Retirement

I used to go to Sturgis every 5 years. That’s how long it takes for the memories of the heat, the stink, the noise, the crowds and the high prices to fade enough for the idea to become attractive again.
As I’m sure it still is, there was a regular circuit followed by the Sturgis crowd who wanted to get there quickly in a straight shot. For many in Washington it starts with the Sun & Surf Run at Ocean Shores in late July. Monday morning you get up, break camp, find breakfast, and then head East. 
I-90 is the artery if Sturgis is the heart of things, and at every intersection with another major highway more riders feed into the stream, down from Canada, up from Oregon via 84, 15, 25, 80; all roads lead to Sturgis in August. For us coming from the West Coast with our tents and gear strapped on our bikes, the target each day was the KOA at the end of the road.
The first night out was in Missoula, a butt-burning 550 miles if you’re not used to it on a regular basis. Everybody seems to get off at the big fuel stop just over the Idaho line, long enough to pull off their helmets. I got wise after the first couple of trips, when I noticed that my face and lips were burnt to a crisp and weather blasted by the time we hit Rapid City and bothered me for weeks after the trip, but if I kept my full face helmet on I was more comfortable on the road and arrived fresh and unburnt to the party. There are lots of other reasons to stop along the way, most related to Casinos and alcohol, not to mention the whorehouses in Wallace, Idaho, but you have to keep pushing along to get to the Missoula KOA and get a spot for the night.
This is one of the older KOAs, well established and organized, down on Tina street, which is off Peggy Lane, off West Broadway. They have lots of open grassy trailer sites planted with trees and gravel pathways. They keep building little cabins, but for a motorcycle to camp for the night was only $7 if anyone in your group is a member, so that was the ticket for us. Normally it would be one vehicle per site, but on these weekends before and after Sturgis Bike Week we would pack ourselves in any way that fit. By the mid ‘90s the KOAs got smart with their marketing and had full service food available right there in camp, and a store that sold beer, so the party started the first night, and got wilder as you approached the Black Hills.
Montana is a big state, so you have to get up early and hit the road from Missoula if you want to be at the KOA in Billings before dark. We would head out through Bonner and up into the mountains, veer south past Deer Lodge through Butte and Belgrade to Bozeman, where we stopped for lunch once and found the Museum of The Rockies on a back street. From there we would pick up the Yellowstone River at Livingston and follow it all the way through Laurel (home of the best biscuits and gravy in the known world, at the Tastee-Freeze, but that’s another story) and on into Billings, where the KOA promotes itself as the very first one, set along a lagoon on the back streets of town where all the mosquitos in Montana live. That was where we met Roxie one year, on her solo way from Springfield, Oregon to meet up with some Aussies at Buffalo Chip, and Stuart and Livvie, two Canadians from a remote sawmill town on a fiord in upper British Columbia on their annual month long road trip. From there is where you jump off I-90 at Crow Agency and Little Big Horn, where Custer died for his own sins, and the blast across Wyoming and South Dakota on Highway 212 through Alzada and Belle Fourche, coming down into Sturgis from the north. If you don’t waste too much time at the former cowboy bar turned biker ripoff joint in Alzada you can make it by early evening in time to line up for a campsite, along with everyone else.
But the point of this story is that KOA in Billings, and a different time on one of my solo journeys, this one homeward bound through Wyoming on my way back from Milwaukee in 2003. I had left Papa and the group in Wisconsin and dropped by my sister’s place in South Bend, Indiana for a visit before heading home through Iowa and Nebraska and wound up at the Billings KOA after a long day bucking the infamous Wyoming crosswinds. After setting up my tent and eating their food, I sat around the picnic table and struck up a conversation with a couple fellow travelers, each on solo runs from different directions. Bikers on the road are a shared community, and everyone you meet at a campsite is a neighbor. One of them, Jim, offered an observation that has stuck with me ever since. We were yakking about this and that, about two beers into a fine conversation, when it came up that he was retired, and had been so for the last couple of years. He was about my age, so I was surprised he was already retired, and I asked him, “So tell me, what is it like being retired?” He smiled and said, “Every morning, I wake up and grin!”
That was about 4 years before my first retirement (I’m on my fourth right now), and the idea stuck in the back of my head. Every morning, wake up and grin. Yeah! That’s why I say to myself, and all of you: When you get a chance to retire, which means you finally get to do what you want rather than what you have to do, on your own schedule rather than anybody else’s, reach out and grab on to it with both hands, and don’t let go! Every morning, you can wake up and grin! :-{)}