Gaspésie Gambol, Day 9

Over the Borderline
Tuesday June 30, 2009
Copyright(c) 2009, Jim Beachy

“Shall we go with Atlantic Time, Eastern Time, or split the difference?” Kitty asked last night. We “lost” an hour riding into New Brunswick because the province is on Atlantic Daylight Time. We decide not to follow the New Brunswick time zone since we’ll be here only for two days at the most; when we cross back into Maine at Calais, we’ll be back to Eastern Time.

So, because time is relative, we don’t set an alarm and, when we are ready, pack up the bike and trailer, conveniently parked overnight in the warm, dry garage offered to us by the hotel. What a blessing that was to find shelter from the torrential rain that accompanied us to Bathurst! Now, using yesterday’s newly-formed trip parameters, we have decided to try to make Cook’s Lobster house on Bailey Island, Maine, in two days, leaving more days to ride through New England’s White and Green Mountains without riding Interstates. It’s about 930 km (580 miles). This will put us completely out of sync with any of the towns I’ve researched, so we are winging it on our Gold Wing with our trusty Garmin GPS to help us find our way.

We set out a little after 8:30 AM Eastern after doing the Dance of the Rainsuit. At the moment it is very foggy and chilly (about 53F, 12C) but not raining; however, we expect that to change. We have one-piece Motoport rain suits that we may re-evaluate if Kitty learns to love her electric suit. (The one-piece suit is a sealed garment and has no openings for an electric cord to plug into the bike; a two-piece suit would solve that problem.) We have waterproof Cruiserworks riding boots that actually look like normal boots that one could wear into a nice restaurant, and we wear them all the time while riding. It seems odd that they are waterproof, because they look just like normal boots. We have SealSkinz waterproof riding gloves, manufactured by a company that makes diving wet suits and dry suits. They know how to keep a body dry! Kitty wears her balaclava along with the rain suit.

Thus attired, we strike out for more coastal riding, roughly following Rt. 134 and Rt. 11 along what is known as the Acadian Peninsula region, and within 30 minutes we are once more engulfed in torrential rain and enveloping fog which, while preventing us from viewing the seacoast, does not hinder our riding vision. In the midst of all this, we see several cars stopped and first think there’s an animal in the ditch, but it’s just folks picking what I imagine to be wild strawberries by the road. It’s too early for blueberries, which ripen in August, and I remember the delicious tiny wild strawberries, hardly bigger than large peas, that we found for our picnic lunch dessert somewhere on the Cabot Trail during our last trip to Nova Scotia.

“Oh, no!” I say with dismay. “We have to go back to Percé! We forgot to get coffee cups!” We’ve made it a tradition to pick up coffee cups from wherever we travel on our motorycle, and we have cups from all over the North American continent. It makes for some great morning conversations at home as we each choose a cup and reminisce about where and why we got that cup. But in Percé, we inexplicably forgot to purchase our cups. Someday I hope we can return for our coffee cups. I could be content to stay there a while.

Eventually, at the village of Caraquet, Rt. 11 turns southward and we run along the coast to Miramichi. For six days now the sea, always on our left, has been our constant companion. Several times Kitty would look across an expanse of water and ask “Is that where we’re going?” My answer was always the same: “If you see a place where land and water meet, yes, that’s where we’re going unless we’ve already been there!”

I’d like to take some pictures of the foggy seacoast when we can see it; frequently I will ride all day with the camera around my neck so I can easily stop for a photo. But with the foul weather, I can’t risk exposing the camera to the elements, and it is difficult to find the right place to pull over, get off the bike, open the trunk, take out the camera, take the shot, put it back, and continue. And thus to Miramichi and onward without a single picture. At Miramichi, we must leave our restless blue-green friend who has brought us fog and rain and hidden the sun for many days, but has also yielded some great vistas and many great memories. “Good-bye, Ocean,” I say.

“Au revoir a la mer!” says Kitty in my headset. We’ve had a great time learning to speak better French, and almost invariably, when people saw that we were making real effort to learn, they would light up and go out of their way to explain things in both French and English, and laugh with us as we tried to form the idiosyncratic French vowel sounds. It sounds so lyrical when they do it, so awkward for us. Nevertheless, there were several times we were able to order off the menu in French or ask for something in a store and people didn’t appear to give us a second glance. It has been fun!

With our new trip parameters, I’d envisioned riding as far as Fredericton today, but that will take us off the road by 2:30 PM (Eastern) and we think we can do better than that. “Shall we make a run for the border?” I ask Kitty in the headset.

“I’m up for it!” she responds.

I haven’t researched this area carefully, and at a fuel stop I inspect the route. Not many towns there, no amenities listed in the GPS along that route. The waypoints in Garmin’s Canadian maps tend to be less accurate than their US counterparts, so I’m not too concerned. But what I am a little concerned about is that tomorrow is Canada Day, and I wonder whether all the existing services will consumed by travelers. But we make a run for the border at St. Stephens (Canada) and Calais (USA), hoping not to need the scarce services of the New Brunswick interior. From Fredericton on Rt. 8 and Rt. 3, it promises to be a ride of about two hours plus. I’m still a little concerned about housing: Will all the motels be booked by Canadians escaping tomorrow’s madness? Or perhaps by vacationing Canadians eager to return to their home for the festivities? Or perhaps even by Americans escaping to Canada for a day of revelry?

Without any research other than issuing a GPS command to find hotels near the town of Calais, Maine, I find the Calais Motor Inn in the GPS. I make a call from my cell phone and book a room. The place has a restaurant and a bed. For us today, that’s good enough. Lord willing, tonight we will be south of the northern border!

For four days straight, we have seen no sign of bright sun or blue sky. Suddenly, somewhere between Fredericton and Calais, we see a patch of blue sky. It makes me so happy I create a GPS waypoint and title it “BlueSky.” But 20 minutes later we are once again in a foggy downpour that lasts most of the way to St. Stephens.

We arrive on the Canadian side of the border at 5:10 PM. Except that now the time zone matters because it’s really 6:10 PM and all the international money exchange places have closed at six! We were told they were open for “extended hours” which I’d interpreted as “at least until eight.” I’m glad I didn’t know they close at six, because I would have stressed all day about whether we’ll make it in time. Even so, Kitty had earlier remarked “Slow-Down Guy has gone into hibernation today, hasn’t he?” I go into the Canadian duty-free shop where the attendant tells me the duty-free shop on the US side can exchange our Canadian money for the US equivalent.

While sitting in line to cross the border, I reset the GPS back to statute units instead of metric, and I retire British Emily Version 1.50 to reactivate American Jill 1.50. The unit reboots and automatically issues the next appropriate routing command in its new American Jill persona. “Emily is done?” asks Kitty with a note of sadness. British Emily has guided us faithfully for nearly a week through the metric mazes and has been flawless.

We cross the border by surrendering our passports to be swiped and by answering only a few perfunctory questions, then stop at the US duty-free shop where indeed they can change out our several hundred dollars Canadian for US. And just like that, we are back in the USA and back in Eastern Time.

At the Calais Motor Inn, I ask if there’s a car wash in town. The GPS lists no car wash services. Black Satin and the trailer are as dirty as they have ever been. Between two days of pouring rain and wet fog, mist and drizzle, muddy wet construction areas, and dusty dry construction areas, the rig is covered with grit and dust. “Don’t even think of touching any surface on this bike!” I’d told Kitty at the border. I can’t stand it one more day! Even if it starts all over again tomorrow, I will clean this bike tonight!

Instead of a car wash, the motel guy offers us a complete little motorcycle-wash setup just outside the motel office, replete with soap, sponges, drying towels, a water hose, and a bucket; he encourages us to park the bike in the shelter and wash it right there. After dinner at the motel restaurant (which closes at 8:00 PM Eastern), where we each order prime rib that turns out to be large enough we could have split one between us and have some left over for a moderately hungry stranger from the street, Kitty helps me wash and dry the bike. I appreciate this, because one of our rules is that she never has to help with my idiosyncratic care habits for my bike. But it’s a lot faster and a lot more fun when both of us do it!

