Lobo Loco Rallies are based out of South/Central Ontario, but if you're anywhere in the mid-west or on the eastern side of North America it's easy to get to. It's a great excuse to find weird things and pile up alotta miles on your bike, and it's based out of Peterborough in the middle of some beautiful Canadian shield riding. You'll have hundreds of miles of rocky shield, winding road and beautiful lakes to roam through:
We just spent a delightful dam day riding north and west from where we live looking for water themed locations for this year's Lobo Loco all-season Water is Life rally. If you find that your riding is a bit aimless, or you're always showing up at the same places over and over, a long distance rally is a great way to break those habitual rides. You get a theme and some specific targets, but you also get some special monthly targets in this rally. It runs from May to October, so you have lots of time to get points. You can set up rides with intention and ride as hard as you like. Some people go and go if they're all about the points (and have a lot of free time). I'm more about the exploration and photography opportunities, even more so If I've got a pillion along, but you can do it however you like. My son and I have done this a few times now, and my buddy Jeff and I have had some epic rides, but this time it was all about my wife and I getting points and spending some quality time together. For May the water specific theme was dams, so we went looking for the damned things in our area. It's amazing what you can find when you ride with a purpose. Only fifteen minutes from home we were stumbling across secret Mennonite fishing holes at the Woolwich Dam, and twenty minutes later chatting with dreadlocked sports bike riders on the Conestogo Dam causeway. We bumped into a number of riders on the trip and always suggest they look up the rally as a way of extending their riding destinations.
Further north we stopped just past Harriston (after getting a photo of their water tower), and got lunch at The Red Caboose. If you've never had an Ontario chip truck lunch, this would be a great place to start. Everything is grown in the fields around you (including the beef). It's what you'd expect to pay for a burger and fries, but this'll be the first time you've ever had something this fresh. Some fancy burger joint in Toronto will but sriracha on it and charge you five times as much for something that tastes half as good. The fries actually taste like potatoes. We would never have stopped there had we not launched ourselves on this exploratory rally adventure. With our stomachs full of goodness, we continued north. After a water tower hit-and-run in Clifford we eventually found ourselves in the place where government cuts made the water kill people: Walkerton, Ontario. We got to the Walkerton Heritage Water Garden only to discover it wasn't running - a local walking by told us they weren't turning it on due to new cut backs. Thousands got ill and e Coli in the water killed seven, and now a similar government has cancelled the memorial to what their predecessors did - I imagine they're thinking this is best not remembered. The irony runs thick, unlike the water in the monument. The local said the politicians all spent more time making sure they weren't liable than they did actually trying to solve the problem. Walkerton is now a vibrant community that has bounced back from this tragedy, but the damage runs deep, and more cuts are coming. We left the park in a sombre mood and headed through the lovely town before striking out east on Highway 4. Another water tower hit and run in Hanover and we were on our way to Durham and the ride south to home.
I'm sure I've passed through Durham before, but have no memory of it. It's a pretty little town in rolling Niagara Escarpment country. Alanna eagle-eyed the Garafraxa Cafe on the main street and we pulled in for a caffeine boost to get us home strong. Things looked promising with an Italian coffee machine that looked like a Vespa scooter and a proprietor who knew what he was doing with it. It ended up being one of the best Americanos I've ever had. We pushed south to Holstein Dam while picking up water towers in MoFo and Arthur. Our last stop was the Shand Dam that created Belwood Lake just down the road from our home in Elora. To maximize points you want to get your bike in the photo and have signage and the dam itself in one of the two photos. I find the Ricoh Theta 360 camera handy for doing this because it grabs everything at once, but many others just use their smart phone camera and get a lot more points than I do. Naming conventions on your photos are important too - you lose points handing things in the wrong way. Having Alanna along really helps with this as she actually reads the instructions.
By
this point we'd been on the road for well over six hours and were ready
to go put our feet up, fortunately our circuitous route took us in a
big loop back home:
Getting signage with the name on it counts for points!
We went a bit overboard with this one. It was our first stop, it was a lovely dam surrounded by Mennonites fishing and we wanted to make sure we got the required things in the photos (and they are many!)... You will need to have the following in order to collect points: A) A photo of the dam itself B) A photo of signage indicating the name of the dam, or a photo indicating the name of the town the dam is in - We will accept a “Welcome To”, City Limits, or Town Hall sign. C) The GPS coordinates, approximate street address, or nearest cross street to the dam Your motorcycle MUST be in at least one of the 2 photos. You will receive the highest points ONLY for whichever you achieve for each individual dam: 99 points - motorcycle with the dam (which I think we got with the bottom one with me standing with the bike in front of the gate) 66 points - motorcycle with the dam signage 33 points - motorcycle with the town signage ... but I think I like the one with us leaning over the dam more. Sometimes the photographer gets in the way of the rally requirements.
