Day 1: Easy Rider
April 28, 2019
It’s been a crazy 18 months. Last year seems like a lost year because of family responsibilities while Dad was in hospice for 280 days due to an intractable hip infection. Much of last year we lived away from home. Dad passed away in late October 2018, and the family has slowly been trying to understand and live the new normal. I’m a co-executor of the estate, so that has taken more hours than I would have guessed, and we’ve spent numerous weekends going through the contents house.
In 2018, Kitty and I managed
only one overnight ride, to Knoxville TN to have Lewis Preston of Electrical
Connection install LED headlights to our bike, named Crusader. Otherwise just a
few day rides here and there. So far
this year, one ride to the Honda shop and home is literally all I’ve managed.
By God’s grace and the
family’s blessing, somehow we’ve carved out a three week respite wherein tomorrow, we plan to strike out on a 6,000+ mile
two-up ride. Kitty has been everywhere on the North American continent, USA and
Canada, except for the Saguaro cactus deserts, so that’s our primary target.
We've planned stops in Vicksburg, MS to eat crawfish (Mississippi Area Crawfish
Hunt, or MACH.19), a little time with family in Gulfport, MS, wandering around
in the deserts of Arizona and Utah, our third visit to the Grand Canyon, a bit
of circuitous wandering through New Mexico in the general direction of home, and
then a super-slab ride home.
Kitty and I have experimented
for the past couple months with SpotWalla, an Internet cell phone technology
that uses GPS signals from compatible devices, broadcast over the Internet to a
web site that in turn drops breadcrumbs onto a map. I use the Bubbler GPS app on my Android
phone, having set it to update every 10 minutes. Thus anyone with the link can see real-time
updates (with a 10-minute delay) as to the route, speed, location, and other
parameters. I plan to use that on this
trip; I have an on-board GPS unit on my Gold Wing, and I’ll still download GPS
tracks as usual, but will load them into the computer and the mapping software after
the fact. SpotWalla seems to do a good
job, with the added advantage that the maps can be zoomed on a PC and
pinch-zoomed on a phone. The current
link for this trip (cannot guarantee that it won’t become a dead link in the
future) is this SpotWalla link. I have the link configured to protect some
secure zones where data won’t be shown, and otherwise the link is configured to
show the entire trip.
During this trip, I might
blog. I might provide a SpotWalla link. I might post Facebook updates. Time
will tell. I'm a free range biker, traveling with my favorite free range biker chick.
After significant planning,
shuffling of schedules, and revamping of our packing lists, I think we're ready.
So now, after streaming one of our church services this morning, we
lazily finish packing up our luggage and loading the trailer. All this luggage begs the question about what
happened to the couple who would strike out for the weekend with an extra pair
of underwear, a T-shirt and jeans, and be perfectly content. After performing the Dance of the
Repositioning Vehicles in a Single-Car Garage, I back the bike and trailer out
of the driveway, almost surprised I still remember how to back a trailer; we connect
our helmet intercom, and we’re on the road at 1:40 PM for our lazy afternoon ride.
The
morning rain has moved out, leaving in its wake a beautiful mid-70's kind of day. In an
easy-rider break-in ride, we have a lovely short 120+ mile day to Lovingston,
VA, near the location of the California Sidecar factory, where tomorrow morning I've made an appointment for some minor service
to the trailer. Lovingston is a tiny village, and we stay in
what I believe is the only motel. We
intend to walk about a mile into town to a café for dinner, but the four-lane
highway really doesn’t work for that. So
we cross the highway and wander into a wonderfully surprising little Italian
restaurant called Vito’s. We’ve been
there once before but I’ve forgotten what a little gem it is, an unassuming
tiny place by the wayside along a country four-lane road.
Tomorrow we plan to be at
the California Sidecar factory early, and then start heading toward Huntsville
AL where we hope to spend a day at the US Space and Rocket Center.
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