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

Gaspésie Gambol, Day 0

A Day for Fathers
Sunday June 21, 2009
Copyright(c) 2009, Jim Beachy

It’s Sunday afternoon, and the family is at Outback Steakhouse. Somehow steak and Father’s Day seem to be made for each other. If I’m choosing, as today I have been asked to do, then steak it will be.

We enjoy the time with Kevin and Kristal, and grandkids Danica and Carter. Our son Kevin has turned out to be quite a great father in his own right and I should be buying his lunch today! We talk about many things including our upcoming trip. If the mood strikes, we might even head out this afternoon or evening.

Last year, Kitty and I traveled on our Honda Gold Wing to Key West, farther south than we had ever been. This year we are heading farther north than we have ever been, to the tip of the Gaspe Peninsula, which at its extreme is about 150 miles north of the northernmost tip of Maine as well as Nova Scotia. Two weeks ago the high temperature there was 48F but this week it’s near 70F. I’ve wired the bike with a special connecting harness contributed by my friend Ray Smith, with whom I did a farewell ride several weeks ago; on that ride, I also picked up his Gerbing electric clothing to see if Kitty could wear it. It’s too tight for me, a little big for her, but passable, so we are ready for some cold weather if it happens!

Last weekend as I was getting the bike ready for departure, I carefully inspected the tires. I am fastidious with my tires (well, not just my tires, but particularly my tires) because on a motorcycle, they are, you might say, the only contact you have with the rest of the planet. This makes them an extremely important commodity. When I’m on a remote mountain road with Kitty somewhere in Canada or Carolina or Colorado, or on the Interstate crossing the Mississippi near Memphis in a blinding microburst while surrounded by two dozen big trucks, there are several thoughts that I pray will never cross my mind. Very high on that list is this one: “I kinda wish I would have changed those tires before we left!”

I changed the tires. Well, Mike at the Honda shop changed the tires. I’ve used up many sets of Dunlop Elite II tires over the years but Dunlop no longer produces them, so I’d tried a set of Dunlop Elite III. I never warmed up to them from the first mile to the last. They were noisy, loose on tar snakes and expansion joints, with limited longevity, and to me they always felt vague in a hard corner. Ray had mounted a set of Michelin Pilot GT tires on his Wing and liked them, so I decided I’d try a set. In the few miles I’ve ridden, I think I’m impressed. They seem quiet, road-savvy, and very accurate. I haven’t really tested them because as every biker knows, the cosmoline they put on rifles and rubber tires to protect them in storage is deathly slick on the road and you just don’t test your new tires for the first fifty or a hundred miles. I’m sure I’ll get a chance or two to test them in the next couple weeks.


I fly two flags on my Gold Wing: a US flag on the right antenna pole and a WOTI flag on the left. My Canadian friends tell me it is proper to proudly fly my US flag while traveling in Canada, eh? But both my flags were looking pretty bedraggled after accompanying us to Nova Scotia and then to Key West on separate trips. So last Monday I’d called The Flag People (http://www.theflagpeople.com) with a rush order. The new flags arrived Friday and I installed them on each pole. I can now fly a crisp new US flag as I travel through Canada! I looked for a minute at the old flag I’d just removed. It was in bad shape, dirty from hundreds of miles in the rain and frayed from many thousands of miles of wind-whipped travel. I have a collection of faded, dirty, and tattered US flags just like it; I carefully marked this one “Nova Scotia 2007”, “Key West or Bust 2008”, and “Once More with Feeling June 2009”, and gently laid it to rest with the others in the collection. On a winter’s day, I will pull them out and fondly remember.

On Friday, we discovered that mysteriously we had only one key to our Escapade trailer. Such a small thing but what an impact it would have if we lost it! We are not sure what happened to the spare key that normally travels in Kitty’s possession. So Saturday, Kitty set off to Artie’s Lock and Key, the only place in northern Virginia where I entertained any hope of finding this very specialized key. They did have that blank and soon I got her text message “4 trailr keys my zippered pocket!” The rest of the day I spent detailing the bike and trailer, wondering about where I picked up each of the splattered bugs that I carefully polished from the front of the bike.

