Key West or Bust, Day 6

Coping With Destinations
Friday May 16, 2008

This morning is a sleep-in morning but the alarm from my wrist watch sounds at 6:30. Not because I want it to, but because after several failures I apparently got it working and now I keep forgetting to turn it off!

Yesterday in browsing through a booklet at the motel, Kitty happened to see an entry about the Redland Fruit and Spice Park, a one-of-a-kind experimental park with exotic plants from around the world. We’d decided to check it out, and it doesn’t open until 10:00 AM according to the brochure.

I make sure the GPS logs are reset for the day. The unit has four independent mileage logs. I have one set to record all miles the GPS travels, one is unused at the moment, one is for our entire Key West trip, and one is a daily log that I reset every day. The trip log reads 1,253 miles. Kitty notes this and says, “This must be a low-mileage record. I don’t remember ever being on the road for five days and traveling only 1,253 miles.” I think she’s right, and at the same time I am amused at our next-door motel neighbors who are in near disbelief first, that we would actually ride the bike to Key West instead of trailering it there, and second, that we’ve traveled the vast distance of 1,253 miles in just five days! I don’t bother to tell them that I’ve traveled farther than that in just 24 hours, or twice that in less than 50 hours.

So it’s off to the Redland Fruit and Spice Park, perhaps just to prove to ourselves that we actually can do something on a trip except ride. The GPS has a point of interest for the park, so I route to it. Jill seems to have recovered and the unit is operating normally. (I spent some time last night poking around in several GPS newsgroups that I frequent, and it seems there was some unusual sunspot activity plus the sun and satellite positions were in an unusual array, so I now postulate that the weird behavior I saw yesterday morning may well have been to do sunspot and satellite anomalies.)

Arriving at the Redland Fruit and Spice Park, we find we have stumbled into the middle of the International Orchid Festival. People from all over the world come to this thing. Who knew there was so much to know and so much to-do about orchids? It is quite amazing. We see a hundred different types of orchids, none of which I would have recognized as an orchid. We walk around among the various exotic trees from around the world and marvel at some of the strange fruits they bear!

Sometime after 11:00 AM we head southward on US 1 toward Key West, some 125 miles and about three hours away. Traffic is moderate but moving at least at the speed limit, which is generally 45 with occasional stretches of 50 or 55 mph speed limits. The Overseas Highway in Key Largo starts out as a nondescript tree-lined, two-lane road with heavy traffic, but the scenery improves as we travel toward Key West. Kitty marvels at the mottled hues of the turquoise waters of the Atlantic Ocean on the left and the Gulf of Mexico on the right. Dark green islands in the distance appear to be floating on a paler sea of green. The elevated bridges offer spectacular panoramic views of the green water on which sails of ships large and small can be seen silhouetted against the blue sky.

And thus to Key West, Milepost 0 by any standard. We have reached our destination under cloudless skies and moderate temperatures of about 86 F. And it is strange, because we are not destination travelers. We are in it for the travel, hardly ever for the destination. But here we are, and we have to figure out how to cope with a destination. What does anyone do with a destination? What do we do with one?

Once again feeling very conspicuous in our long jeans and motorcycle boots (the desk clerk says "It's Ok -- we can tell you're on a motorcycle"), we check into the Eden House hotel where I've made reservations weeks ago (www.edenhouse.com). This is a cleverly restored 1920's era hotel set in a miniature tropical paradise mid-town. Most of the smallish rooms have a little porch with a hammock, and there are swings and hammocks set throughout the property amid the lush palm trees and tropical plants. It's perfect for the social, cutoffs-and-flip-flops atmosphere of Key West.

