Cowboy up in Gillette

Ride your motorbike to the middle of nowhere, then go 110 miles north and you’ll find the coal and oil town of Gillette, Wyoming. For three and an half days in July 2008 you’ll also find more BMW motorbikes and their riders in one place than anywhere else.

Gillette is host to the 2008 BMW Motorcycle Owners of America international rally. This year’s event, the 36th annual, is being held at Gillette’s Cam-Plex, a kind of multi-use special events, rodeo, state fair grounds and convention center.

Nearly 6,000 riders – some with bikes and some without – are in attendance. There are a multitude of events, seminars, and entertainment along with vendors offering food, drink, and an assortment of motorbike gizmos so extensive it boggles the mind.

Included in the indoor vendor area is a display of vintage BMWs with a collection of very early bikes in like-new condition. The owner of the bikes boasts that they all still operate perfectly, including a 1924 model.

The vast majority of rally-riders are also campers. The grounds surrounding the Cam-Plex have blossomed like a giant multi-colored, garden of tents, tarps, and trailers in every shape and size. Parked next to nearly every campsite is an equally diverse variety of motorbikes.

It seems that every bikes has customized his or her bike just enough to make it unique. There’s an R1200GS with its side panels painted with a Great White Shark motif. There’s a 1977 R100RT pained like a yellow cab. Every bike is just different enough to make wandering the grounds ogling bikes seem like a new experience every time.

There are but a few food vendors, and the selection is decidedly institutional. The only fresh offerings come from a couple of trailer-sized smokers churning out $9 and $12 plates of BBQ pork, beef brisket, and beef ribs. A Pizza Hut in an RV is making a killing cranking out $5 slices of pizza at an amazing pace.

A staple of any motorbike rally is of course the Beer Garden. This one’s inside a giant rodeo barn and is serving horse-troughs full of thin American Beers and pouring four microbrews on tap. There is literally a tractor-trailer full of beer kegs parked out back – hidden from the prying eyes of fun-quashing abolitionists, no doubt.

And there’s entertainment. Unfortunately the first band to take the stage only got one tune out before rally organizers announced an ominous and looming “severe thunderstorm” due to arrive in minutes. This prompted nearly the whole audience to leap to their feet and scurry to their tents to secure tent pegs and batten down hatches.

The T-Storm proved less devastating than advertised, luckily, and the show continued after about an hour. But a four-hour overnight rainstorm left the whole rally waterlogged the next morning

Asking a rally official for the reasons behind a rally in the middle of the middle of nowhere the reply was unpredictably reasoned. It seems the middle of nowhere is actually quite centrally located for people who are traveling from the four corners of the U.S. and Canada.

The location also comes with a nice variety of day rides in the area, including Devil’s Tower, the icon of Steven Spielburg’s classic film “Close Encounters,” and the old west settlement of Deadwood, in nearby South Dakota, also made famous through the current HBO series named for the town. So, maybe it’s not the middle of nowhere afterall.