08 Group Vacation Day 3 - Buddy Holly, SPAM and the Joint

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This set of blogs is another Group Vacation. Our 2008 trip was from KC up and around Lake Superior into Canada and then a slight detour to Milwaukee for a few days for the 25th and 105th celebrations for HOG and Harley Davidson. The blogs are broken into sections, each being a day in the trip. The first blog of this trip is here 08 Group Vacation Day 1 - to Iowa.

Clear Lake IA, Sunday 24 AUG 08 -- We were at it bright and early this morning. The deal is that we will grab what we can for breakfast at the motel, but we will have an early lunch. One of our crew needs to have protein in the morning, the motel carb breakfasts are not doing it. First stop is at the Surf Ballroom to get pictures of the monument outside the ballroom. I guess the inside is fixed up in the era of Buddy Hollis with posters from that time being displayed. It didn’t take long and we were off to the crash site. Now the plane went down in a corn field. Farm land is blocked off in mile squares with gravel roads making the borders. The crash site is .5 miles in so when the gravel road on the east side was blocked I figured we could go to the west side and walk in from there. I wasn’t looking forward to the walk though. I had twisted my knee earlier in the week at work and by now I have a really bad limp. When we get to the west side I can see where something has been walking into the field, but we really don’t know if it is deer or dogs or an actual trail to the memorial. We discuss it and opt to go back to the east side by taking the long way. Now on the east side its not marked either. But there are 2 other cars there, its 9AM on Sunday morning and there are 2 other cars there. It must be much busier during prime time. We get off, lock up the bikes and start the trek in. A couple of ladies pass us coming out, informing us that indeed we are on the right path and its just right up the trail. On the way in everyone is looking at the path, because its right though a soybean field. Everyone that is but Willy, he’s looking around. Pretty soon I hear him behind me Psssst. Pssst. I turn around and he is pointing at all the pot growing in the fence row. Some of it was over 6ft tall. He cuts off a stem of it and shares what he found with the group as we arrive at the memorial. The memorial isn’t much. Someone made a little thing that resembles 3 records, one for each of the artists that died on the plane. Buddy Hollis, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens, the plane crashed on FEB 3, 1959, a month before I was born. The only other person to die in the crash was the pilot. He was not mentioned here on this memorial but he was listed on the Surf Ballroom memorial. The memorial is in the corner of the field and there isn’t much room for it. We chuckle as we backed into the corn to get a picture of it. The whole thing makes me think the farmer would prefer if people would forget it was here. There were no markings on the road telling you this was the place. We have a hoot with joking about the pot and Willy says hes thinking about cutting some and just tieing it to his tour pak to dry. We all chuckle.

Getting away from the crashsite and back to the interstate proves to be much more interesting than planned. I had the GPS programmed to avoid unpaved roads, but when I put a location on this gravel road it much have decided that I didn’t mind gravel and it just routed the shortest route to the highway. Some of our group didn’t want to travel on gravel. But every turn we took I was expecting to see pavement but instead would see 4 more miles of gravel. At one point we are just pudding along at 25 MPH on the gravel and I hear a noise. It’s a big black dog in hot pursuit of me. So I do what is natural and I accelerated, leaving it in the dust, but then I remember other are behind me so I slow down and start honking my horn, hoping that I will piss it off and it will come back at me instead of straight in to the rest of them. The dog disappears. Later I learned that the owner must have called it because it ran back into the hedges to the farmhouse, never having taken after anyone else. Our next stop was at a dealer, Marcia had a broken visor on her helmet, it had happened yesterday as we were tearing through central IA. The dealer in Albert Lea, was busy for a Sunday morning and although most got t-shirts getting another visor was a bust. We learn that these visors break frequently. After the dealer detour we are off to Austin TX and the SPAM Museum. I was hoping to stop at the café across the street from the museum. It serves entrees made of you guessed it SPAM. But the café is closed. We head into the museum and find out that there is another café down the street that offers SPAM Burgers and SPAM Fingers, so off we go. We all order the Spam burger lunch special and a plate of fingers to share. The café is called Jerry’s Others Place.