We decide to walk the half-mile or so to Mallory Square for dinner and to see the fabled Key West sunset. We settle for a supposedly authentic Cuban restaurant, Meson de Pepe (I’m pretty good with Spanish but had to look up the fact that “meson” means “inn”), where we are serenaded by a colorful rooster that wonders in an out among the diners on the outdoor patio. After dinner we wonder off to see the spectacular sunset, which happens exactly as predicted, at 8:04 PM. Wow, it is no wonder that thousands of people gather here every evening to watch the sunset at the southernmost point of the United States! I’ve never seen a sub-tropical sunset, and it’s shocking to see how rapidly the sun descends behind the outlying islands. I take about 30 photographs, not knowing when I’ll get the chance again. It is truly a spectacular phenomenon!

Afterwards we watch some amazing street theater performances for a while and then wonder off to walk along Duval Street where various assorted weirdness is likely to assert itself at any moment.

Tomorrow is a zero-mile day. The bike is covered and in a special parking place where the hotel manager told me it could stay for the duration.

Tomorrow we will discover more about destinations.

Key West or Bust, Day 5

Gator Bait

Thursday May 15, 2008

By 8:00 AM we are making our good-byes to our friend Mary. She’s departing for an out-of-country trip. We’re southbound along Florida's Gulf Coast, Key West or Bust.

For a while, it seems like it might be bust, unless I can recover my navigating skills without the GPS. For an unknown reason, the map screen keeps locking up. The GPS seems functional in all aspects, seems to navigate just fine, but just can’t draw the screen. I’m amused at how helpless I feel without the familiar magenta route line or, even if not navigating a route, the street names displayed crisply on the map. Several time I get off route and Jill announces that I’m off route and offers to recalculate, which she does, but just can’t redraw the screen.

This problem could arise because of a corrupted map segment/file or it could be a GPS problem. I cycle it off/on many times, and eventually it gets better. It finally draws the screen properly and displays the route appropriately; I don’t dare touch the screen for fear that it will once again go into spasm. Tonight I will copy all the routes, tracks, and waypoints to my laptop and prepare to do a hard reset if necessary.

This morning, for no particular reason, we are a quiet couple. Yesterday we were very chatty, talking for hours in our headsets. About why the north Florida soil is black whereas it is sandy in South Carolina. About Kitty’s colleagues at work. About how I love my work. About speedos and Jabba the Hut. About our friends and loved ones at home and how much we appreciate all the people in our lives even while we’re running away for a brief time. About Danica and her antics.

But today, not so chatty. We roll without much talk southward along the Tamiami Trail, US 41, a hundred miles of sun-baked shopping centers, housing developments, and assisted living complexes in pastel shades of coral, peach, and sand. Cross streets and red lights abound between Sarasota and Naples. I had purposed to take the Tamiami Trail just for the sake of having ridden its length from Sarasota southward, but a dozen times I almost bail out and take the Interstate. Great place to visit, not so great for a motorcycle ride, although Kitty says she now has a great many new landscaping ideas!

From the Gulf coast, to get to the Keys you pretty much have to cross to the other side of the state by traveling eastward on Alligator Alley (I-75) or the Tamiami Trail through the Great Cypress National Preserve and the Everglades. As you might expect, I have chosen the two-lane route. So after passing through Naples we turn east and strike a mostly straight course for the 90-mile dash along the Miami Canal through the Preserve and the northern edge of the Everglades.

A series of my favorite road signs occurs in the Preserve: “Panther Crossing 5 Miles”, repeated every mile for five miles using the appropriate mileage indicator. I have traveled all over the United States and Canada and have never seen another Panther Crossing sign, and it just makes me smile. There remain only 30 of the endangered Florida panthers, and we learn at the visitor center that being hit by cars is the chief cause of fatality. Thus the 50-mph speed limit (45 at night) on a straight and deserted road that begs for 70 mph travel. Nevertheless, I hold the speed limit like a good citizen. Fortunately, I do not hit and kill a panther. Unfortunately, neither do we see one.

At the visitor center we get a few mementos and ask about where we might see alligators without taking the Wing and trailer on graveled or dusty roads. “Just walk outside to the boardwalk and I’d bet money you’ll see some. It’s mating season and they’re pretty frisky,” says the ranger.