In my stories, I hope people of different interests find something of interest, but I make no apologies for the technical biker content because this is first and foremost a biker’s tale. I think our motorcycle and trailer are as ready as I can make them. To my knowledge, every light, accessory, and function on the rig is doing what it should. Our routes and waypoints are loaded to my Garmin StreetPilot 2720 GPS unit. Our waterproof Cruiserworks riding boots are shined; even our black Shoei RF1000 helmets are newly waxed. My Wing’s name is Black Satin. Black Satin is a supremely competent long-range machine made for two-up touring, made for this trip.

We pack the last of the trip bags and I load the trailer, being mindful to keep a good load balance and proper tongue weight. It’s about 5:00 PM and we could leave now but after toying with the idea we decide to hang out at home this evening and leave tomorrow as planned. I believe we are ready. But the thing is, tomorrow’s story is still unwritten because it hasn’t been lived.

We’ll see you as it unfolds.

Once More, With Feeling

“Rollin 8:09:33 PM. One fuel stop. CU.” It’s Saturday evening, June 6, 2009. The automatic timestamp is a function on my BlackBerry, and the text message goes out to Ray as I ease the Wing out the driveway, up the street, and soon onto I-66 West, just as so many of my trips have started. But this is not just another trip. I fiercely cherish the time I can carve out to ride, generally the farther the better, but this ride is bittersweet.

I’d planned to depart very early tomorrow morning, but Kitty and I have returned early from an out-of-town family reunion and I rather spontaneously decide to make a run for it this evening. I’m going to meet Ray Smith, my friend and riding buddy of tens of thousands of miles, who’s already in a hotel somewhere in Virginia. All I have is a GPS waypoint. But I’ll find him. We always find each other. He lives in North Carolina, I live in Virginia. We’ve found each other at places all over the North American continent. He found Kitty and me during our Driving Miss Kitty coast-to-coast tour in 2000, waiting for us at a rest stop on I-70 in Illinois simply by guessing where we might be based on my daily blog updates. He found me at an unannounced and unplanned hotel on New Year’s Eve 2002 while I was doing a quick one-night and half-day 1,200-mile run to get 100,000 miles on the odometer of my Wing before the year expired, then with his brother accompanied me 300 miles to within 5 miles of home just to watch my odometer reach 100,000 miles in a parking lot. And then he rode 300 miles home again in the cold December rain that started to fall. I was with him somewhere between home and Texas when the odometer on his bike turned over that same mileage. We’ve found each other by sending GPS waypoints, or by guess, or by preplanned meeting points, or by intuition.

Kitty and I met Ray and Deb in September 1999 when some of our WOTI (Wings on the Internet) group assembled for breakfast at Wings over the Smokies in Asheville, North Carolina. Since then we’ve ridden our two Gold Wings together for more miles than any other person in either of our collective acquaintances.

The intervening time has seen us ride 1,000 miles on a brutally hot early May day, from North Carolina to Bailey Island, Maine, to eat lobster at Cook’s Lobster House. He doesn’t like lobster. He and Deb and I took an early October ride to Skid West’s Choo Choo Barbeque in Louisiana and ran smack into the coldest weather the South had seen for decades at that time of year. We rode for a day with temperatures in the 30’s. We didn’t have electric clothing (it’s the South, right?) and I still remember Deb dressed up in layer after layer of clothing until she looked like a miniature Michelin Man in a mask. Ray and I have put many 1,000-mile days under our Wings’ tires, just for the sheer joy of the ride. That has been our common ground: the love of the Long Road, just cockpit time and camaraderie.

We once rode to the WOTI Alamo Run in San Antonio and on to San Diego. Then, in a successfully-certified Iron Butt run called “50CC” (50 hours Coast-to-Coast), we rode our Wings across the country to the opposite coast at Jacksonville, Florida, in a little over 48 hours. How well I recall streaking at Max Cruise across the golden sands of Arizona talking on CB for hours to a woman trucker named “Brown-Eyes” in a big Covenant semi, finally stopping in New Mexico for fuel where she stopped just to shake the hands of the two Gold Wing bikers. To this day, we both have Pacific and Atlantic seawater collected in that 48-hour period, the permanent signature of our mad dash across the golden sands of Arizona.

He is known as “Snake” among WOTI folks because once, after a Texas WOTI get-together, he left Evelyn Cline’s place in a cold rain and soon noticed a green snake poking its inquisitive head out of one of his fairing vents, flicking its tongue against his knee! Apparently lured by the heat of the engine, the snake had crawled up into the fairing while the bike was parked and now, with the engine hot, was finding the environs a bit uncomfortable and was looking for other habitat. Ray absolutely hates snakes! And it was quite a few miles and quite a few shenanigans before he could pull off and administer the coupe-de-grace to the unfortunate reptile.

