The Motorcycle Cannonball Endurance Run crossed its fifth day’s finish line in Cape Girardeau on Tuesday, September 9th. Hundreds of motorcycle enthusiasts attended the event to welcome the bikers to town.
This cross-country endurance competition involves vintage or antique motorcycles. The newest motorcycle in this year’s event is a 1936 motorcycle. All the others are older models.
Thomas Trapp is from Frankfurt, Germany and rides a 1916 Harley Davidson in the way it was built, no modification whatsoever. He has never done this competition with a nearly hundred year old bike. After five days of competition, he said the arrival in Cape Girardeau was wonderful.
“This was the very best of all what we have had in the last couple of days. The people are very friendly and whatever you see here is nice and clean around. You can be lucky to live in a town like Cape Girardeau. It’s wonderful here, I like it very much,” Trapp said.
The endurance competition is not a race. Participants have to travel a certain amount of miles each day and have a time-frame in which they have to report in. They ride on backcountry roads because, as Canadian rider Byrne Bramwell explained, most of the bikes “would never break the speed limit.”
He said crossing the country on old motorcycles is a beautiful journey but Dottie Mattern, from Florida, said it is also very tiring.
“It’s physically demanding in that we are on these bikes 7 to 8 hours a day, and it has a foot clutch and a hand shift, and you have to kick it when you want to start it. It physically takes more effort to ride than a modern bike,” Mattern said.
She rides a 1936 Indian Sport Scout with a beautiful two-tone green. Mattern explained that Sport Scouts are nimble motorcycle that people used to race with, although hers was never a racer.
One-hundred-and-ten riders participated in the Cannonball Run, including four women. Only three of them remain in the competition.
“One lady from Italy, her motorcycle is kaput and she says it cannot be fixed,” Mattern said and added that the two other female participants are from California and Hawaii.
When a bike breaks down during the day’s ride, bikers have to either work on it on the road or get it loaded on a trailer that will take it to that day’s hotel where they will have to repair it.
“Several of the people have big trailer support vehicles that have a whole machine shop inside and they do amazing engine rebuilds and repairs,” Mattern said. “The parking lot of the hotels are where it’s happening at night, everybody is out changing oil or doing whatever they need to do”.
The Motorcycle Cannonball Endurance Run will end in Tacoma, Wa. on Sunday, September 21st.
