The Truth

Times are hard. This isn't new information. The weekend I returned from my scooter tour last summer, our firefighters were camped in several intersections, raising money for their local charity. As I was stopped at the light, I scrambled for a couple dollars and opened my window. I asked him, "How is it going?"

The firefighter paused and then said, "You want the truth, don't you?"

"I do, actually."

"Well, we aren't doing a tenth of what we did last year, and that doesn't even compare to what we did the year before."

I understood. I didn't raise even one percent of what it cost me to do my Midwest Tour. Without that prep tour I wouldn't have the experience to one day take my dream ride across France, ending at Sacre Couer in Paris (add link to previous blog). I certainly wouldn't have been physically strong enough either; my body had grown progressively stronger over the course of the tour. Although I did my 50-day Midwest tour solo (with the exception of my three days in and around St. Louis), we knew that if I ever became too fatigued to continue my husband Michael or my friend and colleague Dante could grab my Tahoe, with its specially designed scooter rack, and come pick me up.

So now, if I want to continue, I need an angel to cover the Midwest tour and front the money for the French tour -- or I just have to wait. I'm now editing a book about the Midwest tour and all that led up to it. Ten years ago, when I got out of Intensive Care, I was too sick to do much other than use my laptop in bed. It took a decade's journey back to health, including my scooter journey, to return me to some semblance of a normal life.

I am insanely grateful for the wild and wonderful journey this past summer, to every person I spoke with at a gas station, every person who pulled over to make sure I was okay when I was just getting some water, every person who shared the story of a loved one who meets the challenge of a hidden disability (or doesn't), and to the few special people who took me into their home along the way. Of course I’m especially grateful to the St. Louis Scooter Club, and all the motorcycle people on the road who treated me as one of them, regardless of the fact that I was a chick riding a three-wheeled scooter.

I will continue to ride around Southwest Michigan and Chicago in 2011 and share my stories here and @offthemap_eu. So keep an eye out for more news about my riding life, and upcoming news about my forthcoming book and all the rest of life's adventures.

Cheboygan, Synchronicity & Smooth Sailing

Sick Scooter.

Day Four: Fixing up my Scooter (and my Body) in Cheboygan, MI.

The weather report said heavy thunderstorms in the afternoon en route to Cheboygan, so I set about getting up bright and early to avoid testing out my new rain gear just yet. I had already put in a call to my bodyworker back home to see if she could help me find a Deep Tissue Massage Therapist in Cheboygan, because I was hurting pretty bad in quite a few places and I was worried that if I got chilled in the rain, I would definitely be out of commission for a couple of days.

I fell back asleep after my 5:00am wake-up call, but started hustling around 7:35 when I woke again. I was loaded up and on the bike by 9:00 which, although later than I intended, was my earliest to date. I was punching in the address to The Gables Bed & Breakfast in Cheboygan into the nav, the last step in my departure procedure checklist, when the nav powered down. This was weird. I tried to restart it -- no luck. I tried to turn the bike on -- no luck. I couldn’t even get the key out. It was making a funny high-pitched noise. I wondered if I did something to trigger the anti-theft device on the bike.

I called the Vespa dealer “back home” in Grand Rapids (where I bought the bike) and Dan, the mechanic who got my scoot all suited up for this ride, attempted to talk me through getting the key out. I was able to do so, in fact the ignition was stuck between the on and off positions and wouldn’t move. He said he had never heard of this before. He said he figured something was wrong with the ignition, that maybe some of the tumblers had jiggled loose.

My mind was racing. There are a tiny handful of Vespa dealers in Michigan and I wasn’t so sure I wanted to take my Piaggio to a non-Vespa shop for an ignition problem. I asked Dan, “If you were in my shoes which would you do — have it towed 300 miles to a Vespa dealer or take it to a local shop and see what they could do with the ignition?” I was imaging having to get towed to Detroit and wondering how I would ever make up the miles to get back on schedule. He said, “I would wiggle that thing around for a long time.” But it was like Excaliber in the stone. It wasn’t going anywhere.

