SOUTHBOUND SOJOURN

from May 2022

SARGENT WSP SADDLE

So, tonight after sundown I’m gonna pack my case Without a word, without a sound disappear without a trace Ohh oh, I’m going southbound, ohh oh, I’m going southbound Thin Lizzy

The groundhog. They are basically marmots (genus: marmota monax) though in some places they are referred to as woodchucks (especially in Canada where woodchucks really do chuck wood) but, for the most part, here in the northeast, we call them groundhogs. As Bill Murray and all of us know the groundhog has been bestowed with certain supernatural powers and the mid-winter ritual of yanking a sleepy rodent out of its den to terrify it with news cameras and men dressed like it was 150 years ago is an amusing American tradition. But it didn’t start here rather in Europe with the Germans – who always were starting something. Groundhog Day has its roots in the ancient Christian tradition of Candlemas when clergy would bless and distribute candles needed for winter. The candles represented how long and cold the winter would be. Germans expanded on this concept by selecting an animal—the hedgehog—as a means of predicting the weather. Once they came to America, German settlers in Pennsylvania continued the tradition, although they switched from hedgehogs to groundhogs, which were plentiful in the Keystone State. On February 2, 1887, Groundhog Day, featuring a rodent meteorologist, is celebrated for the rst time at Gobbler’s Knob in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. According to tradition, if a groundhog comes out of its hole on this day and sees its shadow, it gets scared and runs back into its burrow, predicting six more weeks of winter weather; no shadow means an early spring. This year Punxsutawney Phil called for 6 more weeks of winter – which didn’t surprise us as it was just February 2 – but a week or so later we felt it was time to escape for a week or so. Head south and see what we could nd along the backroads below the line that Mason & Dixon drew 235 years ago.

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Regardless of what the PA rodent called for, this particular week was going to be almost balmy in New Jersey with temperatures in the low 50s – to the south, it would only be warmer.

For a few minutes, we debated on taking the bikes south, but that one F-word kept coming back…February.

Who knew what we’d deal with when we were heading home?

So, Dodge Durango, it was. This also allowed for us to bring a bit more along for the ride – including my 30-year old Guild guitar.

We made short work along the interstate south, stopping now and again for coffee or food and seeing that some states take great pride in welcoming visitors and travelers passing through.

We are backroads riders for sure, but the wealth of information and the lowdown on various things to do and sights to see that you can nd in a well-done Welcoming Center is a boon for sure. Virginia’s and North Carolina’s were really superb and it was at the North Carolina Center that we learned about the WhirlyGigs of Wilson. We had made a stop at our cousins Maureen and John who live in Clayton, North Carolina. When traveling it is always a good thing to drop in on loved ones and spend some time – that is how the memories that you will talk about years from now come about. They also said that heading to Wilson was very much worth it. So, in the morning, we drove east to the town of Wilson. The town seems to be in the middle of a rebirth of sorts – great murals and large postergraphs adorn the sides of many older buildings and in the middle of town, you will nd the Vollis Simpson Whirlygig Park. This place is amazing, with its gigantic, whimsical, colorful, and very kinetic sculptures. You can spend a bit of time here studying each Whirlygig – and we did. There is a visitor’s information center across the street which gives good background on the sculptures and the man who created them, as well as selling some trinkets to take home.

The town of Wilson holds a Whirlygig Festival each year and the weekend of November 5- 6 will be a bright and spinning time in this town.

Heading out of Wilson I spotted a small concrete dinosaur in front of a small round stone house. It piqued our curiosity so we swung around, found a parking spot, and walked onto the property. This was the Oliver Nestus Freeman Round House and African-American Museum.

Opened in 2001, The museum has served to preserve, promote and present African-American history, art and culture to all citizens of Wilson and the region to increase the awareness, understanding, and appreciation of cultural traditions and African-American contributions to society.

We found it a fascinating place and Dorothy, who greeted us warmly as we strolled through the door, graciously showed us around, pointing out artifacts and history that might have gone over our heads without her.

With both these interesting, historical, and fun places Wilson, North Carolina is certainly worth the visit.

We stuck to the backroads these days and, once again on an O’Life Mission, we plotted a route to the small town of Goldsboro.