A few years ago we rode down to the last Indianapolis MotoGP. It was a great few days in Indiana and it was pretty close to us. At a push the ride there could be done in a day (we took two because I had my ten year old son with me). This year's only North American MotoGP is in Texas and happens the weekend before Easter. How few days could I do it in? It just happens that Austin is a Bun Burner Gold away, just over 1500 miles south west of here. I watched a couple of fellow motorcyclists from the Lobo Loco long distance rallies pull a Bun Burner Gold off in the fall. If I could get to COTA in 24 hours I'd be a rockstar! If I left on Thursday evening I'd be down there Friday evening or a bit later if I missed it (BBGs depend a lot on construction and delays to pull off). Either way I'd be up Saturday morning with some kind of Iron Butt ride (if I missed the BBG there are half a dozen other, easier ones that I could still aim for) under my belt to catch qualifying. Early to bed Saturday night and then another day at the Circuit of the Americas on Sunday for the races. After a good dinner I'd be back on the road again making tracks north to home. If I missed the Bun Burner Gold on the way down, I could attempt it again on the way back! Either doing a Sunday night to Monday night blitz to get the gold, or breaking it into two long days and going for a plain old Bun Burner 1500 (1500 miles over 36 hours). In a perfect world I'd do the BBG on the way down, enjoy the weekend and rest up again before getting a Bun Burner 1500 on the way back, riding Sunday night after the race as far as I can, having a sleep and then getting up and finishing the ride within 36 hours. If I'm back Monday night I would have only missed two days of work while getting to watch a MotoGP live and picking up multiple iron butts! That'd shake the rust off after a long, cold, Canadian winter. Does two Iron Butt rides around a weekend of MotoGP sound extreme? From the dark depths of February after weeks and weeks out of the saddle, it sounds like a brilliant idea! When you're trapped under a polar vortex and some truly grim, neverending Canadian winter, the thought of trying to cross much of North America twice in five days on two wheels scratches an itch.
Slow motion through the esses at Indianapolis...
COTA has all sorts of pretty views for video and photography...
I did a 360km-ish kilometre ride on Saturday. All back roads and as twisty as I can find in the farm-desert we live in. I was gone shortly after 8am and had a coffee at Higher Ground before ripping up and down the Forks of the Credit. I was then up past Orangeville to Hockley Valley Road, back through Mono Hills and up to River Road into Terra Nova before coming back down to Horning's Mills and north to Noisy River Road into Creemore. All in all I crossed the escarpment half a dozen times on my way north. By now it was well past noon and into the high thirties with humidity. After a great lunch at The Old Mill House Pub in Creemore I was out to Cashtown Corners to fill up and then past Glen Huron and over the escarpment one more time before heading north to Thornbury Cidery and the cooler shores of Georgian Bay.
Nothing Cools you down like the shore of a great lake on a hot, summer day.
From Creemore on I was soaking wet and sweating freely, monkey butt (red and sore on my backside from wet, aggravated skin) was soon to follow. It wasn't so bad by the lake, but inland it was sweltering. I was standing frequently to try and get wind under me, but by this point my big ride was just uncomfortable. The Macna vented pants did ok on my legs, but where I needed it the most they were just trapping heat and leaving me dripping. I bombed south down Beaver Valley, stopping once at an overlook to finish the Gatorade I had and then on to Flesherton for a stop at Highland Grounds before dodging and weaving south on back roads towards Elora and air conditioned nirvana.
Before I left that morning I learned that Wolfe and Robyn, the founders of Lobo Loco long distance motorcycle rallies, had already started the monumentally difficult Bun Burner Gold, the seemingly impossible fifteen hundred miles (2400kms!!!) in twenty-four hours - yes, that's a 100km/hr average for a whole turn of the earth. You'd need to be making time every hour so you'd have time to get gas, eat, drink and toilet; it's madness!
