“When nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?"
-- ~Charles Bukowski

We’re in the end game now, just a couple days more riding left, and if I could make good time across the plains, I could pull off a sweep of the Gut Bomb Bingo, and possibly some good points in Canada and even New England.

First though, it was time to bank some sleep. I set the alarm before falling asleep, and took a full 8-hour rest bonus.

64) REST3 - 5,760 pts

01:16-09:21 EDT

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Points scored:

72,152

When I woke up, I felt good, refreshed, ready to tackle whatever the last few days decided to throw my way. Everything was going great - the sun was shining, the hotel had bananas in the breakfast area, loading the bike was smooth, the gas station next door had a perfect timestamp and address on it.. everything was looking up!

Smiling, I turned on some tunes, and punched in the next bonus, just a quick run up one of the many small valleys from streams tricking down off the eastern slopes of Mt Hood and the Oregon Cascades Plateau into the Columbia and.. what the heck? The next bonus was BEHIND ME?! Somehow, I had overshot the highway exit for the next bonus, picking a hotel 15-20 miles past it; I would have to backtrack half an hour, then retrace my way back, costing myself an hour.

Is this all you got, rally? Bring it!

65) ORHR - Packer Orchards - Hood River, OR - 1,396 pts

09:50 EDT

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This segment:	28 miles, 0h29m
Total:	28 miles, 0h29m
Time Remaining:	69h10m
Points scored:	73,548

I hated retracing my steps, but what else could I do but eat the lost time and keep the wheels moving? I was still on my home turf here, and I enjoyed the morning, heading east on I-84, picking up I-82E as it curves around the east side of the decommissioned Umatilla Chemical Depot, which at one time held nearly 15% of the nation’s chemical weapons. In the 2000s, as part of the Chemical Weapons Convention, the depot’s entire stock of 7.4 million pounds of nerve agents and gasses were destroyed, incinerated in high-temperature furnaces over the course of 8 years. The base has reverted to Oregon, and is in the process of being redeveloped as an industrial park at the junction of I-82 and I-84, with a large portion set aside as a wildlife refuge. The large, hardened bunkers that used to house some of the deadliest and most painful chemical weapons ever invented still dot the plain in an offset checkerboard pattern, like some gigantic mole burrowing up through a chess board.

I-82 crosses the Columbia, and soon after I exited onto US-395 north through the Tri Cities - Pasco, Kennewick, and Richland, just downriver from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, site of the breeding reactors that distilled plutonium for the first atomic bomb, tested in the Trinity test, and fueled the bomb (“Fat Man”) dropped on Nagasaki. During the Cold War, it was expanded to 9 breeding reactors, and the Tri-Cities swelled and thrived on DoD contractors and employees. While that infrastructure is mostly decommissioned and radioactive waste cleanup is an ongoing project, the site itself, as large as Rhode Island, is still home to several high-energy research laboratories, and has one large nuclear reactor producing millions of megawatt hours every year.

US-395 wanders north, and from it I soon cut east on WA-26, the main east-west route across central Washington, through the southern edge of the Palouse region and its endless rolling hills of Ice Age silt now covered with wheat and rye, and into the college town of Pullman, WA.

64) WAPU - National Lentil Festival - Pullman, WA - 2,005 pts

14:09 EDT

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This segment:	295 miles, 4h19m
Total:	323 miles, 4h48m
Time Remaining:	64h51m
Points scored:	75,553

I parked across the street in the empty parking lot of an adult bookstore; not a lot of customers there at 2pm on Tuesday afternoon. In fact, most of the town was pretty quiet, which isn’t entirely atypical of Pullman, but it felt more quiet than usual. I could hardly complain, since it meant I could get out of town and push on without the usual crush of college traffic. I headed northeasterly, crossing over into Idaho to pick up US-95, riding north 90 minutes or so to Coeur d’Alene, ID, passing quickly though town and onto I-90 heading east.

I often forget to eat while riding, and my tummy was howling for something that didn’t come out of a seal plastic pouch at a gas station, so I stopped at a McDonalds in Kellogg, ID for a quick bite and to use their bathroom. I sipped an ice coffee and checked my email as well as the route, still trying to decide if I wanted to take the “southern” route through South Dakota, or to stay north and take I-94 out of Billing, MT, which would set me up for the 3,000 point bonus in Thunder Bay, ON. It would be close, but I could just do it.. or I could stick to I-90, and score around 100 points less, but have far more cushion time, as well as the possibility of a Tim Hortons somewhere in Detroit or Windsor.. in fact, the more I looked at it, the southern route was more time efficient, and opened up some nice “outs” in the last 12 hours of the rally, so I got back on the road and crossed into Montana, I felt like I had a solid plan for remaining time.

Montana riding is one of my favorites, and western Montana in particular. Wiggling through the Rockies, wiggling east along the Clark Fork River as it flows west, then past Missoula, the hillsides that surround it tracing the faint lines of ancient beaches from the ice age lake that filled this high mountain valley. My next bonus was just a few minutes past Missoula, and I was glad to finally stop at the exit where a billboard proudly announces the dates for the current year’s Testicle Festival.