In our quest to make Cook’s Lobster House by tomorrow night, we have ridden 324 miles (521 km) today, a third of which was in slow-down mode in pouring rain and fog. We’ve ridden 1,914 miles (3,080 km) in total. I have added two potential routes to Cook’s: a “fast” route and a “coast” route. I believe Slow-Down Guy might make an appearance for the coastal route tomorrow. But on the other hand, even Slow-Down Guy doesn’t want to be late for Cook’s!

Tomorrow alone can reveal how this might play out. See you then.

GPS Track Log (Yellow)

Gaspésie Gambol, Day 8

Bring on the Rain
Monday June 29, 2009
Copyright(c) 2009, Jim Beachy

I hear the shower and check Kitty’s cell phone clock. It’s 6:10 AM.

“Uh, honey, we were gonna sleep in till 7:00. You couldn’t sleep?”

“Oh, bummer, I looked at my watch and thought we overslept,” Kitty says. “Look outside.”

I step to the glass door and see that fog has retreated overnight and the spectacular rock is fully visible this morning. It has rained overnight but is not raining now and the fog seems to have receded farther out to sea than since we got here.

Nevertheless, we nap for another hour, pack up our stuff, load the trailer, and have breakfast in the hotel restaurant. We say au revoir to the lovely and friendly staff of Hotel la Normandie, plug in Kitty’s electric vest, and head out into the chilly 53F (12F) morning air.

Kitty’s only complaint wearing the electric suit was the cool air around her neck. The “still air” bubble created by the big Tulsa windshield puts me right in the middle of the bubble, but it starts to collapse around Kitty’s helmet and she always gets more wind than I do. She solves this by wearing her balaclava, kind of a ski-mask silk scarf thing that always makes me laugh because I think she looks like a monk until she puts on her helmet and looks just like a normal biker. This does the trick nicely for her this morning, and she is toasty and content in the chill damp air.

The weather, threatening to spit rain at any moment and sometimes filling the air with a mist that clings to my windshield and to my bones, is not conducive for much picture-taking and wandering around; nevertheless I manage to get several pictures.

We’ve ridden eastward from Montreal and Quebec for days, but now we have passed Lands’s End and are riding westward along the Bay de Chaluers for a time until the coast turns eastward once again. The wind is strongly at our back, and we ride in a strangely silent cocoon of still air that is very unusual. There seems to be no wind noise, no wind flapping my flags; it’s almost like riding in a vacuum. When I stop for a picture or two and walk back the way we came, the wind is strong and filled with a cold mist that fogs my camera lens and my helmet shield. We ride through some wet pavement and a few little rain squalls that never cause us to consider rain gear in spite of the gray skies.

At the town of Pasébiac, we stop for a fuel break. At every break, I have a routine where I check the trailer. I yank on the trailer hitch to make sure it’s intact; I push on both trailer wheels to make sure the wheel bearings are ok; and I compress the edge of the tires to make sure tire feels like the air pressure is ok (I only carry 20 psi in the trailer tires). This morning I perform my little check and… hello, is the right trailer tire a little soft? I check both tires and I’m convinced the right tire is a little low. I’ve been watching the tires because this will be their last trip. They will be down on the wear bars by the time I get home.

“We just passed a Canadian Tire place a kilometer back,” I tell Kitty. “I’m going back there to see if they can check it out.” So we backtrack and find Sylvain at the tire place. Sylvain speaks exactly as much English as I speak French but we figure out what the problem is and he asks me to ride my bike and trailer into a bay, first making sure I’ll be able to back it out after it’s in there.

I go one better and back it into the bay using the Wing’s reverse gear. Kitty later says his widen with surprise as he stammers something about “motorcycle… back up!??”

I help the mechanic find a piece of wood to keep the jack from damaging the bottom of the trailer, and we jack up the rear of the trailer, remove the wheel, and inspect it. He paints it with some soapy water but no bubbles (evidence of a leak) are visible. Of course, I only carry 20 psi in those tires so there’s not much pressure. I make a snap decision.

“You have these?” I ask. “I buy two – duex!” I say. I’m thinking that these tires are nearing end of life and rather than fight with a repair and then have to replace them anyway as soon as I get home, let’s just replace them. Here I am in a large store well-equipped to do the job, and it’s a lot easier here than somewhere in wilderness of Maine when I discover we really didn’t fix the leak after all. I will check the mileage when I get home, but I think I have only about 6,000 miles on these tires.

So the mechanic mounts two new tires and in an hour we are off again into the darkening skies. About 50 miles (80 km) the temperature rises 10 degrees F but it starts to rain in earnest. Kitty convinces me that it’s time to put on our rain gear so we stop and do the Dance of the Rain Suit as we have done so many times before.

This is a little more complicated because Kitty’s electric suit has to be unplugged and secured, as there is no opening in our one-piece rain suits to allow the cable to connect. So she’ll have to ride the rest of this day without the electric suit that has kept her toasty and warm.

I’d originally sketched out a stop in Campbellton, New Brunswick, just across the provincial border from Quebec province, but since there have been no slow-down backtracking and slow rides through villages for pictures, we arrive early and decide to just keep riding. This will put us out of sync with the places I’ve researched for Internet access and close-by restaurants, but we’ll wing it.

Unlike this morning, because of the undulating coastline, we are now riding into the wind, then quartering to the wind from our left, and I finally decide I’ve had enough of the fierce wind and heavy rain on the slow coastal route (Rt. 134 in New Brunswick), so I duck onto Rt. 11 south to Bathhurst, New Brunswick, where I’ve selected a motel at random using the GPS. The rain is torrential and the wind, now from our left, is seriously affecting the bike’s lean angle on the highway, which has standing water in both right and left tracks, so I have to make an exception and run right down the middle of the highway. Even in this heavy rain, though, the Tulsa windshield is clearing beautifully and visibility is not a problem except for the two seconds after passing oncoming trucks on this two-lane, limited-access route. It takes about two seconds for the windshield to clear after each such adventure.

By shortly after 3:30 PM we reach Bathurst and as we get off the exit, Kitty sees a sign for Atlantic Host Hotel. “It has a restaurant,” she offers.

“Works for me,” I say. Kitty has been on the bike for nearly four hours without a break other than to put on our rain gear. This would have never happened in the old days, and I’m astonished that she’s been completely settled and apparently comfortable during our dash through the driving rain.

We pull in and we are warm and dry in our rain suits and the rain is pouring down and the wind is whipping my flags even while sitting in the parking lot and there’s not even a canopy to unload and I’m wondering if this is a good hotel after all. With the torrential downpour coupled with the vicious wind from the side, this has been one of the most intense 50-mile segments I can remember ever riding with Kitty. We walk dripping into the lobby and I try to communicate with the desk clerk in French, and then realize that in New Brunswick, a truly bilingual province with two official languages, everyone basically speaks English and French. They do have a room, and I say “Ok, now that we know we have a room, I’ll take off my helmet.”

“Hi there!” says Julie, laughing from behind the counter.

“Do you have a shelter for my motorcycle?” I ask Julie.

We haven’t listened to the radio or any other music for a week, but I can’t help but think of Jo Dee Messina and Bring on the Rain:

It’s almost like the hard times circle ‘round

A couple drops and they all start coming down

Yeah, I might feel defeated,

I might hang my head

I might be barely breathing - but I’m not dead

Tomorrow’s another day

And I’m thirsty anyway

So bring on the rain

I’m not gonna let it get me down

I’m not gonna cry

And I’m not gonna lose any sleep tonight

Julie offers their garage for the night, and the manager happily runs out into the pouring rain to unlock the doors. I pull around the back and find a large three-bay garage, heated and dry, into which I pull the Wing and trailer. I’m startled for a second because in the bay next to mine sits a two-tone green 1998 50th Anniversary Honda Gold Wing. It looks exactly like my buddy Ray’s bike, complete with a mascot that looks very much like his Twinken, and my first thought is “How in the world did he know we’d be here?” We’ve found each other in so many other places that it wouldn’t have surprised me. Then with a jolt I’m saddened to realize it’s just a generic bike, not Ray’s bike at all, because Ray has retired and it will never again be his bike that finds me in some place I’d never expect. But what a blessing to have this warm and dry garage to park my bike for the night!

