Beez' Blog of Moto Greatness - CroMag Campout

September 22, 2014

Every year since 2007 I have been going to a 4 day rally in Vermont called the CroMag Rally. It is one of the regional rallies that is part of the motorcycle forum Adventure Rider.com. We stay at a campground at Silver Lake State Park in Barnard, VT which is closed for the season. We have an agreement with the rangers to use it after the end of their season so the campground is all ours. Last year we donated $3000 to the park. We also bid on the few lean-tos and have a BBQ dinner on Saturday night and all the money from that is donated to the Vermont Food Bank. We drop some serious coin in the Barnard General Store and the guy who supplies out fire wood.

But the most important part is getting together with friends and making new ones that I may only see a few times a year. And of course riding motorcycles. Vermont has some of the best roads in New England, very little traffic and you can legally pass over the double yellow line. That has something to do with all the farm vehicles.

Most all who attend ride dualsport bikes or adventure tourers. In case you don't know a dualsport bike, sometimes called an enduro, is a street legal dirt bike and they range from 250cc to 650cc. Adventure tourers are more like street bikes with long travel suspension, knobby tires and have multi-cylinder engines that range from 650cc to 1200cc. I have one of each but I choose to bring my 2005 BMW R1200GS to this rally because it adds two more days of riding, the trip up and the trip home. And the woods in Massachusetts look pretty much just like the woods in Vermont. On the other hand the twisty paved roads are way better and less congested in Vermont and it has steeper mountains. Vermont also has a lot more country dirt roads that go for miles and miles which is what I love to ride my GS on.

Thursday I left around 6am and met up with 3 other friends at Parkers Maple Barn in southern New Hampshire for breakfast. They make maple syrup there and if you haven't had real maple syrup you should try it some time. Way better than the high fructose corn syrup crap. We traveled a route of back roads and dirt roads north in NH and then turned west towards Vermont.

I crashed on the way up. I was leading and there was a fork in the road and I picked the wrong way. Realizing this I tried to slow down but there was gravel on top of pavement, I used a little too much front brake and it locked up and tucked the front. It was low speed and the only damage was a busted turn signal and some more scratches/scars on my bike. My riding gear did its job and my only injury was a jammed thumb that felt better in a couple days. When people ask me, "Why do you wear all that stuff?" or "Aren't you hot in all that?" I have a very good reason.

Friday, myself and two friends rode more dirt roads to Barre for pizza then visited a meadery to try some mead. Mead is a medieval drink that is sort of a combination of beer, cider and wine and has a lot of honey in it. Their mead was like dry white wine but they also had some sweeter ones. I had mead for the first time this year and it was sweet and thick, probably more like traditional mead. It was called Viking Blod.

Saturday I lead a ride of 11 or so guys over all the Vermont gaps (they call them notches in New Hampshire). A gap is a road that goes over the mountains and connects the valleys and they run east-west. They twist, turn and go up and down, it's like a roller coaster on your bike. It was a good day, no one crashed, got a flat or had bike problems and I didn't lose anyone.

Each night we all gather back at the camp ground to eat, drink and tell stories around the camp fire. Caveman TV. We burn a dump truck's worth of wood each night! Which was nice since it was pretty cold at night.

If you are interested, check out the link below for my photos. I didn't get that many riding photos and probably too many fire photos, ha ha. Now I have to wait a whole year until the next one.

http://beez.smugmug.com/Motorcycles/Cromag-2014/44478923_pZBZWt

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