Please respect our intellectual property rights. Do not distribute any of these documents, or portions therein, without the written permission of Robert Higdon or the Iron Butt Association.
Written by Robert Higdon
October 30, 1995
Galveston Island, Texas
Half a dozen people had ridden down from Pittsburgh. Terry Evans was there from Miami. Mike Kneebone had flown in from Chicago. More friends than I knew I had were wandering around in Capital Cycle's parking lot near Dulles airport on the morning of October 7. The hurricane that had wrecked so much of the southeast earlier in the week, and that I'd feared would smear my departure day as well, had already blown through. It was sunny and pleasant, a good day to leave home for perhaps a couple of years.
I don't know how I got through it. Much of it is a tangled blur. One of my fellow BMW/BMW club members, Linda Rookard, pinned a tiny gold guardian angel on the lapel of the Aerostich Darien jacket. She tried to say something comforting, but I don't remember the words. All I can remember was thinking that I should have snuck out of town the night before. That's how Ted Simon left, frazzled and alone in the midst of an evening rain. For hours I tried to swallow the lump in my throat. It wouldn't go down.
It didn't move for the next few days either. I stopped in South Hill, Virginia to see Jim Brown, my classmate who had pulled me through some dark days at AMI. Jim's father had called a local newspaper reporter. I easily slid into Quote Mode and told the scribe what I was trying to do. I left out the part about wanting to turn around and go home.
In Gadsden, Alabama I spent some time with Rick Jones, the wizard of BMW electrics. Rick went over the bike's suspect areas, shot some vitamins into the parts that needed it, and gave me a pat on the back. The bike will break down sooner or later, but I doubt it will be the electrics that head for the hills.
By the time I reached Texas I was actually beginning to feel a little better. I visited friends in Houston, Austin, Bryan, and Galveston, all the while trying to decide if taking the Compaq notebook was a good idea. After what seemed like endless days of indecision, I finally settled on an HP 200LX palmtop. There was no reasonable chance that the Compaq would survive the trip. And as much as I enjoy flailing away at a real keyboard, the HP was at least an XT computer that fit in my pocket. Having settled that issue, I'd run out of excuses not to head for Mexico.
That was almost a week ago, just as a cold front shot through from the north, hammered Mexico for a couple of days, then turned back north to revisit the Texas Gulf coast. In three straight days the wind has not been under 25 mph for so much as a millisecond, there is a wall of hard rain to the south, and I am becoming more neurotic than a rat in a coffee can.
Tomorrow I take off again. Whether I run south to Brownsville, then jump the river into Matamoros, or head for the ferry at Cabo San Lucas via Los Angeles depends solely on which way the wind is blowing and where the rain is not.
Never a master of self-perception, even I recognize what is happening here: Trip jitters, pure and simple. I've had them before and I'll have them again. But for three straight _weeks_? I chuckle mirthlessly at the thought.
After thirty years of motorcycling, I didn't expect to feel like a rookie. I didn't expect that leaving home would be so crushing. I didn't expect that the learning curve would pretty much parallel the x-axis. What I expected was an odd odyssey, sprinkled with moments of lucidity. Maybe I've missed something, but it seems that I haven't had a lot of those lucid times.
They'll come. If I didn't believe that, I'd head home tomorrow.
© 1995, Iron Butt Association, Chicago, Illinois
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