So we walk outside and sure enough, we see upwards of eight gators, two of them quite large. They don’t seem very frisky. Actually, mostly they don’t move, simply immersing their scaly bodies in the murky water while resting their heads on a rock or the bank of the canal, eyes and nostrils just above water. One seems confused about what an alligator should do, though, as his tail is out of the water and his head is immersed. The most frisky one is swimming lazily up the canal, tail describing a slow series of graceful sinuous curves while his head remains motionless as the water gently ripples out behind him in a v-shaped wedge. The other gators pay no attention.

Minutes after leaving the visitor center and resuming our eastward trek, we both notice the acrid smell of smoke in the air. This is the first sign we’ve seen of the fearsome Florida fires. Days ago, I saw on the CNN website that the area around Naples was declared unhealthy due to wind-blown smoke from the Okeechobee fires, but it was clear today as we passed through. Now, though, the smoke becomes thicker and a ghostly pale fog envelopes the road surface and the trees in the distance. It’s eerie and makes me feel vaguely claustrophobic. It’s all-encompassing in an unsettling sort of way and there seems to be no way out. In about 20 miles the smoke lessens and in 30 miles, by the time we’re 28 miles west of Miami and turn southward onto Rt. 997, the smoke is gone.

Travel for us is so very upside down compared to what I imagine would be the case for normal travelers. When we tour on the Wing, our main purpose is to ride. We don’t do much. Our travel philosophy is really pretty basic: If you see a tour bus parked somewhere, don’t go there. And be afraid — be very afraid! — if ever you might see three of said buses at any one place. I ask Kitty several times today if she wants to do any of those Everglades things that normal people do, but she’s just not that interested and neither am I. I’d love to learn more about the environment, but those tour buses are just too daunting. I can’t make myself do it!

We roll southward on Rt. 997 through the heartland of Florida’s plant nursery. Kitty loves it, as I knew she would. There are miles of nurseries filled with exotically graceful palm trees of various kinds, whole sections filled with red bougainvillea, fields of beans and potatoes, nurseries with all types of concrete creations, potted flowering plants in profusion. It’s a veritable feast for a plant-lover. I always think that a palm tree with it's perfectly graceful fronds and the symmetrical yet asymptotic curve of its branches, is just about one of the most perfectly appealing plants God ever created!

By the time we reach Homestead and find a Comfort Inn for the night, the GPS seems to be working flawlessly again. I suspect a corrupted map segment as the cause of this morning’s problems, but still I download all the GPS information to the laptop in case I need to do a hard reset. For now, it’s all good.

Tonight is laundry night. See you tomorrow!