Why, do you ask? Well…

In 1961, a B-52 bomber ying out of Seymour Johnson Air Force Base (no relation to the good Doctor) near Goldsboro came apart in the sky, and the two-armed Mark-39 nuclear bombs it was carrying fell into a farming community northeast of the base. One hit the ground at 700+ mph, burying itself so deeply into a tobacco eld that some of its parts

were never found. The other oated down on a parachute, planting its nose in the ground beside a tree. The parachute bomb came startlingly close to detonating. A secret government document said three of its four safety mechanisms failed, and only a simple electrical switch prevented a catastrophe. It was 260 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and could have instantly killed thousands of people. The radioactive fallout could have endangered millions more as far north as New York City.

Today, if you blink, you could easily ride by the historical marker telling about an almost forgotten and nearly devastating piece of America’s history. Continuing on we drove to Fayetteville, North Carolina, home of Fort Bragg and the Airborne & Special Operations Museum. We found a quick lunch in the historic district and then headed to the museum. Established in August 2000, the U.S. Army Airborne and Special Operations Museum is a rst-class institution that ef ciently and effectively captures, preserves, exhibits, and presents the material culture and heritage of the U.S. Army Airborne and Special Operations Forces from 1940 and into the future. The Museum celebrates over 80 years of Army Airborne and Special Operations history and honors our nation’s Soldiers – past, present, and future.

The museum was outstanding, as were the great art pieces that you will nd as you walk up to the building. Plan on spending a few hours here as the U.S. Army Airborne and Special Operations Museum deserves as much time as you can muster.

We wanted to get down into South Carolina that evening so we jumped

back onto the interstate and pulled the trigger south. Sunset over Lake Marion, the largest lake in the state and named after Revolutionary hero General Francis Marion – the man they called The Swamp Fox - was beyond stunning and needs a brand-new adjective to truly describe it.

Sliding back onto the tiny rural roads we once again went in search of a bit of Mysterious America – this time in the tiny burg of Bowman, looking for the UFO Welcome Center.

Oh, don’t get all that excited. If “They” ever really got here and went to the UFO Welcome Center, they would probably leave quickly and talk quietly to themselves about how bad the Earthling have it and maybe they should have left some money or something.

With nobody there to stop me, and as I am a strong believer in “That it is better to beg forgiveness than ask permission,” I said to Shira let’s go check it out.

Shira said something like… “Nooo, maybe I’ll just stay out here and watch your six.”

It was more than bizarre and I left a Backroads sticker atop the highest point of the hodgepodge Flying Saucer – perhaps the aliens ride bikes?

We drove into Savannah, along miles of straight roads ringed with miles of wetlands with thousands of swamp laurel, cottonwood trees, and stunted ferns leading us east.

Surely a different world from the mountains to the west.

In the city we met up with friends and fellow riders Helene and Laura who had rented a house near the historic center of the Hostess City.

We took a superb lunch with them along Forsyth Park, catching up with what we all have been doing during the winter and all of us looking forward to this season and the Backroads Spring Break. We were going to make quick time to St. Simons Island, our most southerly point in this journey, but before that let’s talk…Taco Bell. There are some 7,200 Taco Bells worldwide, and the California-based company, that started in 1961, had a very unique sign and logo for the rst ten years – not at all like the familiar logo we know today. In Savannah, at a typical American corner full of various fast-food restaurants, you will nd one of the very rst signs for Taco Bell. Ahh, the exciting world of moto-journalism. By late afternoon we pulled up to the lighthouse at St. Simons and the aptly named Inn at St. Simons Lighthouse just across the street from it.

St. Simons is a barrier island off the Georgia coast. It’s known for its salt marshes and sandy stretches like East Beach, and the entire region is lled with impressive and ancient oak trees, almost all adorned with wisps of hanging Spanish moss.

These gnarly, thick trees are more than impressive and in 1794 John Barry, the United States rst Commodore of the Navy, came here and chose these trees for the timber to build the USS Constitution – “Old Ironsides.”

BACKROADS • MAY 2022

A museum traces the history of St. Simons Lighthouse, rebuilt in 1872 after it was destroyed in the Civil War. Anglers sh off nearby St. Simons Pier, which offers views of Jekyll Island and migrating whales. North, boats travel to Little St. Simons Island, home to birds like spoonbills and gannets.

For us it was one of the islands off Georgia we had not explored and thus our escape week south and our exploring the hidden jewels along the way.

