Prez Sez - March 2025
Jeff Ricker | Published on 3/20/2025
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Hello BMW Club of Minnesota,
Happy St. Patrick'sDay. I hope you are able to get out and enjoy those first rides of our Minnesota Spring. As your new club president, I wanted to thank you for electing me and Terry Stirewalt, our new vice president, to lead our club this year.
Here is news about our club activities.
2024 Mileage Contest
If you attended our February banquet, you already know that our top three finishers were the same for the third straight year. How's that for consistent performance?
-- First: Mike Lindstrom - 44,226 miles
-- Second: Daniel Maki - 34,807 miles
-- Third: Jeff Oden - 22,955 miles
Mike Lindstrom stopped riding long enough to accept his mileage award at our banquet. Here is Mike with Steve Handeland, our mileage coordinator, and Joel Howard, our club recorder.
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2025 Mileage Contest
Dan Elasky and Steve Handeland just sent an email about our club mileage contest. We need to submit:
-- Ending forms for the annual BMW MOA contest, which runs from April 1, 2024 to March 31, 2025.
-- Start forms for our 2025 club contest, which runs from April 1 to October 31.
Hiawatha Rally
Pre-registration is open at our website for our club's premier event, which is May 30-June 1 this year in Money Creek. By pre-registering, you save $10, plus we will enter your name into a special prize drawing for one person to win a grand prize.
Door Prizes
Daniel Degallier is stepping down as our door prize coordinator after several years of devoted service to our club. We appreciate all Daniel's hard work, and we need to find his replacements right away.
The good news: The board has decided to scale back our door prize campaign to only focus on grand prizes from our local dealers, rally sponsors and valued vendors. This will greatly simplify and reduce the workload for our new door prize leads. We have also received frequent feedback that the door prize giveaway on Saturday night takes way too long, so our new approach will speed things up.
Lane Filtering
The new state law allowing lane filtering takes effect July 1, less than four months away. Learn about the new law at our website:
Lane Filtering
I personally am looking forward to lane filtering/splitting but realize that it will take a lot of education and time for the car drivers to grow accustomed to and accept it. Safety is each of our personal responsibility and we must use good judgment as to when to filter or split lanes. As with riding in general, we need to give ourselves as much time and distance as possible while positioning ourselves to see and be seen. And even though the cars seem like they are out to get us, we must remain courteous and cooperative. It's important to be good motorcycle ambassadors on the road so that we don’t lose the ability to split lanes.
2024 Club Award Winners
If you were not able to attend our banquet, please congratulate our award winners.
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Hard Luck Shaft – Steve Ballantine
Steve endured a serious motorcycle accident while on tour in Morocco, followed by a difficult hospitalization in Spain.
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MacGyver – Steve Nollet
Steve managed to patch together his R100RS after the muffler broke off multiple times on the way home from the MOA rally in Oregon. Harley riders were jealous about how loud the airhead was!
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Helping Hands – Curt Henry
Curt received this award for helping to repair and restore Joel Howard's R80RT over many months during 2024.
It was fun to see many of you at our meeting Thursday March 13 at Richfield BMW. I look forward to seeing you at our next meeting (at Leo's South on April 10) and on our rides this summer.
Thanks,
Jeff |