65) MTCL - Rock Creek Lodge - Testicle Festival - Clinton, MT - 703 pts

18:33 EDT

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This segment:	276 miles, 4h24m
Total:	599 miles, 9h12m
Time Remaining:	60h27m
Points scored:	76,256

The afternoon was getting warm, uncomfortably so, but when a friend sent me the weather report for the south, I was extra glad I was sticking to the northern tier.

I could see the forecast was calling not just for heat, but for thunderstorms across southern Montana, and once past Bozeman I found myself racing against the gathering storm clouds to the south of I-90. It seemed like they were always ahead of me, even as I was catching up with trailing edge, and by the time I got to Big Timber, MT and my exit, I was just behind the edge of rain. Since the bonus was 15 miles or so south of the highway (and thus in the middle of a deluge of rain and electricity) I pulled over under the gas pump awning at a truck stop and waited for 15 minutes the storm to move on.

66) MTMC - Holly’s Road Kill Saloon - McCloud, MT - 1,668 pts

22:16 EDT

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This segment:	257 miles, 3h43m
Total:	856 miles, 12h55m
Time Remaining:	56h44m
Points scored:	77,924

90 minutes later, I rolled into Billings, MT, 10pm local. It was too early to stop for the night, and the weather was good, so there was no excuse except to push on; I’d stop and nap as I needed to. I did hope off the bike for 40 minutes or so, and enjoyed the finest of truck stop sandwiches, walking around to stretch my legs, call some friends to check in, catch up on rally news and emails. I realized I was dawdling, but also that I was getting towards the end of my day and would need to rest soon.

The only problem with not stopping early in Billings is that there isn’t much for a few hours, until I reach Gillette, WY, and I was already pretty tired. Safety first, so about 45 minutes of riding, I stopped at a Love’s in Hardin, MT and took a nap next to the bike. I flopped down on the mattress pad, using one of my dry bags and my 2023 IBR fleece as a pillow, and snoozed for 20 minutes or so. Never doubt the power of a nap!

I clearly needed it; about an hour later, I noticed I’d left my dry bag and fleece in the truck stop parking lot. Well, shit… do I go back for it, and burn 2 hours? It was just a dry bag and the fleece, do I just keep going and chalk it up to a stupid mistake caused by fatigue? If nothing else, it was surely a sign, so after finally crossing into Wyoming, I pulled off in Sheridan and napped for half an hour at the Sheridan Visitors Center rest area, but I couldn’t really get comfortable - signs everywhere warning of rattlesnakes, and no picnic tables.

I repeated the pattern 45 minutes later in Buffalo, WY - find a place to nap (outside a rather large and fancy looking church), get 30 minutes of uncomfortable sleep, then back in the saddle. I was a little over an hour to Gillette, WY, and I decided once back on the highway speeding through the night that I would stop there and get a room, trading precious clock time for a sustained 4-5 hours of rest and the opportunity for a hot meal.

I hadn’t yet developed a strategy for managing Day 8 and beyond; every other rally or endurance ride you might take on is usually on the order of a few days, and definitely less than a week. The Iron Butt Rally (and it’s new sibling, LDX) will surprise the unwary. Imagine you were really good at running 5ks, and finish them comfortably, sweating and tired, but in reasonable enough condition that you could, say, drive yourself home. Now imagine you got to the end of that 5k, and suddenly oops, there’s another 5k to run.. and then another. Day 8 and 9 is where every strategy for managing your emotional and physical reserves has to face the fact that you may never have ridden a motorcycle this far, nor for this long, while making calculations around routing, keeping track of the clock, the sheer amount of THINGS YOU’VE SEEN piling up inside your skull. “Was I really just in New Mexico? Did I visit a Moon Pie mural in Tennessee 5 days ago?” It’s a mind-bending experience to live in constant motion, with no opportunity for reflection, reset, or grounding yourself, and even when you have every other aspect of it managed, most people are just not wired to experience so much newness, to create so many new memories, and even for those of us who thrive on novelty and delight in exploration and experience, it can be overwhelming.

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Halfway to Gillette, speeding through the darkness, I felt that familiar call of nature, and seeing nothing on the map but grasslands and ranches for the next 25 miles, pulled off at the next opportunity, a ranch exit in a decreasing spiral of asphalt ribboning through tall prairie grass, unmown by Wyoming’s highway department, illuminated starkly by my brilliant aux lights. The exit ended in a small paved area, with a pair of dirt roads leading away into the night, and as I turned off the bike, not a whisper of humanity could be heard. I took care of what prompted me to stop, and stared up at the sky, studded with stars and planets whirling over head, the grass chest-high and growing right up to the edge of the road, like the slowly shifting walls of some trench cut through the American savannah. I listened to the buzzing of insects, a cry from a coyote, and watched a shooting star clip the atmosphere, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scratch of dim light briefly marring a perfect velvet darkness. The warm wind brought the smell of grass and life, and I wondered to myself about how lucky I was, how fortunate and blessed to be here, in this place, at this moment, seeing these small, insignificant things around me. If I had not tarried here, would any of this ever be seen.. be witnessed?

Breathing deeply, I took stock of the world, and as all meditations must, in time I returned to thinking about myself in this moment. Time get the wheels turning again. 20 minutes to Gillette and a soft bed. Time to go.