The MinuteMan 1K (MM1K) was the first rally that I participated on back in 2009. You can find the Minuteman website
here . It is always a favorite for me due to the number of friends I have in the LD community in the North East area. Rob Nye, the MM1K Rallymaster puts on a great rally.
This year my friends from Quebec, Jacques Titolo, Jennyfer Audet, and Kevin Craft rallymaster of the Rendezvous rally would be participating. Many of my friends from the North East would also be participating in the 2011 MM1K; Wallace French, Jim Abbott and Andy Kirby. Shuey Wolfe from Florida would also visit us from Florida. Many of my friends would later participate in the 2011 Iron Butt Rally with me. During the 2011 MM1K, Shuey Wolfe would hit not one, but two deer during the rally. The second deer totalled his bike but he still made it to the awards dinner the next day.......simply amazing. Shuey would also go on to put together and farkle a new ST1100 to participate in the 2011 IBR just weeks later.
I rode my 2002 Honda ST1100 for the MM1K rally as I did not want to take any chances of damaging my FJR weeks before the start of the MM1K rally. Given what happened to Shuey, it was the right decision!
The theme of this years MM1K was "To Infinity and Beyond" from Toy Story......all the bonus locations had a space theme.....very cool! The rally started and ended in Northampton, Mass
The weather was pretty decent although it did get wet a few times; but nothing like the torrential rains experienced during the 2011 Cape Fear Rally.
One of the cool things about this years rally was the timed bonus stop at Max's BMW in New Hampshire for a BBQ (website found
here. Rob was trying to make the stop at Max's similar to an IBR checkpoint. Max served up some BBQ burgers. We got to check out the new BMW K1600 GT/GTL. It was awesome!
I finished the rally with 2 minutes to spare before penalty points.....way too close for comfort. The rally went well for me and I ended up in second place just behind my good friend Jim Abbott. I was pleased to finish just behind a person I consider to be one of the best ralliers around!
You can see my route
here. It was a great time spent with great friends!
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| The mandatory mug shot before the rally start. |
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Met my Quebec friends the first bonus location, Jennyfer and Jacques at New Milford, CT.
The next several hours would be spent in New Milford chasing all the planets in the Solar System.
The planets are aranged throughout the town and are to scale. This was a comet but I cannot remember which |
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Kuiper Belt
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Pluto
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Neptune
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| Cannot remember what this was......any ideas? |
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Uranus
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Saturn.....this was tough to find... buried deep within a park!
The GPS routed to a location across the river. |
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Jupiter
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Mars.....soooooo tiny!
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| Mother Earth..... can you believe that we live on such a small planet? |
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Venus
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Mercury
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The Sun.... To scale with the Earth pictured above.
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| New Milford CT |
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| Observatory an hour or so from New Milford CT. I cannot recall the name. |
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I blew this bonus. The Rally book went to great lengths to describe the rocket.....so I took a picture of it......
I should have carefully read where it instructed me to take a picture of an engine beside the rocket (just off to the right)
It is all about reading comprehension. I bonus location is worthless if you do not take the correct picture of answer a question wrong. Turns out if I had of taken the right picture at this location, I would have won the rally. Turns out that the first place finisher, Jim Abott, made the same mistake I did at this location...... "woulda, coulda, shoulda, ......did not" |
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| Getting wet |
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| Portland Maine....it dropped about 15 degrees here and I needed to put a sweater on! |
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This was a cool place... |
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This is one of the coolest pictures I have ever taken!!!
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Echo Park was in the middle of no where.......very spooky.....
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Shortly after this picture, I stopped for 2 hours for our mandatory rest stop.
I elected to take a 2 hour nap at a nearby parking lot....cool and damp. |
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Getting fairly wet at this point.
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Last picture. I had a hard time finding this location as it was hidding behind a building.
At this point I was concerned about being late to the final checkpoint.
Turned out I would arrive 2 minutes before penalty points started........plenty of time! |
That was a very long ride and challenging also. However, congratulations you made it to the final check point.
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