Key West or Bust, Day 4

Finding Love on the Interstate Wednesday May 14, 2008 Last evening the hotel valet people put us in the underground parking garage. This is always a cause for pause, because the guard gate arm doesn’t always properly sense the motorcycle and returns early to its guard position, which is especially inconvenient if the motorcycle is being followed by a little Escapade trailer, and said trailer is higher than the bar at rest. So the valet guard manually opened the gate for me as the bike passed through. This morning, I fear the same problem. Kitty goes to find the attendant while I test the exit gate. I pull up to the gate and it opens on cue. I sit there for a while and it stays up, then I back away and it closes. I decide it senses the bike and will stay retracted, so I try again and hurry through without a problem. Kitty hasn’t found the attendant, so we are on our way. This is a day of mostly Interstate travel. We have almost 400 miles from Savannah, Georgia to Sarasota, Florida where we are scheduled to meet a long-time family friend. We plan to travel I-95 into Florida, and before we get to Jacksonville, take Rt. 200 west to US 301 south and follow it until we hit I-75. It’s not a particularly long travel day for us as Interstate days go, but it is the longest day of the trip and a bit of mental positioning is in order for this day. I have stood front and center and declared my aversion to Interstates when Kitty and I are traveling together. But the day is what it is, and I can meld into the moment, so the long straight stretches become, not a boring Interstate, but a part of the biker experience. Because Interstates need love, too. So while we’re rolling down the seemingly endless four-lane highway lined with palmettos and pin oaks, let me explain a few details for the non-bikers who might be reading this. For my biker friends, you can skip this just like you would skip the Interstates we are riding today. We tow an Escapade trailer (http://www.californiasidecar.com/) that has a capacity of over 25 cubic feet, about the size of a Honda Civic trunk. Quite sufficient for Kitty’s makeup kit! (Actually, Kitty travels light — it’s all my stuff that takes up the space.) Our 1500 Gold Wing SE has adjustable air suspension, cruise control, CB radio, regular radio, and a tape deck. When we talk to people about taking long trips, I think they envision Kitty perched precariously on the back of a tiny little seat with no support, frantically clutching onto the rider for hundreds of miles on end. Actually, Kitty’s seat is as comfortable as a rocking chair, with a back support that reaches her shoulders and armrests on either side with various pockets to put stuff. We have Shoei helmets outfitted with microphones and headphones. The bike’s stereo system can be played using the on-board 4-speaker system or routed through the headsets. We always use the headsets. When a musical passage is playing and either of us talks, the music is automatically muted for the duration of the conversation, after which it returns to normal volume. My Garmin StreetPilot 2720 GPS unit is pre-loaded with maps and over six million waypoints for the entire US and Canada, and I can upload or download waypoints, routes, and tracks to and from my laptop, which always travels with me in the already-described trailer. The GPS is connected into our headset so that Jill’s voice (there are over a dozen different voices and languages) can guide us to whatever destination we have chosen. US 301 strikes an arrow into the heart of Florida until it reaches Ocala, featuring a speed limit of 65 mph except for the occasional towns along the way. In one of those towns we stop for fuel and break, and I’m reminded of a recent Sunday sermon by our son Kevin. He talked about when speedos go Star Wars. That is, the speedo wearer has the body hair of Chewbacca and the physique of Jabba the Hut. He described walking on a glorious white-sand beach and seeing such a creature. Here he was with his gorgeous wife Kristal, in the exquisite surroundings of a beautiful beach, and all he could do was stare at the speedo guy. Kevin, my son, I now understand how truly upsetting this can be! At our fuel stop, I saw a bicyclist with skinny legs that didn’t look like he could even pedal a bicycle, skin-tight speedos, and… a huge stomach that lapped way down over the speedos. I now agree: speedos should be outlawed. It may take quite a while to recover from this unsettling image. Today Kitty has discovered that she has a voice and she continues to feel better, which is a good thing because we will take the minimum number of rest breaks. Since Kitty lost 50 pounds, she is like a different traveler. Used to be we’d stop every hour or hour and a half max, and now we sometimes ride nearly tank-to-tank, or about three hours, if the weather is cool. Hot weather affects us both, and as we travel, the temperature rises from a cool 67 F to about 86 F, and we do stop oftener than planned. Still, we reach Sarasota by about 4:30 PM. Our Sarasota friend Mary had asked us to stay with her tonight, but it turns out she’s going out of the country tomorrow and I’d sent an email telling her we’ll get a hotel and just hook up for dinner. I give her a quick call my cell phone. “Hey, Mary, we’re here!” “What?!” she nearly yells into the phone. “Where are you? Why aren’t you here?” I explain and she insists that we cancel the hotel and come to her place for the night. I have a GPS waypoint for her house and Jill leads us flawlessly to her beautiful Florida home. After cleaning up in a shower filled with an alarming number of bottles, vials, sponges, and other objects that I only vaguely recognize, we head out to a local seafood restaurant, Stonewood. I order seared Ahi tuna, which turns out to be delightfully rare with a complex layer of tastes. The wasabi, though, is covered up with lettuce and comes as a complete surprise when I scoop up a mouthful with some lettuce and a piece of tuna! Mary and Kitty and I talk about old times and new, and, as is often the case with long-standing friends, about good and not-so-good times. As we’re finishing dinner, Kitty gets a call from Kristal (daughter-in-law) and Danica (granddaughter), and I get a call from our dear friend Karen with some fantastic news on their life project (http://www.updateonbabyclark.blogspot.com/). And so back to Mary’s house, where I clean and cover the bike parked in her driveway. It just goes to show that if you’re looking for love in all the right places, you can find it even on the Interstate.