By the time I'd seen what these two superheroes were going to attempt that morning they had already done more miles than I was going to do all day (monkey butt and all), and they still had the better part of two thousand kilometres to go... in a day! Part of this is making sure you've got the right gear for the job. I'm going to address that in another post, but the other side of this is do I think I can actually pull something like that off. I'm months away from turning fifty and I'm starting to get a sense of what getting older is going to feel like. Doubt is what starts you thinking that you have to act your age. The two doing that epic bun burner are fifteen plus years younger than I am and much more experienced riders. My starting to ride late grates on my nerves. Despite numerous opportunities, events beyond my control conspired to prevent me from finding my way back to a hereditary hobby. Those lost years still haunt me. No point in moping about it. I've gotta grab the opportunities as I find them and not let doubt weaken my resolve. If I want to get an Iron Butt done then I need to get it done. You don't get shit done by moaning about it. But first I've got to get my seat and kit sorted. No point in trying to do a job without the right tools.
A hot and sunny Sunday ride up and around the Niagara Escarpment looking for murals, though the twisty roads were the main focus... Part 1: https://goo.gl/maps/QseRL6TWNhq Part 2: https://goo.gl/maps/BgC2rUvH2qQ2 293kms The PTTR Grand Tour is going on all summer through Lobo Loco Rallies: Paint the town red 2018 Grand Tour That one is closed now, but there are many other weekend rallies going on if you're interested in exploring long distance motorcycle rallying. Murals Discovered: Grand Valley 43.898875, -80.315307
Creemore 44.326060, -80.106099
Ravenna Country Market 44.469285, -80.417343
Clarksburg 44.546531, -80.461742
Some other 360 imaging from the ride. Made using the Ricoh Theta camera on a flexible tripod attached to the bike:
The twisty bits on River Road
In Thornbury on the shore of Georgian Bay - the temperature was easily ten degrees cooler.
We knew it was going to be a hot one before we started. We'd done the last Lobo Loco rally (with great success!) on an equally hot and dry day, so we didn't give it much thought. Our cunning plan was to head up to Jeff's cottage and then drive from the shores of Huron up to Southampton and then down through Southwestern Ontario before finishing up in Brampton. We'd been pouring over the rally map for days working out the best route. Stops were thin on the ground this time around, so the 16 stop plan I concocted seemed eminently doable and quite competitive.
Last time we'd won the longest (worst?) route award. This time we were cutting over a hundred clicks off last year's marathon that had us burning through the atmosphere to get to the finish in the nick of time.
A wrench was thrown into the works a week before this rally when Wolfe Bonham, our improbably named rally master, threw a bonus in that had us radically rethinking our route. If we could connect together towns that started with a 'W' a 'T' and then an 'F', we could pick up a cumulative bonus for each set of three. We were out in the country with tiny towns everywhere. This was a distinct advantage as those in the Greater Toronto Area had paved over all their small towns and called them one thing. With points so thin on the map, this seemed like the way to go. Jeff had headed up to his internet-less cottage the night before. I followed him up the next day, about 12 hours before the rally would start with all sorts of WTF towns lined up and a Google Map saved on my phone so I could access it off-line. It was cooking hot on the way up, well into the 90s Fahrenheit and with a relentless wind that had me riding with a permanent 10° lean. Winds were gusting even higher by the lake.
After a good dinner we went for a walk and watched the sun fall into Huron before we got down to the business of mangling our carefully built route. Each WTF town combo built on itself, and the only stipulation was that you had to do them in order. You could do other bonuses in between, so in theory you could do multiple WTFs within and around each other.
Our initial route had us riding north out of Point Clark and up to Southampton before looping back through Chesney and Walkerton, down past where we live, over to the escarpment and then down the 401 to Brampton. We threw out Georgetown, Milton and riding along the 401 to the finish line to begin with because neither of us like riding in population - that prejudice would end up derailing us later. I was loath to throw out our loop north around Southampton and tried to fit in some early, multiple WTF town combos. Our original score would have been in the seven to eight thousand range, but with a couple of cuts we'd have 7000 in regular stops and four WTF combos worth 1500, 2000, 2500 and 3000 points. That would have had us finishing with upwards of sixteen thousand points; it felt like a sure victory! Even with the extra stops we were still lower mileage than our marathon from last year, though with almost no highway riding at speed.
