The Great Wisconsin Fly-Over Tour
The Great Wisconsin Fly-Over Tour
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
ABOUT 23 YEARS AGO, WHEN I WAS working at Road & Track in Southern California, the good Editor strode into my highly organized office, eventually spotted me behind a pile of unanswered mail and asked if I could fly up to the Napa Valley and do a story on a 1953 Bentley Continental R. This rare car, he said, belonged to a guy named Gil Nickel, who owned the prestigious Far Niente winery.
I must admit that I tried to duck out of this assignment because I secretly feared the owner might be a stuffy old wine snob with an ascot, a crested blazer and halfframe glasses hanging around his neck on a little chain. I’d seen guys like this in the movies.
As usual, I should have checked my preconceptions at the door.
Gil Nickel turned out to be as unpretentious as they come, a good of boy from Oklahoma who was also an avid motorcyclist. Not to mention private pilot, former rocket scientist and racer of old British sports cars. Except for my low I.Q. and inability to plot missile trajectories accurately, we had much in common and hit it off instantly.
Gil told me that, back in the late Sixties, he and his brother had taken a couple of BMW R69Ss all the way from their home in Oklahoma to the Panama Canal. Furthermore, he’d just bought a new BMW Kl and was planning a trip through the Canadian Rockies with a bunch of his buddies who called themselves the NVTS (Napa Valley Touring Society). Would Barb and I like to come along?
Well, yes we would.
We rode a Buell borrowed from the Calgary dealer and spent a week zapping ourselves through the mountains with Gil, his future wife Beth and about a dozen of their wild and crazy friends, most of whom were connected with the wine business. Over the next two decades, we had reunion tours of the Ozarks, Mexico’s Copper Canyon, the Colorado Rockies, the Alps, the Cascades and northern California.
Gil’s good friends quickly became ours as well. Mostly couples about our age, they liked to ride fast and party in the evening, bringing many cases of their own wine along in a chase wagon. There were about five great vineyards represented in this group, so on many evenings our brain cells were tricked into forgetting how serious life can be, and much laughter was heard. Probably from several blocks away.
As a side benefit, I quit drinking Thunderbird and Night Train exclusively and began to experiment with wines that cost more than a dollar.
On one of these trips, however, we noticed that Gil was not drinking much. Normally the life of the party, he seemed pensive and withdrawn, often regarding the rest of us with a quiet, thoughtful smile. “I think maybe he’s gotten some bad medical news,” Barb said. Sadly, she guessed right.
A few years later, Gil died of cancer.
We held a memorial ride in northern California the following summer. At dinner one night, we toasted Gil’s memory, and someone wondered aloud where our next group tour might be.
“How about Wisconsin?” I suggested in a low, nearly inaudible voice.
I wasn’t really sure how this would go over. The Rockies, Ozarks, Cascades, Alps and...Stoughton, Wisconsin?
Those of us who live here know Wisconsin as a green and beautiful land of ridges, hills, deep valleys, red barns, onelane bridges, rocky harbors on the Great Lakes, towering north woods, high Mississippi bluffs, classic American small towns and an endless network of winding roads that run through the countryside like a nicely paved nervous system.
Meanwhile, those who have never been here picture one large cornfield with a straight road running through it.
Nevertheless, the NVTS (which looks suspiciously like “NUTS” done in Roman letters) seemed open-minded and ready to ride. A few weeks ago, people started arriving at our place. Some shipped their bikes and flew in, others rode all the way from the West Coast. We had 17 people, nine bikes and three rental cars for those with health or bike-shipping problems. Seven of the bikes were BM Ws, Barb and I rode our Honda VFR800 and Randy Lewis (the former IndyCar driver, now of Lewis Cellars) and his wife Debbie rode their Ducati ST4S.
One of the BMW guys jokingly chided me for taking the only Japanese bike on this tour, to which I replied, “Hey, Randy and I just won’t ride on any brand that hasn’t won a world championship...”
We left on a Tuesday morning and hit the road for six days. Where did we go? Well, from Stoughton to Galena, Illinois—a scenic river town with many antique shops-and then up through the western hill country along the Mississippi to Trempealeau, Wisconsin. From there we sped into the north woods to Solon Springs, to visit the “little cabin in the woods” girlhood home of Beth Nickel.
Another long 415-mile day took us to Sister Bay on the Door Peninsula, which I like to call “Wisconsin’s Cape Cod.” It’s the narrow thumb that pokes northeast into upper Lake Michigan. Then it was back to our house for a huge bratwurst fest and a workshop party blasted by my ineffably loud garage band, the infamous Defenders.
In the morning, after our friends left for the airport or turned their bikes toward Napa, there were many wine and beer bottles left to recycle. And a few great vintages left behind, as yet unopened.
It is said that a forest fire starts with a single match. Well, this whole 20-year tradition of good times started with a single guy who thought his friends should all ride together. Gil was the missing airplane in the formation, but the Wisconsin fly-over was all because of him.
And I think everyone had a good ride, even without the Rockies or the Alps. We kept hearing our guests remark how green and beautiful and hilly the country was, “and so many great roads-with no traffic on them!”
For anyone thinking of moving here, however, I would like to say that our state is one large cornfield with a straight road running through it. □
