The Mid-Ohio pits were sprinkled with curious machinery. Take this Sportster-based dual-sp
By the time I get to Casey in the morning, the mental image of a cinnamon roll and a cup of coffee has held me captive for miles. Downtown Casey stretches two blocks in each direction, paved with bricks the size of small bread loaves; a 19th-century farm town with a bank in the middle and a grain mill at the edge. And the KC Café, where the waitress asks if I I'd like coffee, then says "We have some good home-made cinnamon rolls if you're interested." I'm not making this up.
Two walls of the café are covered by bright murals of the American flag, Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty. Next to the flag is the text: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."-Edmund Burke. Uncle Sam is rolling up his sleeves, his pant legs morphing into the World Trade Center buildings; Lady Liberty holds a flag-wrapped child in one arm and in the other a revolver: "The most dangerous place in the world is between a mother and her children."
Closing in on Wall, South Dakota, the air temperature and motel prices are on the rise. Nearly 800 miles have rolled away below the BMW today-time to relax. The 67th-anniversary rally crowds are a few days hence, and Sturgis in the morning has few bikes lined up; shopkeepers are still setting up their displays, truckloads of T-shirts being unloaded. Gunner's isn't open yet, but Rodent is holding court in front. He's senior events editor for Barnett's magazine, from the mega-Harley dealership in El Paso, Texas. I mention that at my last Sturgis stop some years ago, the city had just outlawed the exposure of female breasts on Main Street, declaring it a $50 misdemeanor. "Well, the chicks are a lot older now," he says. "Now, it's a felony!"
Rival leadership factions have weakened AHRMA racing in recent years, but the foundation o
The road to Deadwood curls through the Black Hills, former home of Crazy Horse, Wild Bill Hickok and Rocky Raccoon. Nearing town the four-lane skein narrows to two, where I come upon a rolling chicane of cruiser riders, evenly staggered, cruising in formation. Weaving carefully through the ranks, and into town, a sputtering rider rushes up on my right. "What the hell were you doing back there, weaving in and out like that? You don't do that!"
Too dumbstruck to even ask if they have a parade permit, I watch him sputter away. And sure enough, headed for Spearfish I happen upon another school of groupers, rumbling along at 40 mph behind a plumbing truck. Double-yellow be damned, I snick the twin down two gears and and hit the wick. Enough with the Anti-Destination League.
For some reason, I'm reminded of The Hollywood Squares: When Paul Lynde was asked why Hell's Angels wear leather, he said, "Because chiffon wrinkles too easily."
Yellowstoners and the Montana breaks
By that measure, I'm reminded that Yellowstone-in-tourist-season lies ahead. But so, too, do the Big Horn Mountains, the Absaroka Range, the Bridger-Teton National Forest and the Rocky Mountains themselves. At Buffalo, Wyoming, the rains are marching south along the eastern slopes of the Big Horns. The church hall portico offers a dry patch, where the BMW becomes a recliner, and I kickback against my duffel with a copy of Larry McMurtry's Telegraph Days, a fictional account of Buffalo Bill Cody's time in the territories as narrated by his intimate friend Nellie Courtright, a lusty young career woman from Virginia by way of Oklahoma. Good read.
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What could be better than hangin' with a racing buddy who has a beer magazine for a sponso
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Dave Roper has been a vintage-racing legend for three decades, and is still the only Ameri
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The southern road is the shorter of two arteries through the Big Horns, magnificent sweepers dropping into the Badlands just east of Worland, Wyoming. It's at that point, just clearing a rise, that State Trooper D.J. Smith's radar later says I was doing 78 mph in a 65 zone. Trooper Smith is downright polite about it, affording me not only the Wyoming $10 discount for wearing a helmet, but also the cautionary advice to watch out for antelope crossing the road this time of day. You just can't beat Western hospitality.