As the wind continued to howl around the cottage we finally put the map down and went for a short sleep. The next morning we woke up to tree limbs down and many branches blown off. Unlike most mornings, it was still wild and windy on the shores of Huron and the temperature was already climbing. We got out early and filled up right at 8am at a little two pump gas station in Amberley. Instead of heading north up the coast we cut inland, searching for our first WTF town bonus. Along the way we stopped in Lucknow for a terrifying statue that suited the rally theme (WTF?). After piling on those points I realized we didn't have to go all the way to Wingham for our 'W' as Whitechurch was on the way. We were tripping over 'W' towns! The combos had begun, except it was so windy that my rally flag blew onto the highway in Whitechurch and I had to stuff it into the fairing to stop it going walkabout again. A quick Google maps detour had us in the scenic town of Teeswater only a few minutes later. This time the rally flag flew into a farmer's field. Since we were emailing the stops in as we went (an annoyingly time consuming task), we got a warning that rally flags needed to be in every shot. Short of some crazy glue or a photo crew following us along, I wasn't sure how we were going to do that. We pressed on to the even prettier town of Formosa which had suddenly gotten hilly as we neared the edge of the Niagara escarpment. Once again I was comedically chasing the rally flag into ditches and missed it in the photo. We were off again, this time headed for a village that didn't actually show up on most maps: the mythical berg of Westford (not to be confused with Westworld).
After the road turned to gravel, then dirt, then went into a full on bayou as we entered the Greenock Swamp Wetland Complex (I couldn't make this up), we found Westford! As we took the picture to start our second WTF town combo we got a message saying our rally flags weren't showing. Whether this was a warning or a three thousand point penalty (we wouldn't be losing our first WTF bonus, we'd be losing our last), it took the wind out of our sails. We'd been having a great time on our big adventure bikes slashing through the wetland complex to find the nearly fictional village of Westford only to wonder if our first 90 minutes of hard going had been for nothing. We tried to shake it off as we saddled up and headed over to Tiverton for our next target. The sun was starting to bake everything and the wind was relentless, but for the next little while we had it at our backs, so life was good.
The roads got gravelly, then dirty, then muddy! Circumnavigating the Greenock Wetland Complex was a good time!
Tiverton arrived, but now we wondered what it was worth. At that point we re-prioritized getting the rally flag clearly in every picture. Since we were partnered up this was a relatively straightforward prospect, Jeff would take a photo of me with my phone then I'd take one of him with his. I still wonder how other competitors working solo managed to take photos of themselves, their bike and a clear rally flag in sixty kilometer per hour gusts. We were now working our way north up the coast Lake Huron and past the Bruce Nuclear power plant. By mid-morning the temperatures were soaring. Fortunately the great lake next to us did something to take the edge off. At no point were we lolligagging, with quick stops and efficient speed between them. We pulled into Southampton well before noon and collected two more regular stops. From there we angled eastward and then south, into that fearsome wind, for the main leg of the rally. We felt on top of the time and ahead of schedule.
Passing under the main output from the Bruce Nuclear Power Plant. An operator there was the former owner of my radioactive orange Tiger!
Southampton was busy on a sunny June weekend with lots of traffic and lights. Up until then we'd been safely ensconced deep in the country, but now we were trying to make time with people all around. A big dog and a house covered in lawn ornaments (I know, WTF, right?) and we were back out on country lanes making (hot) wind as we headed east toward Owen Sound.
I'd never been to Tara, Ontario before, though my parents once entertained ideas about moving there. It's a pretty little town with lots of old, brick buildings. That became a theme of this ride. Small Southern Ontario towns have these beautiful old brick buildings in the empty hearts of most of them. In Southampton an enterprising group had turned one into The Outlaw Brew Company. Passing it I was struck with the idea of just stopping and going in. Why am I tear assing around like this? Jeff and I both put a pin in that one though, we'll be back. Visions of reclaiming an old brick building in rural Ontario and turning it into a motorcycle themed digital foundry, coffee shop and nano-brewery (only for local consumption) floated around in my heat soaked brain. The stop in Chesley included a giant cow (WTF?) and then we were on to Walkerton for a sadder WTF.
Walkerton was where my son Max and I drove to pick up the Tiger on a cold spring day over a year ago. I've got a soft spot for the place. The memorial gardens to the people who died in 2000 when local water treatment failed to protect its own citizens was a difficult WTF stop to see. That it's not downtown but hidden away by the municipal buildings in the south end bothered me. We finally found it and got our photo by the memorial waterfall. We left Walkerton (our third 'W' town) in a reflective state of mind.
