Leanings

LEANINGS

The 500-mile Weekend

PETER EGAN

SOMETIMES IT’S NICE TO HAVE DECIsive friends, so you actually get on your motorcycle and go somewhere on a holiday weekend rather than dithering your time away on pleasant-but-forgettable picnics and fireworks.

Not that there’s anything wrong with picnics and fireworks. It’s just that they aren’t rides, and are often attended by people who don’t care about bikes. Some of whom are said to be very nice...

Anyway, our decisive friends, in this case, were Randy and Marilyn Wade. Randy called me a few weeks ago and said, “Okay, Egan, we need to take our annual ride to Trempealeau on the Mississippi. How about the Fourth of July weekend?” “Sounds...good,” I said tentatively, looking at the surprisingly blank squares on my Triumph-themed calendar.

“Mark it down.”

And only two weeks later, I found myself vacuuming our house while Barb dusted, all for the pet-sitter who takes care of our dogs and cats when we leave. You can’t help but wonder why the petsitter deserves a clean house while we live in tragic squalor, but it’s a long and honorable tradition.

On the morning we left, it wasn’t quite hot enough to fry an egg on the hood of your Jeep, as Allied troops once did in North Africa, but the humidity was so high you could easily have poached one.

Thanks to the miracle of mesh riding gear, however, we didn’t suffer much. I’ve discovered, belatedly, that mesh jackets and pants are the next best things to riding nude, only without the inconvenient arrest and jail time.

Thus dressed, Barb and I were twoupping on our Buell Ulysses, with Randy and Marilyn on their Honda VFR800, all of us headed northwest through the sunny green hills of Wisconsin, wending our way toward the little town of Trempealeau on the Mississippi River.

This has become kind of an annual event for us, as Trempealeau (pop. 1039) has an excellent restaurant at the historic Trempealeau Hotel, and the hotel itself has simple, inexpensive rooms like something out of an old Gunsmoke episode—bed, dresser and a bathroom down the hall. Sometimes we stay at the hotel, sometimes at a favorite bed & breakfast nearby called The Lucas House. Despite the name, the owners are not related to Joseph Lucas of England, so all the lights work. And so does the air conditioning.

In addition to food and lodging, this place has two other things going for it. First, there’s simply not a bad mile of road between our house and the Trempealeau Hotel. It’s all curves and hill country, kind of like the English Cotswolds, only with more cheese outlets along the way.

The other good thing is that the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks run right past the Trempealeau Hotel. I worked on a Burlington section crew one summer, shoveling gravel on this very rail line. Every time we visit, I look at the endless ties disappearing off into the distance and say in my best Steve Martin voice, “Hey! I don’t have to shovel any more!”

Then I go back to the hotel and have a beer.

George Herbert said living well is the best revenge, but I would be more specific and say that not shoveling gravel in front of a diesel tamping machine all summer is the best revenge.

So, off we went, Trempealeau-bound. It was great to be on a bike and going somewhere. This was Barb’s first road trip on the Ulysses, so after about an hour of travel, I shouted back and asked how she liked the passenger seat.

“Perfect!” she replied. The Ulysses has a built-in flip-up backrest, plenty of legroom and a wide, comfortable seat. My front half of the seat was perfect, too.

We arrived in Trempealeau after a great ride, non-seat-sore, showered and changed into non-mesh clothes at the B&B and had an excellent dinner at the hotel. Later, I walked down to the railroad tracks to inspect the current state of gravel distribution. Still good.

In the morning, we were loading up to head home when Randy said, “Oh, no... Look at my rear tire.”

Steel belts were showing down the center of the tread. “This tire’s only got about 3000 miles on it!” he said. “It looked fine when we left home.”

I pointed out that it was a sticky sport compound and that he’d been riding pretty hard—two-up with luggage—on a very hot day. Personally, I felt a little negligent, having followed Randy half the day without noticing the big silver stripe appearing in the middle of his rear tire. So much for my keen powers of observation. I must have been looking at the scenery.

It being Sunday, there was no chance of finding a motorcycle shop or a tire, so Randy and Marilyn were essentially stuck. Luckily, another couple at the B&B were from Madison and offered the Wades a ride home. I told Randy he could borrow my bike trailer and come back for his Honda on Monday. Problem solved.

The sudden absence of our traveling partners caused Barb and me to re-evaluate our route home. We decided to detour slightly through my home town of Elroy, so we could visit the graves of my parents and grandparents. My dad had died on the Fourth of July 12 years earlier.

After a visit to the cemetery and lunch at a Main Street café, we stopped at the local historical museum (where Barb found our wedding announcement in the 1971 newspaper files), then we walked around the overgrown lawn of the now-abandoned and dilapidated house where I grew up.

I was sorry the Wades weren’t with us for the trip home but glad they didn’t have to endure the boredom of our little nostalgic side trip. When you travel with others, you’re thinking for everyone and trying to smooth the way. A solo bike is more easily deflected by personal whim.

When we got home, the trip meter on the Ulysses said we’d gone 502 miles.

It struck me that this is the perfect distance for a weekend trip. You get far enough from home to escape your everyday surroundings and feel you’ve been somewhere, but not so far that you can’t rescue a bike with a vaporized rear tire. At 250 miles each way, you have time to stop and explore both the past and the present, and you arrive relatively unexhausted, with plenty of time to clean up and enjoy dinner and drinks. And a short, quiet walk down to the railroad track.

Yes, you have to vacuum and dust before you go, but it does get your house cleaned—and the place still looks fantastic when you get home.