Now I’m a dozen miles into the darkening western sky on I-66, no golden sands here in Virginia, and a routine mirror check suddenly shows the pale orb of a full moon, seemingly hovering directly above the Interstate behind me. A happy feeling suffuses my somewhat melancholy musings, and the moon like a benign smiling giant urges me onward to my mission. I turn south on I-81 and the moon on my left continues to smile in a star-studded and cloudless Virginia night sky.

My mission is to find Ray. We always find each other. About 165 miles and nearly 3 hours later, I do, arriving at his hotel just before 11:00 PM.

“I’m here.” I send the text message to his cell phone and cover my still-warm Wing. Before I finish, he walks out, we shake hands, and it’s just like old times.

But it’s not like old times. Because this is the last time.

Last week we’d talked and he said “Jim, I'm going to sell my bike. It’ll happen soon. I want to do one more ride with you.” Ray has medical issues that we’ve both known would eventually limit or end his riding career. He and Deb have reluctantly decided it’s time, although he’s been riding a lot lately, most recently with our friend Gibby to Cape Canaveral to see the space shuttle lift off. And that is the reason for this ride, and the reason for my melancholy musings. So we will do this once more, with feeling.

Sunday morning, and we awake to fog lying on the hills around Lexington, Virginia. We realize there is no point in hurrying, for our day’s ride will be mostly on the fabled Blue Ridge Parkway, which is sure to be completely socked in with fog. So we have a leisurely breakfast in the Greek restaurant that opens at 7:00 AM, although the hotel clerk recommends we don’t push it, as they are known to be a few minutes late on many mornings. He’s right.

We strike out at around 8:00 AM and ride toward the Parkway, but at Buena Vista we see the mountains still completely shrouded in fog and decide to run 80 miles or so south on I-81 to give the fog a chance to clear. By 10:00 AM we take Route 8 to Floyd, Virginia, were we get on the Parkway without incident. It’s a beautiful early June day and the lifting fog adds an aura of mystery and intrigue.

As we roll southward on the Parkway, I am in the lead and check my mirrors often for Ray’s Wing’s distinctive front-end signature with the double headlights and the driving lights spread low and wide on the fairing. I’ve seen this in my mirror for thousands of miles.

The rhododendron along the Parkway are slow to bloom this year, and we see only some early volunteers foretelling the spectacular rhododendron blooming season that will be evident in several weeks. The temperature is a perfect 68 degrees F.

“I enjoy this part of the ride almost more than the southern end,” Ray says on CB. Indeed, it’s a relaxing, non-technical ride as the Parkway winds southward along the spine of the Blue Ridge.

After several detours including one through the town of Boone, North Carolina, we pass Grandfather Mountain, whose higher elevations are hidden by dark clouds. We ride slowly across the Lynn Cove Viaduct, and finally get off the Parkway for good a few miles before the long-term road closure, a result of a rockslide that closed the Parkway between here and Asheville. It’s hot when we get to the flatlands off the mountain, and we find a place in Morganton, North Carolina.

Walking to the Sagebrush Steakhouse across the street, it’s hard to fathom that this will be the last dinner we’ll have on one of these trips, and we hoist a glass or two to the good times we’ve had and to whatever the future may hold.

The next morning, Monday, we make plans to meet Deb for lunch at a restaurant near her workplace, so we ride the 250 miles on the Interstate, mostly in silence. Ray is leading, and I look often at the familiar pearl green trunk and saddlebags that I’ve followed for so many thousands of miles, most of them with Ray’s mascot, Twinken, a charming little creature of indeterminate taxonomy, peering over the back of the light bar.

We meet Deb for lunch and talk about the decision to retire the bike.

“It was a hard decision,” Deb says, “but harder for Ray.”

“She said I could get a truck,” says Ray.

“I’ve ridden my Wing past a thousand places all over the continent where I would have liked to go but the bike couldn’t,” I say. “So here’s our new plan: Kitty and I will take the bike, you’ll take your truck, and we’ll tour the country. When we get to one of those places, I’ll park the Wing and we’ll take your 4x4 to explore the rest of the country!”