At dinner in the hotel restaurant, I pass up dessert this evening. Last evening at Hotel la Normandie Kitty had a goat cheese appetizer in honor of her brother, Norman, who once raised goats and has a great affinity for goat cheese. However, I won the dessert battle with the maple cheesecake, but have now sworn off desserts for the rest of the trip. Kitty apparently hasn’t, and orders an apple-berry kind of pie. The waitress slyly brings two forks and I have to admit I scarf up a few bites of Kitty’s dessert.

Looking at the Weather Network, it appears there’s a rather stationary rain system that will be in the area for quite a few days, but I think perhaps as we head south tomorrow after our final flirtation with the slow-down coastal roads, we might run out of it. But I expect more rain tomorrow, especially in the morning. The only hard stop for us on this trip is Cook’s Lobster House in Bailey Island, Maine because we just always do that when we’re in New England. We seem to have two major riding options: We can try to make the 580 miles (930 km) to Cook’s in two days and then take three days to ride through the White Mountains and the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire, or we can take three days to get to Cook’s and then take two days to ride the approximately 700 miles (1,125 km) home.

Today’s ride was 358 km (222 miles), for a total of 2,559 km (1,590 miles). Although we've discovered that we crossed into Atlantic Time Zone when we entered New Brunswick and it's an hour later than we thought, Kitty says at the moment she’s in favor of Option 1, Cook’s in two days, so we’ll see how that works out. We’re not finished with the slow roads yet! As most of our tomorrows on this trip, the story of this one will only be revealed as it arrives. We’ll see how it works out.

See you then.

GPS Track Log (Yellow)

Gaspésie Gambol, Day 7

I Am a Rock
Sunday June 28, 2009
Copyright(c) 2009, Jim Beachy

We are in the area called Land’s End and have planned zero riding miles today. As it happened, it has worked out very well for us to be in Percé rather than Gaspé as originally sketched out, although it involved 30 extra miles yesterday riding in extremely dense fog and wet roadway. But Hotel la Normandie is a fine full-service hotel and is within walking distance of the cruise ticket offices, the wharf of Percé, and has direct access to the boardwalk that runs along the sea. And there’s a lot to explore within walking distance should we choose. For a fog-shrouded, misty interlude, we couldn’t have picked a better place.

Days like this, with zero riding miles, are actually quite unusual for us; I believe that last year’s several-day hiatus in Key West was the first time in all our travels that we’ve stayed in the same hotel more than one night. Usually we just ride to see the country and absorb what we can as we explore and research the area we’re in. On this trip, we watched the dramatic skylines of Montreal and Quebec slide by to our left as we kept moving in spite of invitations from several people to help us explore the cities. Generally we aren’t about cities (Kitty’s rules: No snakes, no cities, no traffic), but are all about areas that keep the cities apart. Here at foggy and chilly Land’s End, all of Kitty’s criteria are met.

We have a lazy breakfast. “I can’t imagine there could possibly be a whale-watching cruise,” I tell Kitty. The fog has been relentless and all-encompassing, and it’s hard to imagine it would be any different on the open sea 8 km from land.

But we dutifully walk the several short blocks to the billeterie or ticket office of les Bateliers du Percé to find out. As I expected, the cruise is cancelled. But Slow-Down Guy is in a hanging-out mood today, so we exchange our whale-watching tickets for a $50 refund and a new pass to a cruise to L’Ile Bonaventure, which features the world’s largest nesting colony of northern gannets.

Kitty is not a water-lover, unlike those swimmers we saw yesterday in 65F (18C) temperatures plunging into the frigid waters of the Bay of Saint Lawrence! And she’s definitely not fond of small boats on the open sea, and especially not when fog has closed in and visibility is only a stone’s throw. But she gamely takes her Dramamine an hour before departure, and we clamber aboard the 40-foot boat. It’s a rough ride, and even the park naturalist says it’s “not too good” today.

But we arrive safely, drop some people off at the island, and then circle it once to see the northern gannet colony from the seaward view. We see thousands and thousands of the large white birds lining the cliffs and rocks. Amidst the brooding fog, it’s a spectacular view and we’re glad we made the trip. Kitty has done quite well with her Dramamine kicking in, unlike some others who spent the whole trip hunched over the buckets liberally distributed throughout the boat.

The boat drops us off at the dock and we set out on foot to traverse the island to see the bird colony from the landward side. It’s said that only one-third of the colony is found on the cliffs, the rest on the slopes above. It is those nesting birds we are making the 5.6 km (3.5 mile) round-trip to see. It’s a more arduous walk than we expected, and the path is frequently muddy.

Eventually we can hear the cries of the thousands of birds, and as we approach, the cacophony is deafening. When we are finally able to see the expanse of nesting birds stretching into the distance as far as the fog will allow us to see, it is a stunning, jaw-dropping sight. 120,000 couples, the naturalist tells us, the world’s largest colony of northern gannets (fou du bassan). They will all be gone by September, wintering on the coasts of North Carolina and south to the Gulf of Mexico. They return to the same nest every year for life.



These are large white birds with a delicately colored yellow-orange-brown head and neck. They mate for life and lay one fertilized egg per year. Each nest is basically a small hollowed-out mound in the dirt, and we see many males returning to the nests with huge mouthfuls of plucked grass or seaweed they’ve collected on their journeys. They are constantly engaged in home improvements. Fascinatingly, each nest is the same exact distance from each adjacent nest, all equidistant in every direction. It turns out this distance is exactly the distance beyond the pecking reach of the jealous bird sitting on each adjacent nest, guarding its territory.

The chicks are just now hatching, and as some of the birds exchange roles (the males also take their turn sitting on the nest) or shift positions on the nest, we are able to see the large pale reddish speckled eggs, and some nests already contain a small gray featherless chick. The naturalist tells us that the young birds remain dark even after their plumage comes in because it’s their free ticket to being an extra body within the nest territory. Otherwise, they would be treated as an imposter, attacked, and driven from the nest.

The nearest birds are only a few feet away from us and show no interest or fear. Near the rope that marks their territory from ours, we see a number of birds that don’t have nests. The naturalist tells us this is where new couples meet and form mating relationships. Apparently it’s a kind of gannet singles bar. They become a couple one year but don’t mate and nest until the next year.

After spending probably an hour and a half observing and taking pictures, we walk back across the island, board the hourly cruise back to the dock at Percé, and pick up a few things for the grandkids in the Boutique Natural.

It’s raining and still very foggy, so we decide to eat at the hotel tonight. Slow-Down Guy is so mellow he even convinces me to take a little nap while Kitty launders our muddy clothes. Just before leaving our hotel room, we notice that the fog has receded and the famous rock off shore is suddenly visible for the first time. “It really does exist!” says our next-door neighbor as she, like everyone else, comes out of her hotel room to gaze at the rock or take a picture. We’d learned that it weighs 370 million tons. Which begs the question, just how do you weigh a rock that big? And where do you stop measuring? The waterline? The bottom of the ocean? The center of the earth? Whatever, it’s a truly imposing spectacle and a rewarding moment. I’m glad we have an hour to see Rocher Percé while enjoying our dinner before the fog once again rolls in to protect the monster rock from mortal view.

At the end of dinner, I tell Kitty I don’t want any dessert. I’ve had too many on this trip. When the waitress brings the carte du dessert, of course I immediately order the cheesecake tart with maple sauce, which turns out to be stunningly excellent! Many desserts may have just a hint of maple; this slice of cheesecake is drenched with a buttery sauce made with maple sugar that’s almost caramelized, and maple becomes the dominant flavor of the whole dish. Spectacular with a strong cup of café noir! But no more desserts while we’re in Canada! We still have to eat at Cook’s Lobster House on the way home!

