning gas stop. Then augmenting that diet to one protein bar at every gas stop. I did some testing before the ride and concluded that Zone Perfect protein bars (www.zoneperfect.com) were the solution for me. They tasted pretty good (although nothing beats a Snickers, right?) and they had a thin chocolate coating that made getting them out the their wrapper easy in both hot and cold weather. I actually gained weight during this ride and not once did I feel tired or ever even yawned. Compare that to the ride back home to the Bay Area from San Diego where I stopped at Carl’s Jr. for a burger and was fighting the nods for hours afterward.
This was my first LD ride since adding the Garmin 2610 GPS last December and I can’t speak highly enough about it. Not necessarily this particular model, but GPS with routing capability in general. I never missed a turnoff due to the 2-mile advance audible warning message. I found the 1604 loop around San Antonio, the Houston HOV lanes (closed both times I passed through), the alternate route through Baton Rouge and the various roads to get to Jacksonville Beach at the end of the ride.
My GPS is configured to display the time to the end of the route. This allowed me to measure the length of each stop. I would mentally record the time to end before I exited for a gas stop. Once back on the road, I would check that time again. However many minutes the end of route time increased was the time expended on the stop.
Yes, it takes considerable effort and planning to enter every stop and via point into the GPS but, IMHO it is well worth it to free your mind to attend to more important things like traffic, weather and your state of mind.
Summary
All in all I had a great time. I saw some friends I hadn’t seen since last year and made some new friends. I saw a lot of country and accomplished what I set out to do. And perhaps most importantly, I learned a few things along the way.
Thank you MTF, LD Riders and BMWLT.net for all the great planning, advice and help along the way.
Ride safe,
Bob Bacon
El Cerrito, CA
IBA #14398
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