Day 17: Monday July 2
Copyright(c) 2007, Jim Beachy
We have stayed at the Super 8 or the Viking Inn in Brunswick, Maine many times on our trips to Cook’s Lobster House. I don’t think we’ve ever left the area under sunshine: Always, it’s been foggy, cloudy, or outright raining. Until today. Not a single cloud in the entire horizon, 57 perfectly formed degrees (F), another gorgeous morning for our ride home.
Homeward bound. We love the time away, love the time together, and I’m always sad when I turn the bike around for the last time to head home, but “homeward bound” has kind of a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
I’ve got a GPS route mapped to get us home while bypassing most of the cities, but still it promises to be a high-intensity, Interstate kind of day. As we catch I-295 on our way to I-95 south, I call up some GPS information and tell Kitty jokingly, “It’s only 666 miles home. Wanna go for it today?” There’s a long pause suddenly I know she’s taken me seriously.
I often quote my friend IndyWinger (is he IndyBoater now?): “The only problem with a 500-mile ride is what to do with the rest of the afternoon.” Like him and some of my other friends, I would ride 400 miles for breakfast, 600 miles for lunch, and 1,000 miles for dinner. But that’s not the mode we’re in when Kitty and I travel together. We’ve done quite a few 500- or 600-mile days on Interstates, but a 666-mile day would be a highwater mark for Kitty.
“The way I feel now, I think we can go for it,” she finally replies. Had I had this in mind, we would have tried to hit the road earlier than 8:51 AM, which is when my GPS says we rolled out onto the highway from the motel. I play with the GPS routes at our first fuel stop to see if I can find a route that shaves off some miles but still respects Kitty’s Kardinal Rules. I find what I think is a good compromise that reduces our riding time by an hour, and so I save that route and we begin navigating our way homeward.
Since Kitty lost all that weight, I’m astonished at her riding endurance. She now rides for 2 1/2 hours between stops, not quite tank-to-tank but far enough that we often don’t need a rest break between fuel stops.
We follow Jill’s flawlessly fluent instructions through a Interstate route system that only a GPS could love but roughly stays with I-95 variations around cities, until we reach the same variations of I-90, which we follow always south and west. Eventually, after riding through several states’ “Turnpike” (translation: there’s a toll, plus additional tolls for the trailer axle), we catch I-84 west near Worcester, Massachusetts, which is mostly our route for several hundred miles.
We pass by Hartford and Danbury in Connecticut, which once again come dangerously close to violating the “No Cities” as well as the “No Traffic” rules.
Me: ”If you could choose between that bumpy Lighthouse Trail in Nova Scotia or this road, which would it be?”
Kitty: “That bumpy road on the Lighthouse Trail.” Well, there’s a perspective.
Me: “If you had to choose between that dirt road to Meat Cove or this road, which would it be?”
Kitty: “This road.” There’s another perspective. Guess she really doesn’t want to be on a steep dirt road.
Me: “If you had to choose between seeing a snake or being on this road, which would it be?”
Kitty: “If he were very, very far away, then I could see a snake rather than be on this road.” Obviously she is not a fan of Interstate travel!
This is a high-intensity Interstate travel day. With the way I’d sketched out the trip and to give us the time we wanted in poke-around and slow-down places, to find the end of the road and the last lighthouse, the compromise was several days of this kind of travel. It’s tiring and certainly not the preferred routes for Kitty and me. On these roads, all the careful planning, all the professional approach to riding, all the defensive driving skills that can be employed — all that can be undone in an instant by a 16-year-old kid whose belief in his own invulnerability exceeds his reflexes by a millisecond. Constant vigilance is in order. Nevertheless, we are homeward bound, and that with a vengeance.
Following the compromise route I’d ginned up on the GPS earlier in the day, we catch I-87 near Newburg, New York and rocket southward to I-287 into New Jersey until we catch I-78 westward into Pennsylvania. We stop for fuel sometime after 5:00 PM and discuss whether we can make the last 220 miles home. We’ve ridden about 440 miles. “I don’t know,” Kitty says. “I felt so good this morning, but maybe we should have stopped more often so we can go farther. But I’m not sure I’m up for doing the whole trip. And you’ve got one headlight out as well.” Without realizing it, she has echoed the credo of the Iron Butt rider: Stop oftener so you can go farther. She’s probably right.
But after our fuel stop, I feel completely rejuvenated. “I feel like I just started out,” I say. She says nothing, which I know means she doesn’t feel the same way. So after another 30 miles or so, I say, “Ok, last chance. I’m going to stop at the next exit for the night unless you want to keep going. There is no reason to push, no reason we need to be home, no reason to wear yourself out. Remember, it’s a vacation!” Reluctantly she concedes that she’s done for the day.
We stop near Allentown, Pennsylvania, having ridden 470 miles. We’re about 200 miles from home. I can tell she is a little bummed, and that she would have liked to complete the trip today. Maine in the morning, Virginia by nightfall. But stopping when we do is the right thing to do. Every day I pray for wisdom and for help in making wise choices. This was the wise choice and that’s why I’m happy to end our day in another hotel room. Happy and together, because “Together is the best place to be.”
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