This has been an extremely gratifying zero-mile day and I’m glad we didn’t decide to hit the road when we learned the whale-watching cruise was cancelled. Tomorrow, if the weather deteriorates even further, perhaps we’ll wish we would have made a run for it today, in the fog but with no rain. Meanwhile, we're in a nice hotel listening to the surf crash against the seawall; we have enjoyed this day and will deal with tomorrow as it arrives.

See you then.

Gaspésie Gambol, Day 6

Foggy Mountain Breakdown
Saturday June 27, 2009
Copyright(c) 2009, Jim Beachy

I’m sleeping as late as I possibly can. This is because at 4:00 AM when I got up and looked out the window of our hotel, the fog was so heavy I could not see the cars across the parking lot. So I decided to sleep in, since not only could we not see anything of scenic value, it would be downright dangerous to ride in those conditions.

Everybody has to wake up sometime, and by 8:15 I’m awake. I’m stunned to see that it’s sunny, it’s warm, and the fog has lifted save for a few wisps drifting by the hills behind the hotel. We’ve noticed that all meals here seem much more relaxed compared to our fast-paced lifestyle at home. Food seems to be prepared in leisurely fashion and is savored slowly. Breakfast is no exception. So after another episode of us practicing our French and the same waitress as we had last night practicing her English, it is 10:00 AM when we finally roll eastward out of Ste. Anne-des-Monts on Rt. 132.

The fog and temperatures conspire to play tricks on a traveling motorcycle couple. We start out under sunny skies and warm temperatures, then a mile later find fog drifting in from the sea with temperatures 15 degrees cooler. This route has some rough spots but in general this is a well-graded and well-paved road.

The bay is always on our left, and we pass miles of picturesque shoreline with millions of birds perched on the black rocks that line the shore. With the blue-green sea to the left and rocky cliffs towering above us to the right, the road winds a sinuous path as it skirts the shore and runs along the base of the cliffs. Every little bay seems to have a little village, and sometimes we get off the route to ride through a village or catch a fog-shrouded lighthouse on a hill.

Some of the topography reminds me of the Cape Breton Highlands along the Cabot Trail in Nova Scotia, but a major difference is that this road is flat, running along the sea, while the Cabot Trail runs along the elevations off the mountains and cliffs. All bikers have experienced roads where they are torn between riding and looking; this road is made for looking, as there are few technical challenges in this section between Ste. Anne-des-Monts and Cap Madeleine.

The times when the road does climb away from the sea and over the hills, I’m surprised every time that the temperature increases dramatically, sometimes as much as 15 degrees. I finally conclude that it’s a function of the very cold body of water that generates cold wind, but when we climb the mountains, we find rising instead of falling temperatures because the road is sheltered by the mountain. This happens again and again as we ride eastward.

At Cap Madeleine, where we ride off the highway to a little lighthouse park, things change dramatically. The temperature has dropped to 56F (13C) on my fairing thermometer and the wind whipping around the complex makes it feel much colder. Fog shrouds the seascape but I manage to get a few pictures. For the first time this trip, Kitty decides to put on her “new” electric suit contributed by Ray Smith. After connecting it and making sure it is working, we set out.

In about five minutes, I ask her, “How’s that electric suit working for you?”

“I had to turn it way down,” she says. I’m glad we have it. Thanks, Ray.

About this same time, the road makes a little run for the mountains and before we can even adjust, the temperature skyrockets to 75F (24C). We are tempted to stop and take off layers, but I look at the GPS and see that in about 8 clicks (5 miles) we’ll be once again riding along the shoreline, and if history repeats itself, we’ll be glad we have these layers.

History does repeat itself, and soon we are back into electric-suit temperatures. Fog sets in again and this time it is not the on-again-off-again variety we’ve seen earlier in the trip and today. This time it’s for real, and a light mist covers the windshield as we enter Parc Forillon. The fog is relentless and increasingly intense, and we can catch only very occasional glimpses of the shore that lies only several hundred yards off to our left.

This isn’t exactly what I had in mind in coming here, and I’m sure we are missing some of the best scenery of the trip, but Slow-Down Guy takes it as it comes. We’d planned to spend the afternoon in Parc Forillon, maybe stay in Gaspé or Percé, maybe book one of the many whale-watching cruises available at any of these locations. But with the steady fog and light mist, we decide to simply ride out the afternoon until we arrive in Percé where I’d booked Hotel la Normandie this morning. The last 60 km, 35 miles or so, have been just a little tense because of the winding, hilly road with less that great road surfaces and the intense fog. Thankfully the road isn’t wet for the most part, and we are welcomed in the mist and the cold and the fog by the inviting environs of the Hotel la Normandie at around 4:00 PM.

I call les Bateliers de Percé, one of the many cruises available here, fully expecting them to be closed or certainly not running cruises. Much to my surprise, a very pleasant fellow named Julian answers the phone and says in English that they will have one whale watching cruise tomorrow. So I walk to their pavilion about a half kilometer up the street and book the tickets. I want to practice my French but he insists on speaking English. He insists that tomorrow will be nice and the cruise will run at 11:00 AM as scheduled, or if not, our money will be refunded. We shall see about all that.

Now here we sit in the coin-operated laundry at an adjacent hotel doing laundry for the first time this trip. Kitty is reading and I’m writing, a familiar scenario on our trips and especially while doing laundry.

Today we have ridden a fog-intensified 315 km (196 miles) for a total of 2201 km (1,368 miles). Tomorrow we hope to see les baleines on our little cruise, and I think we’ll probably stay at the same hotel tomorrow night since Slow-Down Guy packed about 6 days of riding into 14 days. For some reason the pleasant (English-speaking) hotel clerk upgraded our room at no charge to one facing the sea. We can hear the sea crashing against the seawall that has been build all along Percé, and off the shore lies the spectacular Rocher Percé, (literally, “pierced rock”), one of the major landmarks of this area… except that all we see is a blank wall of gray fog that begins a hundred yards from the hotel room.

Tomorrow will reveal much more about our plans than we know today. See you then.

GPS Track Log, Day 6 (Yellow)

Gaspésie Gambol, Day 5

Old Man River
Friday June 26, 2009
Copyright(c) 2009, Jim Beachy

In the town of Rivière du Loup, River of the Wolfe, a foggy dawn has birthed a ghostly gray morning that appears vaguely out of focus as shapeless banks of fog drift silently past the hotel window, sometimes obscuring the brightly-colored buildings across the street, other times rendering them in water-color pastel shades of blue and red.

I actually don’t mind fog, and some of our most rewarding experiences have been surprises offered to us by a fog-shrouded day. But this day, I’d like to see some of the mighty St. Lawrence River, and with this fog I’d be lucky to see the guardrails on the far side of the road. So we make lazy once again, hang out for a while, and finally the fog begins to lift and we roll at a little after 10:30 AM.

The river is always to our left as we head east, practicing our new French vocabulary in our headsets. Our vocabulary is growing little by little every day. (They tell me I have a credible rendition of “Rivière du Loup.) This is quite necessary because the available number of English words spoken by the people we meet diminishes with each kilometer farther from the big cities of Montreal and Quebec, so we must balance that with an increasing number of French words spoken by us. The people are friendly and laugh with us at our attempts to communicate, and we have a good time with the language. It’s a barrier only in the sense of easy communication, but never in the sense of enjoying the interpersonal interaction with the people we meet. In the visitor centers (Information Touristique) where we stop, they always speak English much better than we speak French, but when we talk to other bikers, we sometimes have to resort to pulling out maps and pointing. Yes, I still do carry a map although I generally never use it because I have the GPS.

It’s a bit chilly this morning, about 61F (16C) as we ride in and out of fog banks that mysteriously appear and disappear off the river. Sometimes the gray fog recedes off the banks and lies offshore like a giant white blanket thrown aside and rumpled as though by someone just getting out of bed. When the fog is off the shore, bright blue sky appears through the wisps that escape landward. I’m just a little disappointed that we can’t see more of the expanse of water, but the fog does create quite a picturesque rugged coastline. The tide appears to be out and we can see large expanses of exposed shoreline that presumably will be covered later today when the tide returns.

