Rally Vignettes
By Marilyn Roberts
So he comes up to me at the Door Prize desk and says he’s been to a museum in Kansas City where he saw a picture of Amelia Earhart, and I look just like her. Really? He continued to jabber away and I realized that he was going to continue to jabber.
I found something else I had to do and shook him. The next morning he found me out front and called me Amelia. Fortunately, Bill wandered out and I wandered away, leaving Bill to talk with him.
Cathy Bissell outdid herself collecting large plastic coffee containers to use as door prize ticket repositories. She got 18 of them from Dave Andy Anderson. Government types must be under a lot of stress, needing gallons of coffee.
Some rally goers had their usual problems understanding “blue goes in the red coffee cans, white grand prize ticket goes in the grand prize jug.” There were pink 50-50 tickets in both. There were white tickets in the red cans. There were blue tickets in the grand prize jug.
One guy realized his mistake just as he’d finished putting all of his blue tickets in the grand prize jug. I said, “No worries, I am good at this.” Indeed, I have had lots of practice since I began working the Door Prize desk a few years ago.
With tape on the end of the checkered flag stick (it marks the grand prize jug) I fished for blue tickets through the one-inch hole in the top of the jug. Turns out, his weren’t the only ones in there and I fished out 7 of someone else’s tickets, too.
Even though we had parked our RV, a Winnebago Travato 59K named Winifred de Bago, in a corner behind the Lion’s Den, many people found it and wanted to know more about it. During the weekend we gave tours to 28 people.
Ray from Ray’s LED Lights approached and I prepared for another tour, but he walked straight to my R100R Mystic and spent the next 30 minutes admiring it and telling me how I could save alternator wattage by replacing the bike’s bulbs with LEDs, and that I didn’t need to close the fuel petcock.
He moved on to the starter, sure that it was a Valeo (it is), and said that around 40,000 miles the starter would die because the magnets would fall off due to failing glue. In that event, I should look for a used Saturn car starter, which he says will replace the Valeo much cheaper than buying a new Bosch, and it’s a stronger starter.
We awoke Friday morning to the Lion’s Club team reaming out an underground sewer line behind the Lion’s Den. Seems it was clogged with lots of poop and paper from the outdoor men’s room. Much of said poop—or maybe it was just mud—decorated the workers’ fronts.
Three entries to the pipe were open: one by the old concession stand, one near the kitchen door and one about 2 feet from the Ackerman’s tent. As I watched a man peer into the opening near the Ackerman’s tent (left), I couldn’t help but think about the sewer fiasco of a few years ago when the Potosi fire department blasted out the sewers. If you haven’t heard that story, ask someone who has been around a while.
Friday night was forecast to be as chilly as Thursday night was, so I suggested to Bill that we plug in the RV. So at 10 p.m Friday night I goaded Bill into going out to plug us in. No, we didn’t do it during the day when it was light and warmer. Dew was heavy and our breath was visible in the flashlight beam. Hmmm. Thirty amp into a 110 outlet.
We got out all the adapters we had and the extension cord and surge protector. We jury-rigged the wires and adapters together in an unnatural order. Bill was dressed in shorts and t-shirt and looked to be shivering as he tried the plug in each of the 4 outlets on the pole, only to find out that none of them were live.
We ran the heat off propane that night. The next day we learned from Lion’s Club personnel that that pole isn’t live and they didn’t want it live. We plugged in to an outlet on the Lion’s Den for Saturday night.
I wanted to enter my R100R Mystic in the Bike Show, which is why Bill drove the RV down. I rode the bike. I don’t have bags large enough to carry camping gear and clothes on the Mystic. After removing the bugs from the ride down I took it over to the show area on Saturday afternoon.
Because the Mystic has a self-retracting side stand, I had Bill accompany me to the show area with a block of wood to put under the side stand. When I push the side stand out while seated, I cannot see the end because the left jug is in the way, so I wanted Bill to pull the side stand out and place it on the block of wood. We must have positioned the bike on a small rise because as soon as I removed my weight from the seat, the bike rolled forward slightly, the side stand flopped up and the bike lurched to the left, depositing it and me unceremoniously on the ground.
Naturally, there was a group of people standing nearby to witness the whole thing. There was no damage except a couple of large bruises on me. The Mystic won the show, by the way. GR