Key West or Bust, Day 3

Bikers and the City

Tuesday May 13, 2008

Since we have a very light riding day, we sleep in as long as possible. But eventually, the lure of a perfect southern day entices even the most sleepyheaded into action and to embrace the day.

And it is a perfect day, unusually crisp and cool for this time of year, 51F and perfectly formed. By 8:30 AM we have fueled the bike and are ready to head southward on I-77. But Jill, my GPS friend, keeps clicking in my ear. I've never heard her do this before and it's actually quite annoying. It appears I've created a spurious waypoint and it is corrupted, because the GPS keeps going back to the "touch-screen-waypoint" screen regardless of what I do. "Won't that annoy you?" Kitty asks.

Well, yeah, but what am I to do? Can't sit here waiting for Jill to fix herself. After trying various things without success, I finally think of trying to delete the wayward waypoint, and that seems to fix the problem. I've never had this issue before with any of my GPS units, so it's a mystery to me.

With that problem resolved, we set off southward. I think of motorycling, of life and its rewards. This is such a perfect day, and to think that only two days ago we were slogging through vicious downpours! It occurs to me that this perfect day is emblematic of life in general: The best rewards come after the times when it's hard to perservere, when hope most difficult to maintain. The brightest days often come after the darkest.

After an hour and 40 minutes of perfectly delightful riding, we stop for a break, and I'm standing in the lobby of the rest area idly looking at a map. Kitty walks up and I describe our intended route. I-77, as Interstates go, has been a lovely ride this morning, but at heart, when traveling with Kitty, I'm not an Interstate kind of guy. "Can we avoid I-95?" Kitty asks.

Well, yes, we can. And so I choose a route where we work our way off the Interstate and westward about 10 miles using a "shortest-distance" route that only Jill could love. We have to deviate several times because Jill, in her zeal to create the shortest route, doesn't always consider whether all the routes are paved! At the town of North, we turn left on US 321 South, which immediately pays riding dividends.

This is the rural South, with long smooth stretches of pavement interspersed with small towns featuring the occasional white southern mansion with its tall columnades and live oak trees exotically festooned with hanging strands of moss, giant magnolia trees holding their own space in the expansive green lawns. Some of these live oak trees must be large enough to overspread my entire property! The primary field crop seems to be corn, which appears to be about 12-18 inches tall this time of year. In one field we see a giant machine with a spraying apparatus that must be at least 80 feet wide. A white fog emanates from the spraying. Logging trucks and the implements of logging are everywhere. We ride due south through miles of tall green forests that are mostly pine but also, until corrected by someone who really knows, what I'm going to call pin oak forests. To our right is a railroad track; we never leave it for 80 miles or more, but Kitty is disappointed that we never see a train.

I am so happy Kitty gently urged me to find a route that escapes I-95! This has been a low-key and relaxing but captivating ride! On a motorcycle, two lanes are better than four just about any day! We get to Savannah at a little after 1:00 PM, check with the hotel to make sure everything is in order (we can't check in until about 3:30), and then ride 15 miles east along a scenic Rt 80 through the swampland to Tybee Island, Savannah's beach and the locale of several historic old forts. On either side are brown grassy swamplands and shrimp boat docks.