I have mapped several interesting potential stopping points today, but Slow-Down Guy is in evidence, and we wander slowly and stop often to take pictures, explore a visitor center, or walk to the shore to explore whatever we find there. Several times we get off the highway and ride through the villages to take pictures and enjoy the well-kept, brightly colored, neatly trimmed homes, and marvel at the architecture of the village church with its giant single or double spires. By the time afternoon rolls around, we still have 140 km (almost 90 miles) left until we reach Ste. Anne-des-Monts where we have tentatively penciled in a stopping point. Slow-Down Guy doesn’t really care if he makes it to that destination, but as it happens, the timing and the availability of accommodations more or less dictate that as a stopping point.

We have been watching in fascination all day as the topography demonstrates slow metamorphosis from massive expanses of flat, fertile farmland that to hills that slowly creep closer and closer to Rt. 132 where we are traveling. Finally there is no farmland, only the hills and trees, and we see glimpses of our first sea cliffs as we round the curves. We have definitely made the transition to Haute Gaspésie! Just about then the fog, which has never really left us all day, returns in earnest, and we ride the last 30 miles (18 km) or so entombed in a relentless dark gray shroud that, while rarely causing difficulty in seeing the road, nevertheless obscures any scenery we might otherwise be able to see.

It has not rained on us since we left home, but we narrowly escape at least one local rain squall and ride through some wet pavement; the fog is heavy enough that water is dripping off the mirrors and collecting in droplets on the big Tulsa windshield.

We arrive in Ste. Anne-des-Monts by about 5:30 PM, find a small hotel with a full-service restaurant (Hotel a la Brunante) and I wash the road grime off the bike and trailer and cover the bike. I’ll leave the trailer uncovered tonight because a light rain has started to fall and putting the cover on the trailer in the rain is worse than leaving it uncovered.

In the restaurant, the waitress speaks no English, but we have a great time practicing our meager French and figuring out what we are ordering. We seem to have ordered at just the same time as a private group of about a dozen people. The somewhat harried waitress comes over and offers what we think is an apology for the wait, and we do our best to reassure her, but dinner turns out to be a leisurely affair. Quite leisurely. We sit and talk while watching the other patrons. It strikes me that, although we can understand only small snatches of what anyone is saying, their facial expressions, laughter, body language, and vocal inflections are the same as in any restaurant we’ve been, anywhere we’ve been. It’s gratifying to realize so forcefully that a smile is the same in any language! Let’s use it often!

I check the GPS and we are, by 150 miles, farther north than we have ever been, farther north than our previous excursions to Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island or the northern tip of Maine. Today we’ve traveled a slow-down 299 km (186) miles, and 1,886 km (1,172 miles) total for the trip. I find daily amusement in how few miles we are traveling. I do believe this is probably the lowest daily total for any trip we’ve ever taken. But I’ve become pretty good friends with Slow-Down Guy and we are doing well! We’ll travel a little farther north tomorrow but mostly east, and then begin heading south. We might hang out for a few days in the same area after tomorrow’s travels, maybe do a little whale watching around Gaspé or Percé, but only tomorrow knows the plans that will be made or changed.

We’ll see you then.

Gaspesie Gambol, Day 4

Wolf River
Thursday June 25, 2009
Copyright(c) 2009, Jim Beachy

We have another lazy start, rolling out at 9:30 under partly sunny skies and temperatures that are much warmer than I expected this far north, nearly 80F (27C). Slow-Down Guy just doesn’t seem to care that it’s two hours later than the usual start. We head east on Aut-20, which for practical purposes is like a US Interstate, through vast flatlands of rich crop farmland. Some fields have freshly upturned soil, incredibly black and vibrant in the morning sun. The horizon seems endlessly far away in every direction, and our meager progress at the posted limit of 100 kph (about 62 mph) seems ineffective in reaching the limits of what we can see. Slow-Down Guy runs the speed limit, and I am surprised that many of the Quebec drivers are similarly inclined. When I see Quebec license plates in the State, I usually figure they are running 15 mph over whatever the posted speed limit happens to be, but that is not the case this morning. I don’t know about Canadian law enforcement’s attitude toward running over the speed limit, and they are out in force this morning.

After about 48 km (30 mi) I say “I think we’ve seen all there is to see along this road. Let’s duck off and find a road near the river.” The mighty Saint Lawrence Seaway has been on our left all morning, and so we find a way to Trois Rivières and wander eastward on Rt 132, which will be our primary route for the circuit around the Gaspésie. This road is a bit rough in stretches, especially within the little towns, but other than that it’s a nice slow-down road that mostly follows the great river to our left. At times we can see the great expanses of the valley on both sides of the river, a massive carpet of verdant farmland sloping gently on both sides down to the river.

We stop in a few small quaint towns just to take a look or take a picture or two. The architecture of churches in particular is unique in this region: Most of these centuries-old structures are constructed of grayish-white stone feature two giant spires, sometimes seemingly incongruous with the size of the building, and many of them have red doors. Often these spires are the predominant feature of a town as we approach, visible through the trees long before there’s any other evidence of a settlement.

At one curve in the road we are startled by a field of brilliant fluorescent yellow in a sea of green farming country. We stop for a picture and conclude it’s probably canola. Canola, one of whose chief uses is for cooking oil, is produced from the rapeseed plant. Due to its unfortunate name, “canola” was a new name crafted in 1978, originating from the phrase “Canadian oil, low acid.” I remember huge fields of it in Idaho amongst the potatoes, but I guess since it has Canada in its name, it’s logical that it be grown in Canada. We see many other fields of the same but whose blooming stage is less advanced and thus the distinctive yellow is just beginning to appear.

We continue our northeast meandering with the Saint Lawrence to our left. Even this close to its origin, this is a huge river. From our vantage point looking south-to-north, the north coast looks to be much more populated than our southern coast, and we ride along many miles of shoreline that feature a headland

“My overdrive indicator light just went out,” I tell Kitty.

She wonders if that’s a problem or if I can replace it without dismantling the fairing. No, it’s not a problem, and I think I have some spare bulbs in my stash of such stuff, and I replaced it once without dismantling the fairing. It’s possible if you have small hands.

Then I notice the fuel gauge and temperature gauge are not working either and I conclude it’s a fuse. On a Gold Wing, the various components affected by a given fuse are baffling, so not knowing what else might be affected, we pull over and sure enough, I find a blown 15A fuse for “Tail and Position Lights.” Most times, a fuse failure is just that, a fuse failure. But they are there for a reason, and sometimes there really is a short in the electrical system that causes the failure. I turn on the bike, holding my breath that everything will work, and it does, no apparent electrical problem.

Later, we see a giant “honey wagon” spreading liquid manure onto one of the fields to our left, between us and the great river. I’ve never seen a honey wagon this big: It is a green monster, a tractor-trailer in fact, with a tank nearly as large as a standard fuel tanker truck you’d see on the highway. Three huge arms project from this thing one to each side and one out the back. Attached to the arms are giant rotors rather like helicopter blades, spinning slowly. Attached to these rotors are nozzles that are spraying tons of the putrid contents liberally onto the field, turning the green field dark and leaving a broad black swath in its wake.

“I bet that smells really, really good,” says Kitty. We smell nothing out of the ordinary.

And then suddenly, as the wind shifts, or we ride into the downstream wind current, the odor is so stunningly overpowering as to defy description. We’ve smelled 40,000 sheep in a sheep enclosure in Wyoming, smelled 50,000 head of cattle in a North Dakota stockyard, and growing up in the country I’ve smelled the fields after the farmers clean out their pig pens. But I will tell you that I have never smelled anything like this. This is overpowering, gasping-for-air, throat-constricting, breath-stopping, awful.

