Leaving Out

When the phone rings 20 minutes after your Iron Butt Rally rider leaves home, you just say, uh oh.  Sure enough, my first “rally call” was on Sunday when, within 2 miles of home, one of Kirsten’s GPS units bounced out of its cradle as she was leaving out I-64.  She caught it, and (smoothly and safely I’m sure) made her way to the side of the road to place the GPS back in the cradle and screw down the pins.  Whew!  Happily, she had an uneventful ride that day (we’ll call it Leg 1A - getting to the launch in Albuquerque).  She went about 600 miles on Sunday to stay with a good friend in Tennessee.  Thinking she had arrived only a few minutes early they got down to visiting, when Kirsten saw the clock in the house.  Actually - this part of TN is in Central Time, and she was an hour early!  Add that pesky time zone map to the list of things to get into the top case!  Rally watchers know how much an error in your time zone, time, date, day, or all of the above can mess up your rally and cost you big points.

Considering that Leg 1A was shaping up to become a true shake-down cruise, I was doing a little clean up at home and found this fortune sitting under a stack of Aerostich catalogs and IBR magazines - 

No truer words.

The rest of the trip to Albuquerque (bonus points if you can actually spell that correctly on your first try- I’m going with ABQ) included very hot weather, dodging storms, and yes, even locust!

Seriously. 

Then BaseCamp crashed that Garmin.

And everyone offered spares, and backups, and tech support, and even to take shifts to be on the phone reading directions off of Google maps.  (That’s just how crazy YOU all are!)

But then, the Garmin got reloaded and the maps came back.  And the headset works in the helmet to call ahead to reserve the hotel.  And the Spot Tracker showed that she has made it to ABQ.  And in the next post, we’ll tune in for the pre-rally fun at Rally HQ.  While the locust swarm.....