That evening we strolled the park, along the lighthouse and then spent some time on the pier, hanging with a

very friendly and intrepid pelican that is called “The Mayor” as he has been a xture of the St. Simons pier for more than a decade. Sunset was superb and St. Simons has a plethora of restaurants and watering holes – we had had a few good days to explore them and the surrounding region.

We were up and out early and headed to the far side of the island to Fort Frederica.

Fort Frederica National Monument preserves the archaeological remnants of a fort and town built by James Oglethorpe between 1736 and 1748 to protect the southern boundary of the British colony of Georgia from Spanish raids. About 630 British troops were stationed at the fort, as well as an ever-growing edgling town.

The island of St. Simons and the fort were just above what was optimistically called the Debated Lands and just north of the lands that Spain claimed to be theirs.

This friction zone was much in dispute and Spanish forces from Florida and Cuba landed on St. Simons Island looking to take it for Spain. Oglethorpe’s defense, bolstered by Scottish Highlanders from the town of Darien to the north led to the battle at “Bloody Marsh”. Despite the name, casualties were light and the Spanish continued their campaign on St. Simons. Clever deception on Oglethorpe’s part convinced the Spanish to retreat from Georgia seven days later.

This British victory not only con rmed that Georgia was British territo-

ry but also signaled the end for Frederica. When peace was declared, Frederica’s Garrison (the original 42nd Regiment of Foot) was disbanded, and eventually, the town fell into decline. Today the archeological remains of colonial Frederica are protected by the National Park Service.

The site is a fascinating journey to one of the most important battles in North American history and one that is, sadly, known by few.

Just a few miles south of St. Simons is the city of Brunswick.

It’s known for its Victorian-era Old Town Historic District and the huge, centuries-old Lover’s Oak tree. Its causeways link the city to the four barrier islands of the Golden Isles and to the famed Jekyll Island to the south. George Washington proclaimed Brunswick as one of the ve original ports of entry for the colonies in 1789. Following the Civil War, the wealth of naval stores and timber created a building boom.

For decades life was quiet, peaceful, and happy along the Golden islands of Georgia but World War II broke the tranquility of the region. With the war came a call for workers. And they came, both male and female, to build and launch over 99 Liberty ships from the J.A. Jones Shipyard in a two-year effort from 1943 to 1945, including seven in one month. These ships were an integral part of the American war effort. After the war, the importance of her harbor and port continued. Today the city of Brunswick continues its long history as a seafaring city. Shrimp boats from up and down the coast came to call; today container ships arrive regularly at the deep-water terminals at Mayor’s Point, Colonel’s Island and Marine Point to unload or take on cargo. To watch two huge containers ships pause as they pass each other off St. Simons is a treat. Except on September 8th of 2019 when a 650 feet long cargo ship called the Golden Ray oundered and capsized in the middle of St. Simons Channel. The ship had 4,100 cars and trucks in its hold. It took two years and 3 million collective man-hours to remove the ship. It was the largest maritime wreck removal in United States history. We drove around the small island city stopping to see the Brunswick Stew Pot – now semi-legendary as the rst pot used in the “Battle of the Stews” when two towns, Brunswick, Georgia and Brunswick, Virginia, both laid claim to this style of stew – which throws corn, butter beans or lima beans, and tomatoes into the pot. It was Valentine’s Day and we made a ‘must’ stop at the Lover’s Oak - a magni cent tree that, with its 13-foot circumference and 10 main limbs, you can believe this oak tree is nearly 1,000 years old. Sticking with the oaken theme of the region we stopped into a stellar barbeque called The Twin Oaks. It was full of locals – and that is always a solidly good sign. The place came through with incredible food and a very friendly and up staff!

After lunch, we vectored to Jekyll Island.

This island has long been home to the incredibly wealthy of America and it was here that Senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island convened a secret meeting in 1910 to discuss banking reform. A very secret and, some say, illegal meeting.

This gathering of these wealthiest of the

wealthy led to the Aldrich Plan, which became the forerunner of the Federal Reserve System.

The rst transcontinental telephone call on January 15, 1915, connected club member and AT&T president Theodore Vail on Jekyll Island with President Wilson in Washington, Alexander Graham Bell in New York, and his assistant, Thomas Watson, in San Francisco.