“I know one town that’s going to be eating out in some other town tonight,” I tell Kitty in the headset.

Ten minutes later, Kitty says “I can still smell that stuff in my helmet.”

About 50 km (30 miles) from our destination, we witness one of the most unusual phenomena we’ve encountered. The temperature has been over 85F (30C) and in the space of five miles it plummets to 65F (18F). I’ve seen temperature shifts of that magnitude associated with severe weather patterns or a sudden climb in altitude, but never on flatland without an associated severe weather pattern. Apparently we are out of the heat belt!

We reach Rivière du Loup, River of the Wolf, some time after 5:00 PM. We learn that the name is derived not actually from a wolf, but from a long-ago incident when a pirate crew sailed into an Indian settlement here to escape American capture. There ensued four days of great revelry and great hospitality until the pirates made the mistake of carrying off the intended maiden of Lone Wolf, the heir apparent to the chief’s position. It turned really ugly after that and things were never quite the same in Rivière du Loup. But things seem to have settled down in the intervening years and the town seems quite normal.

After a brisk power-walk with Kitty, she’s helping me clean and cover the bike when I notice a small section of exposed copper wire in the trailer wiring harness, the part that extends from the bike to connect to the trailer pigtail. I’d redressed my wiring harness last fall, and apparently did something that lets the pigtail slide down and expose more of the cable than I’d like. Apparently it rubbed through the insulation against the plastic. Hmmm… what are the chances of a coincidental fuse failure that involves the taillights, and finding an exposed wire, all on the same day? Not high, I’d guess, although there’s no apparent metal that the wire could have contacted, just plastic. I’ll never know.

Kitty looks for my electrical tape to make a quick repair, and it’s nowhere to be found. I always carry electrical tape in my trunk but must have absentmindedly put it back in my toolbox when I was working on the bike recently. We ask the hotel staff where we could find some, and they tell us about Canadian Tire, probably a 2-km walk. We walk to the place, retrieve some electrical tape and wiring in case I have to splice something together. I peel apart the insulation and make the repair; only one wire in the harness has exposed copper, so I carefully dress it as best as I can, liberally wrap it with electrical tape, and we should be good to go.

We have a great dinner at a restaurant within walking distance, entertained by a charming waitress whose English just about matches my French, so we have an interesting time asking each other about words and how to pronounce them. I have a secret plan that by the next time I come to Canada, eh, I will be able to carry on a decent conversation in French. I’m a little embarrassed to have so little French at my disposal.

We’ve ridden 395 km (245 miles) today, 1587 km (986 miles) today. Fog and rain are moving in tonight across the river, so we will see what the morning holds.

See you then.

Track Log, Day 4

Gaspesie Gambol, Day 3

O, Canada!
Wednesday June 24, 2009
Copyright(c) 2009, Jim Beachy

I am floating effortlessly and peacefully in a soft puffy white cloud that somehow supports my weight although it has no mass of its own, and slowly become aware of a shadow falling across my upturned face. I struggle to make out what it is, and finally realize it is Kitty standing next to the bed saying something that sounds a lot like “Are you going to get up today?”

I struggle awake and glance at the bedside clock. 8:17 AM! I thought we’d be rolling by this time. “Can we be on the road by nine?” I ask in confusion.

“I thought we weren’t in a hurry,” says Kitty, an ocean of calm in the face of my agitation. Oh, that’s right, I forgot: we really aren’t in a hurry, and today it’s not a disaster to oversleep. Well, this has been the best night of sleep I’ve had for some time, and after I calm down I realize that she is right, we really don’t have to hurry. Even if we don’t make the 220 miles I’ve roughly sketched out for today, we have plenty of time to make it up and we have no hard points in the trip. We finally roll out at 10:00 AM. Kitty has put our passports into her purse in the bike’s trunk, and we set off for Canada via the slow road.

We veer right on Route 9N out of Lake George and head north along the lake. Greg and George had recommended this last night as a possible route. It was great to see them last night. They knew we were in Lake George because I’d posted a mini-message to the WOTI message board. George and I had met once or twice before; “Somewhere in Texas or Florida or Maine,” he said, or maybe it was right here in Lake George at Americade. Neither of us could remember. I’d ridden with Greg, joining up with him and some other folks for a ride to the WOTI Alamo Run near San Antonio, Texas. Under my helmet is a wry smile as I recall the next day’s ill-fated event that will follow me as long as I ride. After dropping the rest of our group for the night in Austin, Greg and I had arrived safely in Kerrville, Texas, in the dead of a deer-infested night after a 600-mile day, and the next morning we were rousted by a group of WOTI friends eager for us to ride the Texas Hill Country with them. Out of sync with the rest of the bikes’ fuel tanks and in a hurry not to hinder the rest of the group, it was in Leakey, Texas that I filled my Wing’s fuel tank with diesel fuel! And thus will I never escape the ignominious title of “Diesel Boi.” I am now and will be forever greeted as “Diesel Boi” whenever anyone from WOTI sees me, frequently accompanied by sniffing noses and wondering if anyone else smells diesel fuel.

9N generally follows the lakeshore, but wanders off to the west at Westport, and we choose Route 22, proceeding northward to join the shores of Lake Champlain. This is a nice if unspectacular road with minimal traffic today.

We run sedately through the curves, up and down the hills, skirting the shore and then ducking away into the hills. There is one eight-mile rough stretch that requires some serious slow-down. But this is not a problem today, as I sense the emergence of a new person I’m just learning to know: Slow-Down Guy. Unlike Solo Guy, with whom I’m most familiar and who has a definite need for speed — lots of it for many hours! — Slow-Down Guy would never set cruise above the speed limit. In fact, if 55 mph is good, 50 mph is better. Slow-Down Guy makes it up as he goes, not to worry if there’s no plan, no magenta GPS track, no guiding GPS voice from American Jill announcing the next turn. Slow-Down Guy barely uses the routing feature of the GPS. And he is quite content to let the miles and the hours play out as they may, the destination a moving target that ceases to be important; the destination is wherever the day happens to end. I actually think I’m starting to like this guy.

I’m wearing my T-shirt with the inscription “If you ain’t the lead dog, the scenery never changes.” I’m not the lead dog, don’t even think of myself as one of the big dogs, but today we find plenty of ever-changing scenery as we wander along the shores of Lake George and Lake Champlain, ever northward toward Canada. Across the expanse of the lake we can see Vermont’s Green Mountains, hiding the even mightier White Mountains lying still farther to the east in New Hampshire. From many miles away and across the lake, the mountains still look somehow regal with dark cloud-crowns that wreath the tops of the tallest peaks.

I think back over the trip so far and think of an email I got last night from Wes St Onge, another WOTI friend that I don’t think I’ve met in person. He said that yesterday he saw a black Wing and trailer with two people taking pictures of the old locomotives near his home and thought it might be us but then abandoned the thought. I checked our GPS log and yes, Wes, that would have been us at Cooperstown Junction taking pictures of the “GG1’s”. Sorry we missed you yesterday!

Somewhere along this route we stop at an overlook for some pictures and talk for a while to a biker named Brian, from Quebec City. He comments that today is Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, the National Holiday of Quebec, celebrated annually on June 24. As nearly as I can figure out from a quick Google search on my BlackBerry, St. Jean-Baptiste is the patron saint of all French Canadians, so it’s probably good to have a holiday in honor of John the Baptist. I’m sure most citizens of Quebec will find something considerably better to feast upon than locusts and wild honey. Humble apologies to my excellent French Canadian friends if I got it wrong. Leo, Lenny, Furface, Joe Drummond and others — I know you’re out there and won’t be shy in correcting me!

Given this newfound information, I’m just a little concerned about not having any reservations, although from what I can tell in talking to Brian, the day prior is actually the big day of celebrating and fireworks. So at a rest stop filled with an inch or more of soft cotton-like castoff from a grove of cottonwood trees (which I think of as a southern tree but various subspecies occur all over the US and even Canada), I call ahead to a hotel; between the little French I can muster and the clerk’s considerably better attempt at English, we figure out that there will not be a problem with rooms tonight.