We were pushing into the afternoon now and I started to fear for time. Even with 'aggressive navigation' between these towns, riding through them meant not being a tool and staying on the speed limits. We got lost going south out of Walkerton on our way to Wroxeter to start another WTF town loop, but only lost about five minutes. Trowsbridge was a shot in the dark, barely a dot on the map, but we found it, and then wrapped up this loop within a loop within a loop in Fordwich. Checking the time we chucked Mount Forest out the window and started to run south. We needed to close the Walkerton and Westford-Tiverton loops. Teviotdale got Walkerton hooked up and Fergus would close one of the two. We were originally going to head a bit west and hit Floradale, but we were running out of time fast. I then remembered that Forks of the Credit actually has a village sign, so that would close our last WTF town loop. South out of Teviotdale we ran into a steady stream of Sunday traffic heading for Elora (it's very pretty, I know, I live there). The next few stops were in our own backyard, but time was slipping away, and more problematically, we'd both gotten to the point where we obviously weren't thinking clearly, which is bad when it's almost a hundred windy degrees out and you're on a motorcycle trying to make time. We bombed south toward Elora, passing on the broken line when we could, but short of some back to the future motorcycling we weren't going to do this thing. We had to stop for gas and I ran in and grabbed energy bars since neither of us had eaten anything in over seven hours. Chugging Gatorade and watching the heat waves come off the pavement, Jeff asked a good question: "do we want to go all the way to Brampton?" For the first time I got off the must-finish train and thought about it. If we made it it'd be mighty close assuming a clean run into the GTA, which never happens (it turns out it wouldn't have, there were miles and miles of construction on the main highway leading into Brampton that we learned about afterwards).
We were both spent. It was oven hot, we'd been fighting the wind all day and it looked like that same wind had thrown thousands of points in stops into question. The thought of fighting our way into the shity um, city, especially when we were standing in our own backyard was too much to take. We both had to go to work the next day and another three hours in the saddle (conservatively 1.5 hours each way plus surprise construction) put the final nail in the coffin. That last picture of me passed out on the side of the road happened to be right outside of the Breadalbane. Ten minutes later we were sitting in the shade re-hydrating and ordering some locally sourced chicken wings; our day was done. The ride home from there was 7 minutes long with no traffic. We texted our tap out but there were no regrets. We had a great day seeing all sorts of things we hadn't seen before and finding several places that don't officially exist. The missed flags at the beginning knocked us off our game, the heat and wind beat us down and ultimately the thought of fighting our way into any part of the GTA at the end was too much to bear. A few days later we discovered the winner had over twenty-one thousand points and had made thirty-five stops while covering over 450kms. I'm still trying to work out how that was possible. We would have hit 25 stops on our way through a 435km ride had we done the whole thing. Google Maps says that should take 6 hours and 2 minutes, but that assumes no stops. If you've got to find each place, a place to safely stop the bike where you can take a picture that meets the requirements, take the photo, send it via email, saddle up and go again, that sucks up time. This assumes that you immediately find each stop with no problems and don't need to stop for gas, or eating, or drinking, or anything else.
35 stops at 3 minutes apiece (an astonishingly quick stop time) would mean you'd have six and a quarter hours to cover 457kms. That works out to an over 73km/hr average speed. That is quick if you take into account having to slow down and get back up to pace after each of 30+ stops, stop signs, traffic lights and traffic, not to mention speed limits on anything other than a highway. We spent most of our time on empty country roads and we weren't lollygagging. At one point Jeff told me to ease up because I was likely to attract the popo. If we came upon traffic we generally passed it. We covered 358kms and pulled the plug in Fergus at 2:48pm - 6hrs and 48 minutes in. Google tells me it was another hour and twenty-four minutes of riding to the finish line on our route, not counting the time needed to stop four more times. Our not lollygagging average speed before we pulled the plug with nineteen stops done was 52.65 km/hr. To make up for traffic lights, riding in towns, stop signs and traffic, we were doing a bit more than that most of the time. We didn't waste time with silly things like eating. Until I've figured out how to bend the laws of physics it looks like a rally win is beyond my capabilities, or my willingness to take risks.
A doable map - that we didn't do.
I'm away during the next two rallies, but I'll be out there again in the fall. I've never done Port Dover on Friday the 13th, so that'll give me an excuse to overcome my cruiser phobia and go. I think the idea of pushing for a big points day is no more. I'll enjoy the ride, see things I don't normally see and make sure I'm not pushing so hard that I can't enjoy the camaraderie at the end. That was the most disappointing aspect of the day, not hearing about all the other adventures that happened to everyone else.
Here's an upcoming Lobo Loco long distance rally. If you're iron butty you could do the 3 day event. I'm in for the one day on Sunday:
