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May 27, 2013May 28, 2013

2013 Mason-Dixon 20-20 Rally Report

If you already know what a Motorcycle Endurance Rally is. Maybe because you read my report from last year (2012), or (2011) or (2010) or (2009) you can skip this section and go straight to the Ride report. Otherwise, the basics are explained in the (2010) report.

This years theme was the Battle for Lexington.

Mason Dixon 20-20 2013 Info

Unlike previous years, this rally would not be a Photo-Bonus Rally. Meaning you don’t go somewhere, with a flag, and get a picture. Instead you’ll be answering questions about what’s at the location. The very first Mason-Dixon I did was mostly this. You show up at a place, read, for instance the historical marker, and answer a fill in the blank question about the content.

This year however it was worse, way worse and we’ll get into that in a minute.

Also unlike previous years, there were very few boni compared to previous years.

48 to be exact.

Starting in Martinsburg, WV

We had the opportunity to visit lots of great places. In order of importance, the Purple values are the highest, followed by Red, then Blue, then Green.

On the map the circles are available 24 hours, the Squares are defined as daylight ONLY bonuses, and the 3rd type as some sort of time availability. There were few of these, but they are something like only available Sunday from 10am to 12pm.

Almost all of them have some sort of ‘”Lexington” Tie in. Maybe they all do but it seemed to me only about half did.

This was the fewest number of boni that I can remember. After reviewing the data, it became pretty clear, there’s really only one route:

Now one of the things that’s always amazed me about rallying is the different approaches, and different views, and the different ways people get things done. What I feel is the best route usually isn’t that far off from (quote)The Best Route(unquote). I said usually. There have been rallies where we completely missed the obvious, or didn’t think something was possible, yet it got done.

This year the ‘Clear Route’ is what you see above. You could choose to run it clockwise or counter clockwise. Each had it’s advantages and disadvantages. We ran it clockwise.

*Disclaimer: Clear route to me, is the highest points I could obtain within my riding parameters. Including MPH average over roads and with the knowledge of the areas we’ll be riding in that I have. That might not be the same for you, or anyone else. If you chose a different route because this one wasn’t obvious to you, that’s perfectly acceptable I’m not saying or trying to say that everyone should have chosen this but cause that’s never the case.

The obvious “wild cards” in my mind off the base route are highlighted. The winning route got two of them, the upper two. Because we ran the route the direction we did, the highlighted red Square (Daylight Only) bonus wasn’t available to us as it was the middle of the night when we were riding by.

We ran the route the direction we did for a couple reasons.

1) Riding good twisty roads, the kind we we like, is best done in the daylight hours. Certainly traffic might slow you down but even with big ass lights, we prefer to ride these in the daylight.

2) We double-stacked the bonus at Jim’s grave. The winner went there 2nd, then did the loop, then went back to get the second opportunity at the same location. He rode 1640 miles in 29 hours, we rode 1440.

We both slept for about 3:20 so really we had 28.67 hours available to us.

Now it may not be the right approach, but that’s how I’ve learned to do this. Take the available riding hours, in this case the rally is a 32 hour rally, minus the mandatory 3 hour rest and you get 29 hours to work with.

Take an average that you’re comfortable riding, knowing the roads, and locations, traffic, times of day, all that stuff, and you get something like this:

For us, that 50MPH average, that’s TOTAL average, including stops, not just riding average. For us (me) 50 is a good number. It represents driving at or about ~5MPH over the limit in the ‘safe zone’. It’s not crazy. We know we’ll spend 3-7 minutes per stop.

The Top rally rides don’t spend that much time. If it’s a photo bonus, they may not even get off the bike.

So we built our route based upon that number 1450 miles was in our “Wheelhouse”.

The winner rode 1640 miles, while we rode that many miles in 2011, it was 97% highway miles.

Given that this was a non-photo bonus rally, meaning you had to read, interpret, think, and write, we expected each stop to take longer, and take longer it did.

The other monkey wrench, is “usually”, when you complete the rally, you have a few hours to get your ‘crap together’ and organize your paperwork.

Not so this year. The rally ended at 2pm, if you got back at 2:01 you were DNF (Did Not Finish), you had to be in line, with paperwork ready to be scored by 3pm. Ugh, this meant that your paperwork had to be pristine throughout the rally. Some guys jumped off their bikes and took photos of the stuff to figure out the Q and A later. I didn’t feel that was the right way to go, given the small paperwork window we had. Our route was tight enough (for us). But that’s exactly what the winner did.

This year there were two wild card bonuses. 1) Get a package of un-opened, Pepperidge Farm Lexington Cookies. 2) Get a business card that had the word ‘Lexington’ on it somewhere.

We killed both of those in one stop at Target in Lexington, both the cookies and the card.

So how was this rally different?

As I mentioned earlier, in previous rallies you might roll up to a Highway historical marker something like this:

In a Question/Answer rally, the book might say something like:

How far away and in what direction is the home of William Gause Jr.? And you would write in “four miles south”.

This year, our chief rally bastard did us one better.

Instead of giving us the question, we had a double sided sheet of paper with 48 questions. So we’d show up, check the rally book, find out that we were at a historical marker, hopefully the right one, read it, then scan the page for the question that fit. The Question for Bonus location X01 was not Q01, they were all scrambled.

Then scan another page, double sided, with 48 answers and put the two together.

That was bad enough, but some of these bonus locations were simply jacked. One had us looking for a ‘Sign’, but it turned out we needed to be looking for a Fire Hydrant.

Another was a block away from where the way point that we were provided was. Yeah, the address was there, but we weren’t provided with a list of addresses to put in our GPS, we were given Lat/Long Info.

Some of the questions and answers weren’t right. They were close but not right.

I’m not trying to sound bitter, or angry, I’m tired. I recognize the work that goes into this and other rallies and nobody is perfect. But when we (as riders) are held to a high standard for ‘attention to detail’ and rider comprehension, it’s very frustrating when things that are supposed to line up don’t.

Of course we had the normal Rally bastard Chesedickery, where you’d roll up and there were (4) historical markers you had to read and process at one location, and some of the signs are double-sidded. 🙂 And I know Cheesedickery when I see it because I now have a Masters in Cheesedickery.

And the best part, we were given this awesome Mug as SWAG:

A big ass heavy ceramic mug, a mug that you had to carry with you to get signed at a couple of the locations. Brilliant! Smile

I don’t know how many folks didn’t get their mug signed because the just left it at the Rally hotel but I’m sure there were a few.

Lastly, the wild-cards.

If you obtained the wild cards, you could use them in place of a question or an answer. If you obtained both, you could plop those in as a Question and an Answer for a bonus that you didn’t ride too.

The highest point bonus was in Toluca, IL. Too far to ride for 1414 points because you’d sacrifice so many others. But, getting those two wild cards (as most people did) they were able to claim that bonus (and most riders did).

We took a little different approach. We scanned the questions and found a question that mentioned the Toluca railroad or mine or something. So we used that Question and use a wild card for the answer, then we went down the list, and eventually found another ~800 pointer that we felt fairly confident we had the right Question/Answer. So we used that and rolled the dice. It worked, mostly.

My failure was that I knew the answer, it was actually a Pancake house who’d been serving food since 1937. That answer was A20, but A21 was what I wrote down. That mistake alone coast me 66% of those points and 2 or 3 finishing places.

Kyle didn’t drop any points at scoring, and was awarded with the Jim Young Memorial Rider Efficiency trophy which was pretty sweet.

It was another fun rally, the new hotel location worked out well. Staff was friendly as always. Next year’s theme is ‘Get Crabby’ or something like that, which means probably a whole lot of east coast stuff. But then again, I thought the Mountain Doo-Doo was going to be all mountain roads ;0

I continued to be amazed at what people can “Pull-Off”. Josh (the winner) is a machine, most of the guys that do win this are machines. They can sit there and twist that. They must have huge bladders or a much better strategy for dealing with waste than we do.

We had a great ride. We planned our ride and rode our plan, minus my paperwork snafu, we got the results we expected.

So until next year…

May 22, 2013May 22, 2013

Maggie

We took some photos of Maggie on Saturday. Sort of Senior photos phase 1.

She’s all grown up and stuff.

April 17, 2013

River: Rest In Peace

Yesterday, April 16th, 2013 we laid our Missouri Fox Trotter to rest. “Red” River was an awesome horse. Originally purchased to be a pasture pall for Cisco. He was gentle and smart and fun to ride, except for that one day he decided he didn’t want to be ridden.

Like Cisco he ended up with eye issues, unlike Cisco they couldn’t be overcome. In the end they were painful enough that his quality of life was beginning to suffer so we had to make the decision to let him go.

River, you will be missed.

January 20, 2013January 17, 2016

Family Cruise 2013

Claudine and I really enjoyed our cruise in 2011, and decided this year to take the whole family. Everyone but Michael was able to go. That’s right, Claudine and I and 4 kids, on a cruise.

We started the process of looking for a cruise in November, we were hopeful that we could take advantage of the “Friends and Family” rate, since Claudine has a family member who works for Royal Caribbean, but it didn’t work out.

We got the Friends and Family rates for cruises in January and started looking at what was available, the problem is, everything is short notice. When we got the list it was over the new years day holiday, and we couldn’t get in touch with the FAF coordinator until like 4 days later. We called Royal Caribbean and there was limited availability to begin with. It was going to be hard to book the rooms we wanted if we waited. They worked with us and we booked it.

Flying 6 people was out of the question, even leveraging miles, so we elected to drive. I originally planned on renting a van, but in the end we decided to just leave a day early and roll the dice with our mini-van. It worked out well and saved us another bundle of cash.

The ship left from Ft Lauderdale, we left Friday the 11th around 1:30pm, and pretty much drove straight through to Melbourne, Florida where my parents are vacationing and watched the sunrise and had breakfast with them. Then on to our first over-night in West Palm Beach about an hour from the terminal. I wanted the extra day just in case. It was roughly 1200 miles one way.

We had 6 people, and 3 rooms. We could have shoved all 4 kids in a single room but that would not have worked out well, I’m glad we booked it like we did. Claudine and I had a balcony and the kids had connecting interior rooms across the hallway.

The Independence of the Seas is basically the same ship as the Freedom that we sailed on last time. It’s physically the same but as we learned there were differences other than just the décor. Maybe it was simply that we were overwhelmed or overly impressed the last time. I certainly felt the cruise on the Freedom of the seas was all 5 stars. On Independence it was a mix of 5 star items and 4 star items. The entertainment for example, was head and shoulders above on the Freedom of the Seas.

This cruise was a 6 night cruise. 3 port days surrounded by cruising days. We left on a Sunday and returned on a Saturday. So basically 5 ‘days’ not in the port from which we left.

Our Itinerary was:

Sunday Afternoon: Board and depart
Monday: Cruising
Tuesday: Grand Cayman
Wednesday: Cozumel
Thursday: Costa Maya
Friday Cruising
Saturday (AM): Get off the boat.

We spent the first day showing the kids around, and getting oriented, letting them be awed and figure out what they wanted to do. In all honesty, the first day was half a living hell. Some of the kids were kinda grumpy, which made me second guess the whole thing. Matthew in particular was completely over stimulated and decided he’d ‘test’ his parents. But by the end of the evening, things had settled and everyone was having fun. Matthew found his stride in the ‘Aquanauts’ program. Which is like onboard day-care only a whole lot more fun. He really enjoyed the activities, and the Royal Caribbean crew in the kids area were outstanding.

The first night was also the first of two formal nights. Of which we learned that I had no-dress socks. How’d that happen? Of course there were none to be had on the ship. The clothing store on the Freedom had dress socks, ties, lots of things like this. Even the tailor who rented tuxedo’s didn’t have any. Grrrr…. So if you ever wondered if you can shove size 10 feet into kids dress socks designed for kids size 13-2. The answer is yes. Not very comfortable, nor much fun but it can be, and has been done.

Day 2, was our first port day. With a stop in Grand Cayman. We were supposed to stop there during our 2011 cruise but weather didn’t allow it so Claudine and I were really looking forward to it. We were highly encouraged by friends to do the stingray encounter at stingray city. We are cheap, so booking excursions through Royal Caribbean has never been our thing. We considered it since we were taking the kids and that added security of making sure you’ll get back on the boat does have some value. But none-the-less we chose not too. At breakfast on day one we met another couple who said you must do the stingray encounter so we decided to make that a top priority.

We weren’t in Grand Cayman that long, we docked at 9am, and were to be back by 3pm. We got off the ship, the girls hit up the jewelry stores for their free charms then Claudine did her magic, negotiating with the local tour company. She secured our Stingray encounter for $25 per person, with Matthew being free. They were advertising the tour for $45, which included transportation to and from the ship, 45 minutes with the stingrays and 45 minutes snorkeling. The same tour if booked with the ship was well over $75 per person so that was a score.

We hopped in the van which drove us to the pier on the other side of the island. There we hopped into a fishing boat probably designed to hold 30 people with 54 other people. It was a tad crowded, but we weren’t going that far. It was a 20 minute ride out to Stingray City which is a sandbar off the east coast of the island. Our tour guide, David Evans had a pretty good story about his father and his uncle starting this whole stingray tourist thing and his father diving with Jacque Cousteau back in the day. I couldn’t tell if it was BS, but do intend to look up what I can. We arrived at the sandbar, and man, oh man. Stingrays were everywhere, and huge ones, 4-5 foot stingrays. Not those babies you get to pet at the Newport aquarium. The water was crystal clear, and about 3 feet deep between waves. Matthew was in the water in no-time. Maria right behind him. Molly, not so much, and Maggie had no intention of getting in the water.

David and his partner grabbed our group’s stingray. They held it, tamed it if you will and then proceeded to make sure that every family had encounter time with the animal. You could feed them if you wanted. Matthew tried but got a little scared.

They feel like velvet, super smooth, and provided you don’t step on one and make it angry completely safe.

Certainly a highlight of our trip.

After swimming with the rays, they moved us to an area called the Aquarium for snorkeling. The water was equally clear and about 8-10 feet deep. We didn’t have gear, and there wasn’t enough gear on the boat to go around. Matthew and I grabbed life vests and got in the water but since he couldn’t see, nor touch bottom he lost interest quickly. He was also very tired from the previous 45 minutes in the water.

Claudine, Maggie, Molly, and Maria stayed on the boat during the snorkeling. All was fine until we started to leave. One of the boats two engines wouldn’t start and we were already running late. We putted our way back into the harbor, and the driver made the mad-dash back to the port. We were told that the last tender would leave promptly at 3pm. We got back to the port at 2:45 and the line for the tenders was already crazy long. We got in it, and it quickly became clear that we weren’t the only ones late. The line behind us continued to grow. I bet the last person wasn’t onboard until well after 4:30.

The rest of the day was casual, playing putt-putt and just enjoying the cruise.

On Wednesday we had pre-booked a personal tour guide to Cozumel. Claudine got the contact info for Gerry, from Cruise Critic and Travel advisor. I highly recommend using him for your day in Cozumel.

We pre-booked him, and his van for 3 hours (minimum) but knew we’d have him for at least 5 hours. He picked us up at the pier as promised and began telling us about thing things we could do/see on the Island. Claudine and I have been to Cozumel before, both on our honeymoon and the cruise in 2011 where we rented the scooter of death and rode around the island.

The first thing we needed was something to drink, it was hot 90 degrees and humid. Gerry took us to a small grocery store and secured for us, 6 large bottles of water and ice for a whopping $3.00. He could have easily told us to buy drinks from a vendor at the pier but didn’t. While Gerry was in the store he showed us a park to walk around in that contained an underground river. One that’s used for scuba training. Honestly the park was pretty hokey and full of fake animals. But we did see some turtles, and Gerry pointed out an Iguana. Matthew enjoyed it.

Our first stop on the Gerry tour was the KAOKAO Chocolate factory. I personally expected a bigger factory type tour and was very pleasantly surprised. KAOKAO is a small private, family chocolatier. Joshua spent 45 minutes in a very Discovery Channel like demonstration on the history of chocolate and the work required to get flavor from the beans. We made our own Cocoa. Everyone was entertained and the chocolate is delicious. This is a must-do, if you have time in Cozumel. You won’t be disappointed. It’s not free, adults were $10 and kids were $5, Matthew of course was free. We spent about $70 t0tal including the chocolate that we bought. I would do this again in a minute, or at least stop and buy chocolate.

After this tour Gerry offered up the Tequila factory tour, 4 wheelers, and the zip line. I could see where this was going, every time we stopped we’d be shelling out another $100 for a family activity. This isn’t quite what we had in mind. We wanted a leisurely day, seeing stuff but really didn’t want to hit up $10 per person activities. Gerry was cool with that and didn’t push anything, we started heading for the Tequila factory and passed the Zip line on the way. After determining that the Tequila tour was just a dog and pony show put on by a manufacturer and that unlike the chocolate factory they didn’t actually make it there we decided to pass on that. We asked him to circle back to the Zip line because the kids were excited about that opportunity.

The Zip-line was at Ecoparque Cuzam, where you can do a number of things including the zip-line, horseback riding, drinking, ATV’s, swimming and paintball. We were really only interested in the Zip-line. We met the owner and negotiated a rate, and off we went. The guys really took care of the kids, and it was fun and entertaining. A little pricier than I planned on, but we had a blast. I know the kids would do it again.

Matthew on the Zip-line 2013_Cruise

From the zip-line we headed across the Island for lunch at Playa Bonita. It was supposed to be better and more economical than Coconuts. It was good, great view, service was a little suspect. My food was excellent but the girls weren’t really happy. If we had it to do over again we would do Coconuts instead. It was interesting to learn that there is no electricity on the east side of the island. Everything, including the restaurants are run off generators, and that’s always been the case.

After lunch we stopped at the beach for a little bit so the kids could climb on the rocks, Matthew could throw rocks, and the girls could look for beach ~~garbage~~ glass.

Gerry really took care of us. We’ll certainly use him again. If you’re ever headed to Cozumel look him up. Email Eduardo: eduardoczm@gmail.com or call Gerry: (987) 869-0044 Please tell them the Disher Family referred you.

After all of that we were beat, and had Gerry drop us off at the pier. I brought Matthew back on the ship and the girls did a little shopping.

Thursday, our final port day was a short one. We docked in Costa Maya at 0700 and were leaving at 3pm. I wasn’t comfortable taking the family on any Jungle tours. It was questionable that we could rent anything that would hold 6 of us, and I wasn’t about to shell out big bucks for a 2 hour ride into the jungle on a non air-conditioned school bus to spend 20 minutes at the ruins turn around and come back. Instead we opted for a beach day. Claudine did her homework and got us reservations at Tropicante.

The place is the perfect Caribbean beach dive. Food and drinks were good, everything was reasonable, the beach was perfect. Massages on the beach, 1 hour for $25, you can’t beat that. No cover charge, our bill for the day with 3 “on the beach” massages was $160.00

We hung out, Matthew only left the ocean to eat.

The place is run by an American (Steve) that moved there to open his spot 5 years ago. Contact them and make reservations if you ever find yourself in Costa Maya. He can also handle all your arrangements for scuba, snorkeling, ruin tours, you name it. If we had more time we would have used him for other adventures.

We were back on the boat by 2:30pm, again I took Matthew and Maggie and left Claudine and the other girls to shop. It was the 2nd of the two formal nights, and I got to suffer in socks too small for the benefit of my family. But mostly my wife who wanted more pictures.

Friday our final day on the cruise ship was spent recovering from the previous days activities.

We have really enjoyed the ‘Freedom’ class ships. Our next cruise will be on either the Allure or the Oasis, we may then try a smaller ship but freely admit we’ve been spoiled by the larger ships.

Our final cruise day was non-eventful, it was hella-windy and chilly on deck. So we didn’t get to swim but we found other things to do, like 72 holes of putt-putt with the girls.

All of the photos can be found here: [on Picasaweb]

January 7, 2013January 7, 2013

Dropcam, the perfect name.

If you’re looking for an easy to use, yet highly unreliable web-cam, then Dropcam is for you.

The Goal: Get a relatively inexpensive, yet reliable camera to be able to remotely view weather conditions at our office. So that I can make sure the grounds crew is taking care of snow and ice removal.

After poking around the web and reading reviews, dropcam seemed to fit the bill so I ordered up two via Amazon. (gotta love Amazon Prime).

They showed up, and out of the box it configured easy enough.

We have a rather robust Cisco driven wireless network. Which from time to time we’ve had to dumb-down for some consumer devices. Fortunately for Dropcam that had already been done and we have wireless networks up and running for some of those troublesome Apple devices like AppleTV that don’t work with enterprise security.

The first camera, configured right up, and I created my account with dropcam. Then it started happening, the camera kept dropping off the network. I have to Access points within line of site and less than 40 feet away with minimal obstructions. Even my lowly iPhone 4s gets four bars in my office and it’s well known that it’s wireless is sub-optimal.

So I thought maybe I just got a bad camera. Opened up the second one, configured it up and basically got the same results. It would work, *sometimes*.

These cloud based products make troubleshooting almost impossible. There is very limited documentation, and next to no way to test anything.

We screwed around with the Wireless side just to confirm that it wasn’t on our end. We made it as basic as can be with a completely open network. Still no good. I opened support tickets with dropcam, and got no response for well over 24 hours. That’s not a good sign. So at the end of the day they went back.

Now we’ll ratchet up the search and include higher end POE/IP cameras, cause it looks like that’s what it’s going to take.

For us, dropcam sucked pretty hard.