Motorcycle trek puts new spin on Boge family's summer fun

SANDPOINT — Let’s get one thing straight here — Michael Boge has an iron butt. So does his wife, Anavel, and his daughter, Laura. They proved it beyond the shadow of a doubt by riding a total of 11,814 miles over 23 straight days on a motorcycle trek that took them from Key West, Fla., to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and back again.

According to Michael, the adventure took wing when the Boges decided to take “a family vacation that would be different.”

It was every bit of that.

“Anavel wanted to see Alaska and she thought we might do it by boat,” Michael said. “I thought we should do it by motorcycle, so we started in Key West.”

It’s no coincidence that his mind would jump on the bike for the rolling vacation, since Boge has competed in and completed more than 20 Iron Butt Association rides over the years. Those outings have included several rides of 1,000 miles in 24 hours, as well as traveling from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans and back again in 100 hours or less and later riding with a friend through 49 states — Hawaii was out for obvious reasons — and Mexico in nine days, 16 hours and 13 minutes.

But who’s counting?

“Forty-nine states wasn’t enough, so we dipped down into Mexico,” the motorcycle enthusiast said. “It’s fun in a kind of sick way.”

Boge also has completed the association’s ultimate challenge — known as “The Big Dance” — twice. Only 100 riders are selected in an annual lottery for the rally and the route changes every year. One time, it might be to hit four pre-determined corners of the U.S. in a defined period of time. A different year might require visiting all 48 contiguous United States in 11 days or less. To get extra points, the rider can visit every state capital along the way.

The Iron Butt challenges leave no room for cheaters, though. Each participant must provide photographic evidence of their stops, signed forms witnessed by police or firefighters on the course and hand in receipts to chronicle when and where they stopped for gas or meals.

“It’s tough,” Boge said. “More people have climbed Everest than have completed an Iron Butt rally.”

But scooting your glutes all over the country was nothing compared to hitching up the sidecar and taking the family on a madcap run that would, in the end, traverse 13 states and four Canadian provinces, with weather that ranged from withering, relentless sun to merciless downpours of rain.

“Our coldest day was 36 degrees in Prudhoe Bay and our hottest was 105 degrees in St. Louis,” said Boge. “There’s this constant yin and yang going on — light and dark; good weather, bad weather; you’re miserable, you’re happy.”

The Boges would start each riding day by traveling a couple of hundred miles before breakfast, adding a few hundred more before stopping for a snack lunch and then punching it in for the night with several hundred more miles under their belts. Because Laura is a 7-year-old, they needed to keep her occupied to keep on the road.

One way to do that was to pack her scooter along, giving their daughter the distinction of not only completing such an epic ride, but also having scootered in every state and province they passed through. The family also made a game of trying a different kind of candy at every stop. But technology ended up being the thing that ensured success.

“I wired a DVD player into the sidecar where Laura sat,” Boge said. “That was the key.”

The Alaskan jaunt originally was meant to be a one-way excursion. After checking into the Iron Butt Association records during one of their stops on the way north, however, Boge found that only a very limited number of people had completed the round-trip the group calls the “Ultimate Coast-to-Coast” ride. A total of 130 people had made the ride from the southernmost tip of the U.S. to its northernmost point reachable by road. And only 23 riders — all of them men — had completed the round-trip.

“No women or kids had ever done it,” said Boge. “And no sidecars had ever gone up there.”

Which is understandable, given that the last 800 miles from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay are on dirt road with only limited services along the way. Traveling at 100 miles per tank of gas, the Boges were constantly keeping an eye out for gas stations. In the states and most of Canada, that wasn’t a problem. In the Yukon and Alaska, it became a critical issue.

The family ditched their laptop and all but the clothes they had on their backs in order to carry 11 gallons of extra fuel for the long stretches where gas stops could be separated by 250 miles or more. Through much of the trip, dodging other vehicles was the biggest challenge. Once they reached the northern climes, wildlife on the road caused the traffic jams that could slow progress to a halt.

“We saw musk ox and caribou, wild horses and about 30 bear — three of them grizzlies,” Boge said. “There was one time when we had to ride through a herd of buffalo that were blocking a bridge.

“Another time, we saw what we thought was a tree by the side of the road that turned out to be a standing grizzly bear,” he continued, recalling how the bear left its hind legs and took a full-speed run toward what must have looked like the wilderness equivalent of Meals on Wheels. “He was coming straight at us, so I quickly found a gear to escape.”

Not all aspects of the journey were quite so dramatic. On most days, the Boges planned the route so that they could pull into a motel in time for dinner and a swim in the pool.

“The main job was to find new ways to keep it fun,” Michael said. “Three people on a motorcycle with a sidecar for 14 hours a day is like a family sitting on a coffee table with wheels — and still getting along with each other.

“I thought of the whole thing as a circus and I was the ringmaster.”

When the rolling circus limped back into its hometown of Sandpoint on the return trip to Key West, the riders and the bike were showing the strain of pounding it down the road at an average of at least 500 miles a day.

“By the time we got to Sandpoint, the exhaust pipe had shattered, we had huge electrical problems and the tires were shot,” said Boge, adding that, after quick repairs and some regrouping at home, the family set out for its final stage of the round-trip ride. “That was the hardest part, because it would have been so easy to just turn around and go back home.

“Anavel, many days, was the strongest of all of us,” he went on. “She’d say, ‘No — we need to keep going to our next stop.’ And Laura never complained.”

To the contrary, Laura seemed to enjoy the fact that she not only was the first child to complete the “Ultimate Coast-to-Coast” — not to mention having ridden her scooter in all the states and provinces along the way — but also showed uncommon grit for someone who was, after all, just 7 years old.

“One night I was putting our last gallon of gas in the tank and she said, ‘Dad, if I can do this ride, I can do anything,’” her father said.

Her stick-to-itiveness kept up right to the end, when the family donned the formal wear they had packed for the occasion and braved a drenching rain for a celebratory photo at the famous Key West buoy.

Apart from logistical snags and long hours on the road, the Boges found people at every stage of the trip to be uniformly open and kind. Having seen this friendly face of humanity while riding across the U.S., Mexico and Canada has planted an idea in Michael’s head.

“It’s still percolating in my brain,” Michael said, turning to smile at his wife, “but I told Anavel last night, ‘Why don’t we go around the world?’”

She smiled back, shook her head and said: “You’re crazy.”

“Crazy good,” said Michael.