On our motorcycle, Kitty & I really are the antithesis of city folks. We usually avoid cities entirely, so Savannah is a bit of an experiment to see if we might actually like dabbling in city life. But we are strangely out of place here, out of synch, and I can't help thinking we do better together on the open road. This is never more evident than when we walk on the North Beach of Tybee Island in our long jeans and motorcycle boots, surrounded by beautiful people in tans and beach attire. On vacation and off the bike, I could be one of those people, and frequently am (well, except for the beautiful part); on the bike, well, I just want to be on the bike. Much as I crave my beach time, somehow this leaves me a little empty and I'm ready to be back in the saddle again.

On the way back to Savannah we stop at Old Fort Jackson, which has quite a colorful history with regard to defending Savannah against the British and later against the Union forces. Ironically, its last stand was ended by a command to evacuate when the Union General Sherman arrived in Savannah on his famous march, and in that confrontation not a shot was fired from the venerable old fort. The Savannah River is wide and deep here, and several oceangoing vessels pass into or out of the harbor while we are there.

As we unpack, I can only marvel at the bewildering assortment of stuff we pull out of our trailer and into the elevator to our fouth-floor hotel room. "What ever happened to those people who threw an extra pair of jeans into the saddlebag and were off for a week?" I ask Kitty. She has no answer. But as I recall telling my son, "We are the people I warned us about!"

My WOTI friend Roger Riley recommended Uncle Bubba's for dinner, or Paula Deen's (Lady and Sons), also recommended by some others. Well, by the time we get back to our hotel in the historic district, we are hungy. We talk about riding to Uncle Bubba's or walking to Paula Deen's but in the end, Mazlo always wins: we walk to the waterfront and enter pretty much the first restaurant we see, which happens to a Cajun place named Huey's. Cajun with a South Carolina flair: they serve Kitty's grilled salmon with garlic and parmesan cheese grits! I have a crawfish etouffee and thus Mazlo is happy and so are we.

Tomorrow is our longest riding day for this trip, about 400 Interstate miles to Sarasota. We've been watching the news about those terrible fires in Florida, and this evening I actually called our friend in Sarasota. We think our southbound route probably won't be affected, as we're tracking mostly along the Gulf coast, but the return trip was scheduled to run by Lake Okochobee, one of the hardest hit areas.

It's a lot to think about. And we'll think about it as we need to, and we are quite ready to abandon or modify any plans we've made.

Key West or Bust, Day 2

Of Monks, Tarheels, and Bumper Stickers
Monday May 12, 2008

I never wear my wrist watch on a trip. Because I'm on vacation and for the most part, time is extraordinarily low on the hierarchy of Things Important. But sometimes, even on vacation, timing does matter and the watch has an alarm that we occasionally use to help us wake up in the morning. .Last night I’d carefully set my wrist watch alarm and the motel alarm for 6:45 AM. Apparently I need better alarm technology. None of the alarms sound, and we awake at 7:05 and have to hurry through the morning so as to arrive at the California Sidecar factory at 8:00 when they open. Thankfully, although we’re under heavy cloud cover, it isn’t raining as I thought it would be, so loading out is easier than expected and we almost make it. It’s only a 4-mile ride.

At the California Sidecar factory, I talk to Scott about three things I want him to look at: A loose snap for the front cover of the trailer, a factory-recall shock absorber check, and something I’d just noticed hooking up my trailer for this trip, that when touching the brakes the LED spoiler brake light dims instead of becoming brighter.

While we wait, I clean the bike in the parking lot and Kitty hangs out in the little cafeteria reading a book she brought along. It’s a quick clean-up job because I’m at all not sure we won’t run into more rain today by the looks of things, but I feel better with a shiny, water-droplet-less bike. I’ll clean the trailer later.

