We were up early on Friday morning getting ready for the Lobo Loco Comical Rally. This was a tricky one with super-hero themed locations but without a set start and finish location. It sold out well before the start day and had people from all over the place participating in it. A long distance rally like this gives you a list of theme based locations you have to research and plan to visit in a set time period. This one also had a minimum distance requirement of 400kms in 12 hours.
For us we were looking at a warm (28°C), sunny day in Southern Ontario. Our plan was to create a ‘skeleton’ map of where we wanted to go and then research locations on the route that would get us points. Because this rally was a human-focused one, it made sense to head into population to find locations, so I elected to make a route that would lead us to Niagara Falls eventually. This would mean riding in the dreaded “Golden Horseshoe” – the most populated area in Canada and usually a sure way for me to lose all hope in humanity.
I usually aim away from population when I ride. Sitting in traffic and dicing with distracted drivers isn’t on my to-do list when I go for a ride, but one of the advantages to doing a rally is that it pushes you outside of your comfort zone. In this case it would help me hone my highway riding and traffic management skills.
The plan was to take the new Concours 14 on the trip but after a pre-rally ride on it we got home and looked at the Corbin seat on the Tiger and decided to take the older, less dependable and less long-distance touring ready bike simply for a saddle that doesn’t feel like a sadist’s dream. The Tiger also has nicer foot pegs for pillion and wasn’t giving me any reason to doubt it so I spend the day before making sure everything was tight and ready to go.
By 10am we were on the road getting points. We looped through downtown Elora to catch our first super-hero bonus (IRONMN1) and then bounced over to Fergus to get our first villain bonus at the Lutheran church there (LUTHOR1), then it was down to Guelph to catch a Spiderman themed stop (a science building at a university) before heading on to our first comic book store stop at The Dragon in the south end of the city. We’d hoped to also do a motorcycle themed comic book cover in the store but thanks to COVID they were running on reduced hours and weren’t open yet.
South down Highway 6 we immediately got stuck in traffic coming off the 401 mega-highway. It was starting to get properly hot now but once we got moving the temperature was bearable. We were going to stop at Flamborough Patio Furniture to get a photo of one of their giant chickens (the INHULK bonus was to get a photo of an oversized road-side attraction), but there was no place to safely stop and I’m very conscious of safety when we’re rallying, so we pressed on to Terra Greenhouses where we got the GOBLIN1 bonus for finding garden gnomes. We stopped long enough that the Tiger fired up no problem – 10 minutes seemed to do the trick, so on we pressed to Hamilton and our next three targets.
The next target was Do Eat Sushi in Grimsby where they serve octopus on the menu (the OCTOPI Doc Octopus villain bonus!). We stopped for an excellent lunch at Station 1 across the street before pushing on to St. Catharines. Our Skills Ontario GIS medal winning son was at home so we had him look up an alternative Wonder Woman statue we could do and he found a great one! St. Catharines was the end of the Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape the land of the free south of us. Harriet Tubman was a real-life wonder woman who helped free hundreds of slaves and then went back to the US to fight for the Union in the civil war. Her statue in St. Catharines, where she lived for a time, was in a meditation garden on the side of a small church in a rough area of the city, and it was lovely and all the better for it because we were originally going to just grab a statue of a queen instead. Canada has a lot of hidden history like this but queen statues are a dime a dozen.
As we sat there with our boots and socks off (I took my pants off too), we had a picnic of apples, granola bars and water, cooling off and stretching, we made a decision to call it. With better circumstances, a less questionable bike and better stamina on our part I think we could have aimed for a 10k score, but for this one my main goal was to finish and do it with a smile on our faces.
Our rally prep is strong and our ability to pivot away from bad situations while in motion was good. If we can improve our tools and stamina we could aim for a 10k+ finish points wise which would put us mid-pack.
from Blogger https://ift.tt/3kSrskq
via IFTTT