North of the town of Au Sable, in a dramatic shift of topography, the hills give way to vast expanses of flat land that is relentless until we stop for the day. There’s a whole lot of farming going on here!

Soon we cross the border into Canada. I’d prepared for an hour to cross the border but in fact it takes about 10 minutes. “Are you meeting anyone in Gaspe?” asks the agent. “Hooking up with a group or anything? No? That’s a long way to ride your motorcycle. You’ve done your homework? Know how far that is?”

“Well,” I say, “we’ve been pretty much all over on our motorcycle. This trip is about 3,000 miles home-to-home.” After entering our license plate number and scanning our US passports (now required to travel between the US and Canada), he seems satisfied and tells us to have a nice trip.

Later, Kitty is talking about how surprised he seemed that we were riding all that distance.

“I don’t think so,” I replied. “I think he just wanted to see if we were legit, if we actually had a clue about what we’d just said we were going to do, and weren’t just making something up. You never know what’s behind those questions they ask.”

“And now,” I say, “We’re officially in Canada. I’ve already set the GPS to read metric units instead of statute miles. The most important decision is now yours to make: What GPS voice will we use?”

Kitty mulls this over for a while. “Do you have a French girl?” she asks.

“Well, uh, er, no, I don’t, actually. But I do have a French text-to-speech voice in the GPS.” So I select “French Europeen-Virginie 1.50” and the GPS reboots. Now we have a completely exotic but to my untrained ears, completely incomprehensible GPS guide. French Virginie issues a number of instructions for which I can find no common ground between the speech and the text on the GPS screen.

“I think you’d better choose someone you can understand,” says Kitty, always helpful.

“Ok, you choose,” I say. “Remember that I also have Hungarian.” Secretly, I am hoping that this time Kitty opts for Australian Karen (who is a real Australian person with a real website – http://www.karenjacobsen.com), but eventually she selects, as we did on our last trip to Nova Scotia, British Emily 1.50. So a female British voice it shall be that guides us as we traverse the shores of the Saint Lawrence Seaway and beyond.

Slow-Down Guy is ready for his day to end just before 5:00 PM, so we check in to a hotel in Drummondville. After an excellent meal artfully presented and perfectly prepared at la Verrière Restaurant in the hotel (which I actually learn to pronounce and the waitress says I’m doing a good job), we ask the English-speaking hotel clerk if there’s an ATM within walking distance. She gives us directions and after a several-block walk we find the CIBC ATM and withdraw some using with our ATM card. This is a great way to get cash, because the exchange rate is figured into to withdrawal automatically. So for every Canadian dollar the machine spits out, our account is debited, as of today, about 86 cents.

Today we have traveled 369 km (229 miles), and 1189 km (739 miles) for the trip so far. I will need to spend a little time tomorrow morning reviewing the trip parameters and remembering the location of the special points of interest I’ve discovered in my research.

So tomorrow promises to be another day in the life of the newly-discovered Slow-Down Guy. We’ll see you then.

Track Log, Day 3

Gaspésie Gambol, Day 2

New York, New York!
Tuesday June 23, 2009
Copyright(c) 2009, Jim Beachy

Another lazy sleep-in day because we have an appointment at 9:30 AM at Binghamton Honda, just minutes from our hotel, so Frank can look at my cruise control problem.

Kitty packs up our drinking water in the cooler, ice-cold bottles of water that have been immersed in an ice bath all night. By giving them a new ice bath in the morning, we always have ice-cold drinking water. Kitty will sip on cold water all day, while I will down a bottle periodically at rest stops.
Binghamton Honda is just across the river from our hotel, but it’s a 6-mile ride to get from one place to the other. I suppose it’s the confluence of river and mountains, but this town has the most fascinatingly bizarre intersections and service roads I remember seeing. We arrive a little before 9:30 AM, unhook the trailer, and Frank goes to work while we sit outside and Kitty reads her book.

In less than an hour Frank comes back and says “I think your diagnosis was dead accurate. I took apart and cleaned the cruise control switch. It was pretty cruddy and not very eager to light up my test lamp when I tested it.” So by 11:00 AM we are headed out, and for now my cruise control is working as we head in the general direction of Lake George, NY. Frank did us a great favor by working us into the schedule, and I ask permission to put in a good word for him and the shop. He certainly did right by us! Incidentally, he is looking for a pulse generator for 1200 Limited Edition (was that a 1985?) that apparently has been discontinued by Honda. Anybody out there who knows where to get one?

After about 40 miles on I-88 headed east toward Albany, I decide I really want to get off the Interstate. NY 7 parallels the Interstate between Binghamton and Albany; I think I rode this once, or at least part of it, many years ago, before I-88 was completed. I remember having what I believe was my first A&W root beer at a little stand along this road, and to this day I wander I-88 looking for that root beer stand. I haven’t found it. It’s probably a parking lot now. Route 7 turns out to be the perfect choice for this slow-down day, and I set cruise exactly on the speed limit. This is, I have to admit, not quite always the case. Some days I’m trapped in a hurry-up mode on a slow-down road, other days I’m in a slow-down mode but have a destination to make, but today is a perfect example of “All those who wander are not lost.”

Route 7 is a non-technical but winding road that runs roughly along the Susquehanna River as it meanders through the mountains at about 1200 feet above sea level. It’s a beautiful ride, with towns small enough to add interest but not big enough to be a hindrance. For someone who loves arts and crafts and quaint little shops, this road could be a three-day ride! Unadilla, Otego, Oneonta, and many other towns are all filled with quaint shops, restaurants, and crafts establishments.

“Do you want to stop at some of these places?” I ask Kitty.

She responds with a decisive “No.”

“Why not?” I ask. “At home, you’re all over shops like this, but why not while traveling?”

“Well,” she replies, “Because we’re traveling!” I scratch my head at this logic — actually, it’s a virtual scratch, because I’m wearing a helmet. We usually don’t really look for a lot of things to do while traveling. Mostly we ride to enjoy what’s there — doing what’s to be done there, well, usually, not so much.

I decide to get back on I-88 for a few exits to bypass the town of Oneonta. But in a perverse twist of fate, I’m too late, and by the time I find the next entrance to the Interstate, we have nearly passed through the town and it’s a moot point.


A few miles out of town I am startled by the sight of an old, apparently abandoned locomotive. A sign appropriately enough, reads “Dead End.” We talk for a while with the man who lives on the corner, Mike. “There are only three of those engines in the world, he says, “and right here are two of them.” It turns out they are apparently relics of the true electric train era, where the electric power was supplied by huge batteries instead of current locomotives that use diesel. "They are going into the Smithsonian," Mike explains.

"So when we go visit them in three years," I tell Kitty, "we'll know exactly where they came from!"

“This road will be the demise of those rubber extrusion thingies on the tires,” I tell Kitty. “These curves will bring them to a swift end.” At Cobleskill we stop in a little park to eat our small picnic lunch, and I inspect the front tire. Sure enough, the rubber thingies are gone at 416 miles into the trip, save for some survivors along the edges of the tire.

Route 7 has been the perfect ride for a perfect day, and I decide to bypass Albany by finding some other routes. This is called making it up as you go! But I wait too long to find an alternate route, and when I find a waypoint on Route 50 that I can use for the GPS to bypass Albany, it is once again too late. The GPS generates an insanely complicated route. “This will be complicated,” I tell Kitty, “and I have no idea where I’m going.” We’re in the town of Scotia, New York before I know it, and then we’re on Route 50 and two-lane roads that are not bad, but the congestion is too much for me to really enjoy. In an ironic twist, I think I should have stayed on the Interstate. In slow-down, make-it-up kind of touring, not every choice gets a gold star.

Nevertheless, after a short day in which I did not cruise above the speed limit, we get to Lake George around 5:00 PM and I route to a motel I remember. But it’s the wrong one, so we ride around trying to find the one I want, but it has changed names I recognize it by the roof line. We check in and inexplicably the clerk upgrades us to one of their best suites at no extra charge. I’m pretty sure this will be the nicest place we stay in during the whole trip!