An hour and half later, Scott bursts into the cafeteria and announces, “All done! Good to go!” He explains that they tested the light and everything is working as it should. “Did you do your test with the bike running?” he asks. I have to think for a second and realize I checked the trailer lights with the ignition switch on but the bike not running. After we hook up the trailer with the bike running, I have Kitty step on the brake pedal while I observe from the rear. Yes! That Kisan Tailblazer is surely throwing out a whole bunch of blinking red lights that slowly grow to a solid glow over four seconds! The spoiler is working as it should. Wow! That is definitely what I want on the back of my bike and trailer when I apply the brakes!
And thus we head southward. We haven’t eaten breakfast and it’s now mid-morning, so in Lynchburg I route the GPS to a restaurant we recognize that serves both breakfast and lunch. Because choices are good. Jill flawlessly leads us to… an on-ramp! No restaurant in sight. A rare miss for Jill! But I love her anyway. I search for other options and we end up selecting a Cracker Barrel. After brunch, I clean the trailer while Kitty wanders about in the country store and emerges with a bag full of stuff. Because she can just “throw it in the trailer.” Motorcycling with a trailer is a definite boon to the vendors along the way!

It’s chilly. Who knew it would be 48 F in the middle of May in southern Virginia? Kitty decides to wear her balaclava to keep the wind off her neck, since the passenger always gets a lot more wind than the rider. Now this always makes me think Kitty looks like a monk and I’m always secretly relieved when she assumes her normal appearance as a biker with a helmet.

We run under heavy clouds that slowly become more broken even while spitting down a few fine drops of rain on the windshield. And just about when we turn south into North Carolina after US 29 bypasses Danville, we see blue sky for the first time this trip. It’s a wonderful, spirit-lifting thing and makes me think of a bumper sticker I once saw that read “If God isn’t a Tarheel, then why is the sky Tarheel-blue?” It is indeed a lovely thing to see some blue sky even if just in patches. Gotta love North Carolina!

By the time we make Charlottesville, North Carolina, where we had tentatively decided to stop, the sky is mostly clear, the temperature is 64F, and Kitty thinks she’d like to ride a little farther. She’s still not up to her normal strength and stamina, and remembering that only three days ago her fever was 102, I want to make sure we don’t push too hard the first couple days. But we ride on into South Carolina to the little town of Richburg and find a place to stay for the night. By now the clouds have fled and the sky is overspread in a splendid, unblemished azure hue. The temperature displayed on my fairing thermometer is a pleasant 73 F. So for the day, we've traveled 280 miles, leaving somewhere over 200 miles for tomorrow’s route to Savannah, Georgia. Looks like maybe we can sleep in and still get there early.

We walk to dinner at the Front Porch Restaurant, a southern little place featuring an inviting flower-festooned front porch complete with rocking chairs, and inside, a simple wooden floor and portraits of regular South Carolina people decorating the rough-hewn wooden shingle-board walls. Walking back to the motel from the restaurant, Kitty laughs (if her broken half-voice would qualify as a laugh) as she sees one last bumper sticker: “This is just a STUPID STICKER but you’re squinting to read it anyway.”

Key West or Bust, Day 1

A Mother's Day
Sunday May 11, 2008.

Mother’s Day. A day for honoring those without whom we wouldn’t even exist. But for Kitty and me, also a day of new beginning.

Last Friday, Kitty had a fever of over 102. Yesterday, Saturday, I was out doing some final prepping on the bike when she appeared and said “I think I’ll mow the lawn.” And just like that, despite my astonished counsel to the contrary, she was out mowing the lawn. “If I can mow the lawn, I think I can sit on the motorcycle tomorrow,” she had said.

We’d decided to do the Mother’s Day thing when we get back, and thus it is that after church and a quick lunch, we’re on Final Departure Status. Extremely heavy weather is moving in later this afternoon, and we think if we get a good start we might reach our destination before the heaviest rain sets in. The sky is gloomy and fitful spits of rain splatter on the sidewalk and the driveway. Only once before in our travels have we done the Dance of the Rainsuit before departure. And I find I still have the touch: As usual, I do the whole dance and then realize I’ve left my keys inside my jeans pocket, causing me to unzip, unflap, dig out the keys, and do the whole thing over again. I smile as I think about how often I’ve done that and how it seems I’ll never learn.