Deb has to go back to work so we walk together out to the parking lot. “Every mile has been a good one, Ray.” We shake hands and our eyes lock for just a second and then mercifully, he walks away.

“I’ll have two lawns mowed by the time you get home,” he quips. I ease out of the parking lot, give a little toot on the horn, and my last view is Ray waving, standing by his faithful Wing, the companion of nearly 140,000 miles.

I point my Wing toward home and ease onto the Interstate. The radio is off but the CB is on. Some of you have read my stories about Solo Guy, who travels alone and is often confused with Lonely Guy, but is never lonely. Today for the first time, I stare Lonely Guy full in the face and realize he is me.

Several times I am startled to hear Ray’s CB voice in my headset, then realize it’s only a ghost, and my mirror holds only an empty spot where a Wing’s signature headlight configuration would be.

It is brutally hot, over 91 degrees F, and I ride the 250 miles home without stopping save for a 7-minute fuel stop. And then I’m home, 500 miles for the day’s ride.

Our friendship will continue, and we’ll see each other again to be sure. But on those summer days when I point my Wing toward the Long Road, I will miss you, my friend. When the time comes for me retire my riding boots, I hope that I will have the courage to do it, and I hope I will have the dignity and grace to do it as you have done. Most assuredly, that day will someday come. But even then, I will always wish we could have had one more run across the golden sands of Arizona.

Copyright© 2009, Jim Beachy

Key West or Bust, Day 15

Mile Marker: Home
Sunday May 25, 2008

We do our well-honed morning pack-up routine for the last time on this trip. In each of our canvas carrying bags we always use a plastic garbage bag to hold our dirty laundry and keep it separated from clean laundry on a long trip. Today, I laugh as I notice that the dirty laundry now takes up the entire space of my bag, leaving only a handkerchief and one clean pair of socks as the clean laundry. Tonight, we’ll do laundry at home.

“I’ve chosen every route and every mile so far on this trip,” I tell Kitty. “Today it’s up to you.” We discuss the options and she chooses to ride Skyline Drive to the US 211 cutoff at Panorama and then take 211 and 29 home, which, in a twist of fate, is exactly the route I’ve already pre-loaded into the GPS.

At about 9:15 AM we retrace the four miles of I-64 to the entrance of the Shenandoah National Park. At the entrance station, the Harley Davidson Electra-Glide in front of me suddenly begins backing up. Its rider apparently has not heard my quiet Gold Wing come up behind him, and apparently hasn’t checked his mirrors either. Maybe there’s something to that old biker saying “Loud pipes save lives!” I’m not worried about damage to the bike, since he would just impact my front tire, but he’s kicking it backward pretty good, and I’m afraid he’ll hit my front wheel at an angle and dump us over. I sound two long blasts on my horn (I think it’s the first time this trip) and fortunately he stops just before making contact with my front wheel. Trouble can come from the least expected sources on a motorcycle trip, even when at a dead stop! “Good job on the horn!” the park ranger says as we pay the $10.00 motorcycle fee.

The day is crystal clear, with temperatures on the Drive in the mid-fifties. Skyline Drive is a 105-mile ride with a 35 mph speed limit throughout the park. Compared to the Blue Ridge Parkway, the curves are sharper and generally more frequent, and from the overlooks you can often see settlements in the valleys nearly 3,000 feet below. On this pristine Sunday morning, there is little traffic on the road but the trailhead parking lots are jammed to capacity with cars. Apparently Memorial Day hiking is a big thing here.

From about Milepost 85 to 82, we see the fire-ravaged forest to our left, residuals of fires last year that closed the Drive for some time. Some of the blackened trees, in a struggle to survive, have pushed out green buds along the upper tree branches, persevering in the face of apparent disaster.

Unlike the Blue Ridge Parkway, which no longer has any fuel services, the Drive has services and we fuel at Loft Mountain, located around Milepost 80. "And there we go," Kitty says for the last time on this trip. She is no longer croaking as she did when we started. She sounds strong and confident.

“They are just starting our second church service at home,” Kitty says in my headset. “God, bless ‘em good!”