Today the island is still a slightly upscale getaway but is home to the Georgia Sea Turtle Center. We have been here before and the center is Georgia’s only sea turtle education and rehabilitation facility. The Center offers the public a chance to learn about sea turtles and see rehabilitation in action with a host of interactive exhibits and experiences. As much and as beautiful as this island is – it is the Sea turtle Center that, for us, is its shining jewel.

It was getting late in the afternoon by now so we motored back to St. Simons, did a little shopping, and then went down to the pier.

I had brought my Guild guitar, so a little strumming and hummin’ was a great way to end the day, catch the sunset and entertain a few passersby.

We took dinner at The Porch with some seriously spicy Nashville-Style Hot Chicken and then a few games of pool upstairs at a place called Rafters.

I got up a bit before dawn and quietly slid out the room and strolled down to the channel to watch the sunrise – which it did with a brilliantly orange gusto.

Shira had gone in search of St. Simons Tree Spirits. In the 1980s, artist Keith Jennings decided to make his mark on St. Simons Island, carving about 20 faces from the island’s famous oak trees. Each unique face is hand-carved, taking the artist between two and four days to complete. In more recent years, Jennings has brought his son Devon to the Island to collaborate on the newest Tree Spirits. It’s not surprising that they each have a unique personality and look! Returning to the town center, we walked back to Mallory Street and breakfast at Palmers Café – which offered some breakfast choices you might not see in the northeast. Surf’d Squared - poached eggs atop a crab cake and grits and the Chix Pot Pie omelet created with Cheddar Cheese and the good stuff a chicken pot pie is made of. Full to dinner. Our rst stop this day was the War World II Homefront Museum, located in the old Coast Station building. The eastern coast of the United States was on the frontline when it came to German U-Boat attacks and the Georgian coastline was ground zero for a good deal of this, in both defense and offense as thousands of Freedom Ships were built and launched from Brunswick’s huge shipbuilding facilities. A fact that we did not know until this day was that as horri c as Pearl Harbor was – more US lives were lost along the east coast of the nation, due to U-Boat attacks than on December 7th.

This museum is a must-see if you are riding in this part of the Peach Tree State.

Back in the historic part of town, we trudged the 129 steps to the top of the lighthouse – haunted lighthouse we might add - and then headed north to the small city of Darien near the mouth of the Altamaha River.

We never, ever, pass up a decent UFO, Bigfoot, or monster legend!

Here it is that a hissing sea monster resides. Called Altamaha-ha, for the river, or “Altie” for short, the legend predates British-English colonization and is said to have originated with the Lower Muskogee Creek Tribe.

There is a life-sized Altie at the Darien Visitor center – so it must be true and we’ll never let science, fact, fuzzy imagery, or lack of any real evidence get in the way of a good yarn.

Driving along the river we came upon the remnants of an old rice plantation – a good look at history, right along Route 17.

Back in St. Simon Shira made her required stop at the local ice cream joint – Moo-Cow (this month’s Inside Scoop), which had some very nice ice cream, and that night, after a great Argentinian meal, we hit

Rafters for ‘Round Two’ of the Georgia Pool Challenge and then pack everything up as the next day we’d start heading back north. We headed back to Savannah and to the Prohibition Museum – the only museum in the nation that tells the story of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. How it came about, how life was and how, like many Americans today, the freedom-loving public got around it. A fascinating place and we learned far more than we thought we would.

Wayne Wheeler was the Anthony Fauci of his day.

Of course, Shira had an Inside Scoop Stop – Leopold’s – one of the most famous ice cream parlors in the nation. It was a delicious nish to our Savannah afternoon.

The morning found us making time north and east along the Tar Heel State backroads that crossed over the many rivers and streams that wind their way to the Atlantic.

In the town of New Bern, named by the founder Swiss Baron Christoph DeGraffenried in 1710 for his home town of Bern, Switzerland, we made our rst stop.

The town, snuggled in between the Nuese and the Trent rivers, was a superb place to stop and explore and made even better by the vintage F-11 Navy Blue Angel jet parked along the river as you ride into the town. But we had a mission as we needed to stop by Bradham’s.