“And there we go,” Kitty croaks in my headset, as she does every time we mount the bike and prepare to ride. Well, she always says that, she doesn’t always croak. I almost laugh but she just sounds so pitiful, having almost completely lost her voice in the past two days. And at 2:47 PM we gently roll out of the driveway into a light rain under heavy skies. Our destination is a modest 122 miles from home, to a tiny town south of Charlottesville within a few minutes of the California Sidecar factory where I have an appointment tomorrow morning to have a few things on my Escapade trailer checked over.

Within 20 miles the rain starts in earnest and it pelts the bike with huge star-shaped splats on the windshield, smacks onto our helmets, and pools on the road. Visibility is reasonable until about 20 miles out of Charlottesville, when the road spray and heavy rain seem to have depleted the tall Tulsa windshield of its magic rain-shedding properties. I generally ride alert but “loose” in rain, but today I find I’m tensing up and focusing all my attention on peering through the windshield instead of riding the ride. I tell Kitty we’ll stop at the next fuel station to fuel up, take a break, and re-apply the magic windshield cleaner that is so effective in keeping the windshield clear.

After this it’s like a new windshield and once again I can relax. Soon after making the turn onto US 250/29 at Charlottesville, the rain diminishes and we see a patch of blue sky in the distance. By the time we reach our tiny motel in the tiny town of Lovingston, Virginia, the clouds are gone. But having listened to the radio, we know that still to come overnight is another line of vicious thunderstorms for which tornado warnings have been posted in North Carolina and southeastern Virginia. They are heading our way.

We unpack the trailer, hang up our rain suits to dry, and I park the bike in a covered drive-through area suggested by the manager. For one of the very few times in our travels, I don’t touch the bike, don’t cover it, don’t wipe off a single water droplet. Because tomorrow we’ll do it all over again in the next line of storms.

Walking across US 29 to Vito’s Italian Restaurant, I ask Kitty how she’s doing. “I feel fine” she croaks. I hope she feels better than she sounds!

Key West or Bust, Day Zero

In the Balance
Saturday May 10, 2008

In May, it's Alamo Run time. Gold Wing riders from the Wings on the Internet newsgroup (http://www.woti.org/) normally gather near San Antonio for a barbeque, kick some tires together, and renew friendships. But this year, it's been cancelled, so other plans are in order. Roads exist to be ridden, and ridden they shall be.

Kitty & I have chosen a meandering mostly-two-lane route to Key West for our 2008 springtime ride. We chose Florida because it's the only mainland state except North Dakota we haven't visited together on our Wing. Key West because... well, because it's as far as you can go before turning around. The bike is ready, trailer is ready. We're pretty much packed. It's a lot easier now with the trailer than in the old days where every single item had to be carefully scrutinized and vetted to see if it qualified for the trip. Nowadays, we "just throw it in the trailer."

My StreetPilot 2720 GPS is completely programmed with waypoints, pre-calculated trip segments, and half a thousand "custom points of interest" that I downloaded from http://www.poi-factory.com/, including all the lighthouses along the South Atlantic coast. I've set up proximity alerts for a number of those that will alert us when we ride to within the distance I've specified. I recently bought a new handheld GPS unit, a kinda-cute little yellow Garmin eTrex Venture HC, that we can use to track our hikes and power walks throughout the trip, and the planned bicycle or walking adventures in Key West. Hotel reservations have been made where necessary.

We're psyched. We're ready.

And Kitty is sick. Sicker than I've ever known her to be in over 37 years of being married. Last night, on antibiotics but with a fever of over 102 F, leaving as planned tomorrow was looking pretty bleak. She's optimistic today. She's better but it's still not looking good to me. It is what it is, and we'll deal with it. I'm resigned to doing the right thing, whatever that may turn out to be!

We shall see what tomorrow may hold.