I asked if he could look up where the closest Vespa dealer was to Gaylord, MI. Now here is the first miracle in the story — get this, the nearest Vespa dealer was in GAYLORD, MI!! NO LIE!!!

Thanks to Chris Maxsom from Total Powersports (Gaylord, MI) for

fixing me up and getting me on the road in record time.

I called and talked to Jeanne at Total Powersports. I was afraid that, given they didn’t know me, they might not be able to squeak me into their schedule -- but she said no problem and that they were rolling out the red carpet. She sent Chris Maxson, their sales manager out to get me. He was there within ten minutes. Once at the shop, Mike Peppler got me set up and Chris Smith started right to work on my scoot, while Mike took my information.

In about fifteen minutes Chris, the tech, came out with the word. Turns out the Piaggio has two off key positions (I forgot to ask why), and if you take the key out while in the “half-off” position, rather than the “full-off” position, the engine is actually still on. So my engine had been on all night which had killed the battery. He gave me a power jump and told me not to stop the engine until I got to Cheboygan, and then use my charger through the night (which was set-up for me before I started this trip by Scott Sternaman: Shoreline Smart Homes).

They then told me they were going to put me on their website and see if they could get their people to follow the project! AND, they didn’t charge me a penny for all their trouble! A big huge heartfelt thanks to Total Powersports, Gaylord, MI!

I took off for Cheboygan without further incident or rain. When I arrived I set about trying to find a body worker. Now given that I don’t have an abdominal muscular structure, the rest of my body takes on an extra load and, given the additional burden of riding the scooter — well, under normal circumstances I need to have body work to undo all the damage I do just trying to live. With the added strain, I was in a world of hurt and needed someone with some medical knowledge and skilled enough to be able to navigate the terrain of my unusual body. When I left, I knew I would need to find people along the way to unkink what I’m doing as I ride the scooter. I’m particularly feeling the additional stress between my shoulders, my lower back, my wrists and my ankles.

The Gables Bed & Breakfast (Cheboygan, MI).

Image taken from thegablesbnb.com

When I got into town, the B&B was not yet open so I sauntered over to Alice’s Restaurant for a snack. I asked my server if she knew of any massage therapists and she mentioned several places, but I figured the one who works with a chiropractor would be the most likely to have the skills to manage my broken body. Dr. Dom’s office gave me her number — Shellie Charboneau.

Now here are the next couple of crazy and fortuitous parts of the story: first, she is usually completely booked on Monday, but for some reason she was open today and was just getting ready to go over to her mom’s for lunch, so she was available. Not only that, but her place was literally next door to my B&B, so I could walk over while my bike was charging (at the realtor’s office -- thank you Jessie and Chuck Knopp). But wait, that’s not all — she races motocross! Now, for those of you not familiar with the term, that means she races a motorcycle. In fact she competed last weekend at Onaway Motor Speedway in the 30+ Class (with all the boys) and took first place!

Shellie Charboneau, Massage Therapist and Motocross Racer,

fixed my overworked body, pained from riding.

Well, Shellie knew exactly what my body needed. She uncompressed my neck from wearing a helmet, pulled apart my shoulder-blades from holding my arms up for all those miles, took the stress away from my lower back and reassembled my wrists and ankles that were hurting so badly (I couldn’t even hang my left wrist limply over the handlebar without it hurting, much less use it to break.) Now I am all fixed up. I’m not feeling pain at all, anywhere.

Inside the Gables B&B.

I’m still amazed at how fortuitous the whole day was; that I would manage to breakdown in one of the few towns in the entire state of Michigan that has a Vespa dealership, that the only referral I would get for a body worker in Cheboygan would be located right next door to where I was staying, and that she would be a biker chick - what a day! If this is any indication of how the rest of this tour is gonna go, then I am smooth sailing!

Night One: Sleeping On A Sub!

USS Silversides. Decommissioned sub, museum, and place to lay your head,
in Muskegon, Michigan. Image from glnmm.org.