After we do our workout in the motel’s gym, I clean and cover the bike (yes, I still do that every evening!) and we walk together to the Gold Post Grille, attached to the motel, for dinner. Kitty is looking good in a nice-jeans, nice-shirt, cool-spiky-hair, really-friendly biker chick kind of way, while I’m slumming it in my sneakers and an old pair of cutoffs, wearing a T-shirt given to me by my boss: “If you ain’t the lead dog, the scenery never changes.”

I have my BlackBerry in silent mode during this trip, but I glance it and notice the red light blinking. It’s an email from Greg DeNoyer, a WOTI (Wings on the Internet) friend with whom I’ve ridden some thousands of miles: “George Hockousen and I are in Lake George right now!” I fire back an email telling him where we are, and about 20 minutes later, in walk Greg and George in person. Mostly we know each other from the WOTI newsgroup but we've run into each a time or to before, but not for a long time. They have a seat while Kitty and I finish eating, then Greg takes us all to Martha’s for ice cream. Everyone who comes to Lake George has to go to Martha’s for ice cream, and it is just as I remembered it: dozens of people lined up for their ice cream sundaes, banana splits, and ice cream cones. We have a great time renewing our acquaintance and talking about the various interesting ways to ride from Lake George into Canada, where we plan to be riding tomorrow. What a surprise to run into two of my friends here!

We rode only 193 miles today, 509 for trip total, but what great day of stretch-out-the-miles, slow-down touring this was. Next time, I will look sooner for alternate routes to avoid Albany.

Tomorrow if all goes as planned we will cross into Canada, eh? Now just where did we put those passports?

We will learn what tomorrow holds when it arrives.

GPS Track, Day 2

Gaspésie Gambol, Day 1

Start Me Up
Monday, June 22, 2009
Copyright(c) 2009, Jim Beachy

“And there we go.” It’s always magic. Those of you have traveled with us before know the routine: I get on the bike first, turn on the engine or the accessory key and plug in my headset, then Kitty slides into the pillion seat, connects her headset, and says those three magic words that are the key to whatever we want them to be. She does it every time. Just start me up.

We’ve slept in this lazy beautiful morning and it’s just a few minutes after 9 when we finally roll out the driveway and up the street. We are headed northward and will travel as far (or not) as we feel like traveling. Binghamton, New York, an easy 300 miles away, is a potential but not mandatory destination. We have about three days to make the 700 miles to the gateway to Gaspe, and even that has some free time. This whole trip promises to be a lazy-day ride, one day after the other.

I contemplate various routes to occupy the first 30 miles or so of our trip. “Which way do you want to go to Leesburg?” I ask Kitty in the headset. “We could go up 28 past Dulles or we could take some back roads.”

“I’m with you!” she says.

“Nope, this is going to be your decision,” I insist. We haven’t traveled 100 feet and already we can’t decide where to go. That’s because, apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien, “Not all those who wander are lost.” Because sometimes you just don’t care!

“Not past Dulles Airport,” Kitty says decisively, and just like that, our trip starts out on back roads a few miles from our house, heading more or less northward.

Motorcycling is different from normal vehicle travel. A normal trip seeks to minimize the time between points of interest. A motorcycle trip seeks to maximize the journey; the destination becomes secondary and sometimes downright unimportant. My sailing friends who are also bikers say some aspects are a lot like a sailing trip. There are exacting details that must be exquisitely cared for, lest the experience turn on you and consume you in an instant. But the rewards are stupendous. I often think of the Chinese proverb, “The journey is the reward.” For me this is never truer than on my motorcycle. The senses are alive, attuned to the ride and the rider; the bike and its riders and the experience are fused into something that becomes a part of the greater whole. We are more than those interlopers we might see running amok through the scene, desperate to get to the next vantage point wherever it may be, thus failing to appreciate the extraordinary beauty of each moment.

Just start me up! And let me live in each wonderful moment!

We head north on US 15 to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where eventually pick up I-81 north. Some of you will remember Kitty’s three trip rules: No snakes, no cities, no traffic. It strikes me that, only 120 miles from home, we come close to violating two of her rules.

“Well, at least it’s not rush hour,” she says, giving me a pass as we circle around the southern side of Harrisburg.

Our first break is more than two hours later. Some time ago Kitty lost a good bit of weight as we’ve tried to live a healthier lifestyle. This has had the effect of doubling her time in the saddle without breaks. Now, if the temperature is moderate, we frequently ride for hours without stopping, sometimes riding tank-to-tank.

An elderly couple (elderly, I say, because they are older than I) meet us as we walk into the 7-Eleven. “Be safe!” the woman says, smiling. It occurs to me that no elderly ladies talk to me when I’m on a Solo Guy run. And now that I think of it, actually, young ladies don’t talk to me either. Kitty softens the image, and somehow they instinctively know it’s Ok to talk to us. And when we travel together, moms with kids, kids with dogs, dads with moms, all want to come up and talk to the biker couple.

We stay on I-81 after our lunch break and, held hostage by my lazy-day mantra, I inexplicably set cruise just at the speed limit. I think about my new Michelin tires. I’ve been monitoring those little rubber thingies that remain from the rubber extrusion process, just because I want to know how long they last. At 150 miles, 200 miles, they are still hanging.

And I love these tires! Kitty even notices that they are much quieter, and they feel very secure and stable in both sharp curves and sweepers. Ray, my friend, I know you are out there reading this, and thanks for the recommendation! Of course I don’t know how long they’ll last, but as a ride, they really hit my sweet spot.

Shortly before pulling in to a rest area for one last quick break, the speed limit changes and when I try to re engage cruise control, it won’t engage. This happened once earlier today and I fiddled with all the controls that have cruise interlock switches and it started working again. But not this time. I ride the last 10 miles to the rest area without cruise and contemplate what to do.

This isn’t a show stopper, but I’d sure miss having cruise control. I remember a ride just after completing a 48-hour coast-to-coast run with Ray: just after we finished, my speedometer cable broke (which kills the cruise control function) and I rode the 750 miles from Jacksonville, Florida to my home without cruise, using the GPS as my speedometer. I’d hate to do that again.

I pull out my Gold Wing Road Rider’s Association Gold Book and find a dealer in Binghamton. I talk to Frank, the service manager, about what might cause the problem and he says he can look at the bike tomorrow morning. I decide to ride to the shop this evening and talk to him. During the last 40 miles, cruise control starts working again. I test all the interlock switches: left-side clutch, right-side hand brake, foot brake, and throttle, going on and off cruise so often that I envision poor Kitty getting seasick. I conclude that the problem is likely the switch itself, because once engaged, cruise function is normal and none of the interlock switches cause a failure. It always reengages when clicking the “Resume” switch. Frank agrees with me when I describe my diagnosis. I’ll have the bike back to his shop at 9:30 AM tomorrow and he’ll take a look, if only to clean the contacts in the switch.

I laugh as we load out our bags at the hotel we’ve found. How can two bikers need that much luggage? As I once told our son, “We are the people I warned us about.”

Doing our workout in the hotel gym, I'm horrified to see on CNN that there has been a terrible Metro train crash back home in Washington, DC. Many of my company's employees commute on the Red Line including people from my team. I fire off some emails from my BlackBerry but get no responses, then finally a BlackBerry Messenger message from my friend and colleague Christie to the effect that she doesn't believe any employees from our company were injured. Even so, that doesn't minimize the shock and loss to the families of those involved. This makes a cruise control problem see rather trivial.

Well, every day is an adventure. Today’s adventure was yesterday’s tomorrow, and in similar fashion, tomorrow is today’s future. We’ll see what tomorrow holds and whether I will have cruise control for the remainder of the trip.

Meanwhile, those little rubber thingies on the tires are still hanging on at 316 miles!

We’ll let you know about tomorrow as it finds us.

GPS Track for Day 1