"Twelve hours out of Mackinaw City," Bob Seger sings in "Roll Me Away," "I stopped in a bar to have a brew." Now, let's hope he is not providing us with the sum and substance of his stops on this little trip, because twelve hours is an awfully long time to be riding a motorcycle without a break. (The line "Five hours out of Mackinaw City I stopped in a Big Boy to have a reuben" musta got left on the cutting-room floor.) Maybe he was wearing a Camelbak.
At the same time, he was clearly not kidding in needing a break if he went twelve hours without any stops worth discussing. So where did Bob get to? If he went through the plains to the mountains, he was going almost due west. And if he's sick of what's wrong and what's right, I think we can assume he was heedless of the speed-limit laws - let's say he was averaging 80 miles an hour. For twelve hours, that's nearly a thousand miles.
So where does that leave him? Kadoka, South Dakota, is 991 miles from Mackinaw City, so if he wasn't in a bar in Kadoka, he wasn't very far from it, either. Clean out of sight, indeed.
7 comments:
No way he gets all the way to Kadoka in twelve hours. There are no interstates in the U.P. It takes twenty minutes just to get through the Escanaba/Gladstone metro area. At best, he makes Sioux Falls; more likely, he's somewhere in Minnesota.
But on his bike, through those back roads, he doesn't need an interstate to go really fast. Maybe someone could ask Seger how fast he tends to go on a state highway. I bet it's close to 80.
According to SegerBob.com:
As recounted in many interviews, the town 12 hours out of Mackinaw City is Rochester, Minnesota. The motorcycle he was riding was a Honda 1100.
Ok I met Bob a few times I will ask next time I meet him when he is eating pizza with his family
You are awesome! Just made our road trip!
Why would he head south to Rochester? If he was on Route 2 he would have stayed West. And you’re not going to average 80 on a 2 lane full of slow Yoopers. He’d be lucky to average 60, with gas and potty breaks.
I heard Bob himself say in an interview that the city he stopped in for a brew was Rochester, MN, so I'll take his word for it. Interesting side note, I was in Rochester last month getting radiation for my prostate cancer. One evening, my 21-year-old son drove down from the Twin Cities to hang out for a bit. We ended up driving around the town listening to tunes on his badass sound system. He was excited to show me how he had discovered Turn the Page. It meant a lot, especially since his wheelhouse tends to be the gangster rap, much to my chagrin (not that there's anything wrong with gangster rap, per se, but, as I often ask him, what is it about those songs does he actually identify with? I figured, given his taste for the extreme, maybe he'd prefer the Metallica version of Turn the Page. After listening to it, he still stood by the original! Proud dad moment!
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