ROT stands for Republic of Texas and the ROT Rally is the biggest motorcycle rally in the state. This year ROT came June 11-14. Thursday through Sunday.
It usually goes something like this. Thursday, the vendors are all setting up. Everyone who’s camping sets up their campsite. They fill their coolers with ice and beer, and the festivities begin. Friday evening, there’s a parade on 6th Street in Austin and Friday night is about being downtown on your motorcycle.
Saturday during the day is all about getting out on your motorcycle and experiencing the roads around Austin and the Hill Country. Saturday night is about being at the convention center, riding around the campsites and giving away beads, if you know what I mean.
And then finally, there’s Sunday. Everything is winding down. The vendors are tearing down their booths – if they haven’t already – and it’s all over by about noon.
It’s a busy weekend and there’s usually a lot going on. As you can see from my bio page, I have a motorcycle, and I live in central Texas, so it puts me in prime position to go to ROT. And I often do, though it’s always sporadic and spontaneous. But not this year.
This year, my wife and I planned for it. We even took vacation from work, both taking Thursday and Friday off. But for some reason, the stars conspired against us and kept us from making it to ROT.
Thursday we got off to a slow start. We knew that there was no reason to go down early because everyone was setting up. We were going to head down Thursday evening, but then a storm blew in from nowhere that was blasting us with almost golf ball sized hail, lots of wind and plenty of rain. If you know me, you know that I’ll ride in the rain, but not on purpose.
Friday was equally a bust. We were going to go down and check out the vendors. We decided that after the thunderstorms of the previous evening, it would be muddy at the convention center, so we took the bike out and just rode. It was nice because we saw lots of other bikes out doing the same thing.
Friday night we were going to go down to 6th Street but a couple of things stopped us. One, another storm was blowing in, almost identical to Thursday’s, and two, we had to get up early on Saturday to take our daughter to her swim meet. So we took the bike out but stayed pretty close to home, going out to eat and grabbing a couple of beers. We called it a night early.
The one thing I haven’t mentioned is that we were also keeping my sister-in-law’s dog, CJ. CJ is a black lab. He used to be ours, but we gave him to my wife’s sister a couple of years back. He’s getting pretty old and she takes good care of him. But she spoils him – BAD! And she works strange hours. Currently, she gets up at 3 or 4 in the morning to go to work. That means CJ gets up at that time too.
And he did, for the entire time he was with us. In fact, he got up several times in the night, whining and crying. It got to where my wife and I were taking turns on who got to get up with him on which night – worse than having a baby.
Friday night was the worst. He got up constantly and by the time Saturday morning rolled around, we were exhausted. We took our daughter to the swim meet and sat out in the hot sun. By the time we got home, all we wanted to do was take a nap. But not CJ. He’d been sleeping the whole time we were at the meet.
Saturday night was out because we had to go to the airport to pick up Maria’s sister. Good news, CJ went home. Bad news, ROT is almost over and we still haven’t made it down there.
So here I am. It’s Sunday morning and I’m writing this blog. I could have gotten on the bike and rode down to ROT, but I figure after all of this, why bother? Next year will roll around and we’ll try it again. We may make it, we may not. But I’ll bet that we at least get out to ride like we did this year. At least we have that.
~Doug