USS Silversides at the Great Lakes Naval Memorial & Museum

Well it's the first night of my Midwest Training Tour and I'm spending it bunking down in a submarine, a real submarine! The USS Silversides, commissioned December 15, 1941, just 8 days after Pearl Harbor was attacked. To get the lay of the land (so to speak), I took what was without question the coolest tour I’ve ever been on!

Electric Room.

But wait -- first let me make something clear: I’m really not into war. I’m freaked out by the Bomb, internment camps, all that stuff -- but seeing the movie in the museum here, and experiencing the hour-long tour of the sub itself, I certainly got some insight into the culture of that time and a sense of how life was on a U.S. sub.

Some of my sub buddies from Boy Scout Troop 264.

The tour I took was lead by Gary Reynolds and joined by Retired Officer Dan, with Boy Scout Troop 264 from Griffith, Indiana. It began with a solemn ceremony in which the Boy Scouts (guided by Gary) lowered five flags, appropriately folded them and handed them off to him with a salute. I don’t need to have served in the military to have been touched by the honor of it.

An underwater Underwood.

The tour itself was amazing! It included information about how submarines work, the military practices on the ship, the history of the patrols made by the USS Silversides, and the stories of some of the men that served on this ship. It was honestly fascinating. Here some of the interesting tidbits I learned:

Burial at sea aboard the USS Cobia, 1945. Image from ussflierproject.com.

• How was a person “buried at sea”? The body was wrapped in a tarp and weights were added to prevent the enemy from finding it, giving away the location of the ship. A special ceremony would be performed with all officers on deck, in uniform. The body, with a flag draped over it, would then be placed on a board. The board would be tilted so the body would slide out from under the flag and into the sea, leaving the flag behind.

• Mike Harbin, Torpedo Man Third Class, was the only serviceman killed on the Silversides. He was hit by enemy machine gun fire on her first war patrol in May of ‘42. Rumor has it that his ghost still haunts the sub. (Boy Scout Collin explained to me that the ghost usually appears early in the morning or late at night, when you feel the hairs on the back of your neck stand up or a rush of cold air; he thought that with all of us on board there was probably too much activity for the ghost to appear tonight.)

• The propellers are called “screws.”

Ward Room that once served as a makeshift
Operating Room. Image from ussflierproject.com.

• A ship’s pharmacist, Thomas Moore, with only improvised instruments (he used bent spoons as retractors) and an anatomy book, once performed a successful appendectomy on the table in the Ward Room. This scene was reenacted in the 1943 movie Destination Tokyo, starring Cary Grant.

Lobby Card for Warner Bros.' Destination Tokyo depicting

the appendectomy scene. Image from carygrant.net.

• The nickname “Pigboats” came from the odor that resulted from the fact that purified water was used first for the engines, then cooking and hand-washing, and then bathing. Officers were allowed a shower once a week, but the enlisted men could only shower once every 13 days. (Scouts Daniel and Anthony helped me with fact checking on this one.)

• This sub had its “screws” removed because the U.S. has a treaty with Canada saying there will be no active warships in the Great Lakes.

• The USS Silversides is 80% active. The engines are run on Memorial Day to honor the 3,600 men who died on U.S. submarines in World War II.

• On a side note, I just read that starting in 2012 women will begin serving as official crew members on U.S. submarines for the first time.

Something else I got from this visit: I guess I'd never heard much of Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech, beyond that opening declaration, until seeing the museum’s movie. It becomes clear why so many young Americans were motivated to enlist, and risk the ultimate sacrifice.

In FDR’s own words:
“I believe I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again...we will gain the inevitable triumph - so help us God.”

The crew sleeping quarters; bunking down with torpedoes.

Throughout the tour Gary repeated the average age, 18-20, of the young enlisted men who served on the USS Silversides. Their bunks lie in rows alongside the torpedoes. I could not help but think about our young men and women now serving in Iraq and Afghanistan -- the intensity of what they are called to do, the risks and challenges that they bear, and the ways that it changes them forever.

We only just started this journey and already I'm finding inspiration all around me. I can't wait to see what the road will bring next.