You're Not Superman Rally
Stacy and I had a great, cool-season ride through Missouri on a sunny Saturday and had a ball, even if we didn't score particularly well.
We got acquainted with MO106 between Ellington and Eminence, a very nice section of two-lane bliss that I hadn't ridden before, and got a chance to ride that southern leg of MO19, the roller-coaster section, always a favorite.
Jim and Herb did a nice job documenting their rally on their site. There's that one of Stacy and I getting scored on the "Awards Banquet" page; it shows Jim Puckett seated and smiling. Caption should read: "Jim Puckett scoring some late arrivals, Lowell and Stacy Mattox. Why is this man smiling? Because he knew all along there's no friggin' place to buy gas with an Arkansas-stamped receipt in Mammoth Springs, AR!"
(The rally had a multi-state bonus, calling for gas receipts from each state claimed. There are plenty of stations near Mammoth Springs (a bonus location), but they're all just over the state line in Thayer, MO. We mentioned this to Jim. He smiled.)
We rode to the rally area on Friday night, not wanting to arise at oh-dark-thirty from our home west of St. Louis to make the 7:30am rider's meeting at Ste. Genevieve. It was cool riding on the way down, lower 40's, so Stacy and I had on electric garments, good gloves, and nice tunes in the headsets for the evening ride.
After some Pizza Inn nourishment next door to our Drury Inn in Jackson, we got some sleep and hit it the next morning back up a few exits to the Ste Genevieve DQ, where the rider's meeting was being held. We checked in, got our rally packet, and began to confirm our route and point totals. Sure enough, it looked like the IL route would be more profitable, esp. when getting the 4-state gas receipt bonus. But we'd just been there a couple weeks ago for the MTF Founder's Feast Photo Rally, and it was so tempting to get to Mammoth Spring and ride MO19 again (one of our favorites). So...we went west, and with a "perfectly run" route, we'd still have a chance for the IL and KY gas receipts we'd need.
We tarnished perfection right away...after a bio break, and getting the Mighty K underway, we'd just crossed over I-55 from the DQ when Stacy noticed one of her Gerbing gloves wasn't making the ride with us. Not good. A u-turn back to the start found it, and some ribbing from Jim Puckett ensued ("Four states? Are you sure?"), but we now seemed to have all our gear collected.
We hit Pilot Knob first, looking for a civil war battle monument. On this rally, the bonus sheets had photos of what needed to be shot for the points, so that was a plus: no question about what was needed in the picture to collect the bonus. OTOH, there were *not* the usual instructions to locate a bonus ("The Battle of Pilot Knob marker is located one block east of Main Street in Pilot Knob, in the Fort Davidson historic site"). Turns out that this bonus was known to Stacy, since her family's favorite place for fried chicken was nearby, and she'd seen this marker many times. It still took a few minutes to locate it, and a complete on-foot lap of the Fort complex in our riding gear and helmets.
Elephant Rock state park and Johnson Shut-Ins were next, both familiar to us, and we knew just what to do about Johnson Shut-Ins being closed (just photog the closed gate / marker and move on). We then went traveling in earnest, needing to get to Mammoth Spring AR and back by 4p. Our route went down MO21 to Ellington (again, we'd stopped at this very Shell station on the way to Metropolis a couple weeks ago), then west on MO106 (a wonderful road, it's now added to our "favorite roads" list) to Eminence. We turned south on MO19 and rode those well-formed roller-coaster hills until our Eleven Point River bridge bonus; then further south to US63 and Mammoth Spring, AR.
We bagged that bonus photo easily, and had it made for our AR gas receipt: there were two stations along US63 right there, just tank up and hit the road for KY/IL at Cairo, IL and then Cape G. Got my gas receipt, and went to record mileage, and then noticed: "Thayer, MO". Oh golly heck...that station was actually still on the Missouri side. We did a blast south a mile or so until we ran out of civilization; no gas. So then back to town, and west on AR9 a mile or so, through "downtown" Mammoth Spring and west of town; no gas.
Sigh. We'd just screwed the rally; the nearest towns were Hardy (south on 63, nearer) or Salem (west on 9, further) and both would add at least 30-45 minutes to the route; we'd blown any cushion we had hiking around the Pilot Knob fort and lolly-gagging at our gas stop in Ellington, MO. But there was no way I was leaving AR without a gas receipt, so we hot-footed it down to Hardy, hoping for gas in-between but finding none until we got there.
So while that was disappointing w/r/t the rally, we had a blast on that roundtrip to Hardy. US63 is plenty hilly with *fast*, wide, well-paved sweepers that let the Mighty K get into sport-bike mode on the passing lanes. Good times.
After our gas stop and AR receipt, it was now just a matter of collecting one more high-point bonus at Doniphan, then getting back to Cape without too much penalty. We clicked it up to legal-plus-a-few on US63, US67, and US60; unfortunately I trusted Garmin a little too much and took a *long* tour of downtown Poplar Bluff, MO, wasting more time. We finally hit the I-55 junction and fought some crosswinds up to x93, and only had to navigate to Grassroots BMW in Cape G. to finish. You'd think that woulda been a piece of cake, but no...our Garmin routing was indecipherable, asking for a bunch of lefts and rights on streets we didn't see. After a couple of U-turns we finally just gave up, put the endpoint on the screen and dead-reckoned our way to it, arriving at 4:26, late but not time-barred.
We waited in line to get scored, with good visiting and ogling the new BMW's in the showroom. Met a few new folks, and had a nice roast beef dinner, and saw awards handed out to some deserving folks.
So all in all a very good time...our gear worked great, we enjoyed some perfect weather on great roads...what's not to like?
Our route on the Not Superman Rally. We'd planned for a jaunt for gas in the Cairo IL area, but ran short on time (no, really?). The pushpins are the bonus locations that Jim had sent earlier. Stacy and I went for Missouri, not Illinois, since we'd just run many of the IL stuff on the MTF Founder's Feast Photo Rally a couple of weeks before.
Stacy at the Mammoth Spring bonus stop. Beautiful place, even if there's no gas station in Mammoth Spring!
It took a while to find this marker, even though Stacy had seen it before. It's actually "behind" Fort Davidson, and we walked/ran a full lap of the site, in full gear, before we spotted it.
Johnson Shut-Ins is a Missouri state park that was destroyed/damaged last year by the failure of the Taum Sauk reservoir dam (and an interesting story itself). The bonus was intended to be inside the park, according to the Garmin waypoint we'd received, but there was no way to get there. So this photo sufficed.
One of our favorite roads is MO19, and I've written about it before. This bonus was just after that incredible roller-coaster section south of Eminence, MO, and right on the highway, too.
Took us a while to recognize this sign as the one that was needed; we spotted it right away, but the rally packet had a photo of a similar sign in Van Buren, MO. A quick call to the RM cleared it up. We were running late at this point, but this one was "right on the way", too tempting not to bag it.