Once a pharmacy, it is now famous for one particular concoction that they created called Brad’s Drink back then. This is where Pepsi got its humble beginnings. We had lunch on the pier overlooking the Neuse and then red the Durango back up and headed north and east, making a quick detour to an old Navy Airship Hanger outside Elizabethtown, along the Pasquotank River. The Weeksville Hanger is over 20-stories huge and a thousand feet in length, and when it opened in 1942, this massive structure had room for 12 Navy K-class blimps, each an average of 250-feet long and approximately 50 feet in diameter. It is still in use and is just one of a few left in the nation. We crossed into Virginia and drove through the Great Dismal Swamp, which is stunning and anything but.

Ever vigilant the redhead had yet another ice cream stop to make. But this was not really about ice cream but what deliciously holds it – the cone. You see the inventor of the ice cream cone, Abe Doumar and now his family, have been creating cones for more than a century – we stopped at Doumar’s Cones & BBQ to see the very rst waf e cone maker and taste a bit of history.

We called it a night along the Hampton River – coincidentally right next door to the Virginia Air and Space Science Center. How about that?

The Center featured some excellent spacecraft and aircraft including a number of NASA capsules including the Command Module of Apollo 12. F-16, F-18, F-84, and a rare Hawker Siddeley XV-6A Kestrel - the world’s rst operational vertical take-off and landing jet ghter.

There are a great number of interactive displays sprinkled through the well-designed building along the edge of the Hampton River. By early afternoon we scooted across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge & Tunnel – 17 and a half miles across the bottom of the bay to the southern end of the Delmarva Peninsula. Although we did not see it, we know there is a real monster of sorts on this long crossing - Chessie. Okay, not a huge biological cryptid, but rather one of tunnelboring and mechanical heritage. Chessie is a tunnel boring machine from Germany that has been boring a new mile-long tunnel along the southbound bridge. Its name, chosen by an online contest, was submitted by Grace Bentley of Nandua Middle School in Onley on the Eastern Shore. Chessie is a long-fabled sea monster said to live in the Chesapeake Bay. The legend stretches back more than 80 years with “sightings.” The monster was described as a long, snake-like creature that rolled through the waves. Now it is digging at a snail-like rate of two inches an hour. The mile-long tunnel project started in 2017 should be complete in 2024. We have spent a great deal of time along the Delmarva and stopping in at Stingrays for coffee – we felt like we were now in our own ballpark. By night time we were rolling up the driveway – with a Dominick’s pizza (thin crust, half sausage, half pepperoni, and mushrooms all around- thank you). Spenser T. Cat was a ball of confusion. Both pissed at our week-long disappearance and joy at our sudden return home. A week. Just a week. It seems like we packed a lot into just seven good days.

It just shows you that traveling and exploring, whether on motorcycle or winter-forced automobiles, still can be wondrous and excellent escapes and will etch great memories to remember and share.

See you on the road! ~ Brian Rathjen ,

BARBER MUSEUM’S NEW ADVANCED DESIGN CENTER

Traditional museums only peer backward in time, but the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum is looking boldly into the future with the debut of its cutting-edge Advanced Design Center. George Barber created the stunning Barber Motorsports Park complex in Birmingham, Alabama, around the world’s biggest and best motorcycle museum. Echoes of the past will resound at the museum’s new Advanced Design Center, a state-of-art facility built to inspire new generations of creative thinkers.

The intention of the Barber Advanced Design Center (BADC) is to encourage and explore design via the latest computer-aided design (CAD) as well as old-school clay modeling, with the capacity to turn concepts into product reality. “The Advanced Design Center was created to open the door to thinking,” Mr. Barber stated about his latest vision. “We need people to think beyond what’s happening today and see how we can improve on it, and not just motorcycle design.”

The new 11,000 square-foot facility is a high-tech workspace for Industrial Design exploration located on the top oor of the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum. Inside are workstations, 3-D scanners, and 3-D printers that have dramatically streamlined design processes. These tools not only speed up design work, they also allow highly accurate reverse engineering of vintage components. Words can’t adequately convey the scope of Mr. Barber’s latest vision, so we invite you to take a look at the video below, introduced by globally recognized journalist Neale Bayly from inside the fabulous museum. Then the video is passed over to the BADC’s designer, Brian Case, known in motorcycle circles as the designer of the exceptional Motus MST V-4. Follow along as Case demonstrates the capabilities of the BADC and provides insight into how advanced design techniques have created the actual facility itself. You’ll also get a glimpse into development of the center’s radical and exotic Mono Project that will formally be introduced in the coming months.