Back at the museum, everyone sits through the movie and enjoys the exhibits both the static ones and the interactive ones. Jerry and Mel sees who has the better time at the assembly station, Marcia dresses the part as she dawns lab coat and hard hat. Willy was into everything, we all had a hoot. We ended up staying here much longer than I thought we would. The SPAM museum is something that is really fun, whether you like SPAM or not. Last time I was through here it happened to be the day of the SPAM JAM, but it was before it opened for the day. I got breakfast at the rotary club booth and watched the Smothers Brothers do their morning microphone check to the small army of Spam Ladies that were there for the occasion.

When we left the museum we thought to hurry and get to a dealer in Minneapolis to see if we could find a visor there. On the way we drove by a dealer and pulled in there instead. It was Faribault HD in Faribault MN. As we turn into the dealer there is someone there to direct us. When we pulled into Faribault HD and found ourselves in the middle of an event. A little investigating and found we were at the final destination of the 2008 Sheriffs’ Posse Motorcycle Ride. A benefit ride for Red Cross it was a joint effort of 7 different county sheriff offices and the Harley Davidson dealers in them. The counties involved in the ride were Nicollet, Waseca, Rice, Steele, Dodge, Blue Earth and Freeborn. The ride started simultaneously in each county, in some counties it started at the Harley dealer in others it started at the sheriffs office or at a detention center. A sheriff lead the group to other counties as the bikers participated in a poker ride. The ride final destination for every group was Faribault Harley Davidson where food and the Red Cross welcomed them. Bikes were parked in a lines for a large group picture that would be taken at 4:30PM and by the time we were ready to leave, we were parked in the middle of them and had to wait for the picture to be taken before we could leave. They didn’t even have a face shield.

From the Posse ride we headed to Minneapolis to visit The Joint a popular biker bar in the area. It has an awesome mural on one of its outside walls, check out the picture. Pulling in there no one was really hungry but we decided to eat at a bar and grill next door so we would not have to worry about finding someplace later. Its while we are here that Marcia gets a text from another rider from our HOG group that is traveling with a different group also headed to the 105th in Milwaukee. They choose to head directly to that area and then ride around in WI and MI. Well they are in the night, we still have about a hundred miles to go, but we are traveling more miles in our trip then they will be. After we chuckle about them already being in for the night, Marcia asks us what she should text back so we started our story. The text was short and true. “Found pot in the corn field, then surrounded by sheriffs posse now in the joint. Need money.” We text back and forth a couple more times then they called. At that point we were packed up and trying to get gone, so we do not have to ride in the dark for long. They don’t want to talk to Marcia they only trust Mel. The story now we are giving is that we need to go and get out of here. We do need to get going but not with the urgency that we are implying. They had believed our story as they should have, but they put a different twist on it than as was facts, not our fault. J It wasn’t until we get back to KC that Mel sends out an email letting them know the background of our text.

As the sun went down, it was our first cold ride, we made Duluth that night. We were north alright. We had decided the previous night that we save some money and all stay in one room. I slept on a cot but that was fine. They had agreed to let me stay for free with them on the trip anyway. Just give me some place clean and warm to lay my head.

Here are links to all the blogs for this trip:

1. 08 Group Vacation Day 1 - to Iowa
2. 08 Group Vacation Day 2 - John Wayne, Albert the Bull and Freedom Rock
3. 08 Group Vacation Day 3 - Buddy Holly, SPAM and the Joint
4. 08 Group Vacation Day 4 - Aerostitch and Canada
5. 08 Group Vacation Day 5 - Canada and Mackinac Bridge
6. 08 Group Vacation Day 6 - Yoppers, Pasties and outa gas John
7. 08 Group Vacation Day 7 - HOG 25th are you kidding me??
8. 08 Group Vacation Day 8 - Vinnie and Cody from American Chopper
9. 08 Group Vacation Day 9 - Last day of the 105th Anniversary Party
10. 08 Group Vacation Day 10 - Heading Home
11. 08 Group Vacation Day 11 - Snake Alley, Worldest Largest Pecan

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