At about Milepost 32, the location of the now-closed Panorama visitor center, we catch US 211 eastward and ease around the serpentine downhill curves. At the bottom of the steep curvy road, running into the village of Sperryville, I notice a sign on a white panel truck parked at a crafts shop: “Antique tables made daily,” it announces boldly. I think about this for a minute. Somehow the words “antique” and “made daily” just don’t seem to play that well together in the same sentence. Something about this would make me scratch my head if it weren’t inside a helmet, and now that I think of it, I do have an itch inside my helmet.

We ride the remaining 35 or so miles home, sedately observing the speed limit. Kitty is in Full Going-Home Grandmother Mode. We’ve been in the seat now for upwards of two and a half hours, and she says she doesn’t want a break, doesn’t want to stop for anything. “If the trip has to be over, let’s get on home!” she says.

And so, after a short 136 miles on a beautiful, crystal clear day that more than makes up for the pounding we took on the first day out, Jill says "In 0.3 miles turn right on Blueridge View Drive, then arrive at Jim Home." And thus we arrive at Mile Marker: Home! Kitty's health started out pretty shaky but on antibiotics she improved every day, although we never got into the power walking routine we'd planned. By now, she's hardly coughing into my headset at all and she says she feels great. We’ve had great weather except for the first day out. We circumvented the fires in Florida without a problem. The bike and trailer performed flawlessly. (The only casualty was a burned-out bulb in one of the light bars on the bike, but it’s the lower center bar on back, which is hard to change on the road and invisible from the rear when pulling the trailer, so I opted to wait until I get home to replace it.)

Some of you may remember Kitty's Kardinal Rules for a trip: No snakes, no cities, no traffic. Well, this trip was a guarded experiment venturing into forbidden territory.

We visited Savannah, which immediately violates two of the three rules in that it's a city and there was heavy traffic getting into the historic downtown section where we stayed. Savannah, I would say, was not a failure but not a highlight either. We just don't do cities that well. We did enjoy the Cajun restaurant we stumbled into.

Key West was an experiment in "destinational travel." I loved it, Kitty loved some of it but felt there were far too many people too close together. Although the 70 miles nearest Key West are a spectacular ride, next time, maybe we'll fly there.

Walt Disney World was another experiment, and we both enjoyed that a lot. I'm fascinated as much with the technological infrastructure as with the actual venues themselves.

But as we talk about it, we realize that returning to our "riding roots," two-lane roads far from the city, is what we do best on the bike. Kitty and I maybe aren't so good at "doing" things or finding things to do. But we are pretty good at just "being." The 1,000 miles or so from Key West through the flatlands of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina before running into the Smokies and Blue Ridge Mountains, although not spectacular in the "Rocky-Mountain-cool" kind of way, was a great time for us just to "be" together and enjoy what the countryside could reveal as we travelled through vastly different ecological regions.

We’ve ridden 3,099 miles according to the GPS, 3,125 miles per the odometer. I believe the GPS. Kitty and I laughed many times during this trip about the low number of miles we're traveling. I'm not sure, but I believe this is by far the lowest 15-day total we've ever accumulated. According to the hours logged by the GPS, we’ve spent about 63 hours in the saddle. Several years ago I stopped keeping a gasoline log on trips (I know I get 39.8 mpg one-up, 35.4 mpg two-up with the trailer). And with today’s gasoline prices, who wants to know how much you’ve used anyway? We did note the highest price for regular grade gasoline was in Key West at $4.099, until that price was matched today on Skyline Drive. The lowest price we found was somewhere in rural Georgia, $3.749.

It’s good to be on the road; we cherish and fiercely protect our time together. But Mile Marker: Home is where we’ve made our lives together, and where every journey ends. In a sense, although we’ve ridden the far-flung reaches of the North American continent, all our roads eventually lead to Mile Marker: Home.

It’s good to be home!

Key West or Bust, Day 14

Mile Marker 0, Two
Saturday May 24, 2008

During the night, our motel apparently lost power, or at least the clock in the room is blinking a nonsensical time when I wake up. I don’t bother to check the time as pull aside the drapes to the motel room and check the weather. As predicted, it’s raining. The Internet Weather Channel predicted rain moving out by 10:00 AM.

So in the morning we take our time, uncover the bike and hang the wet towels out to dry. (We use towels to protect the bike and trailer at the points of stress where the cover would rub the paint, and he seams bike and trailer covers are not waterproof.) We generally laze around until the weather clears and I think the roads will be mostly dry. Generally, wherever we travel, when people see we’re a couple on a motorcycle, they want to talk about the bike and our travels. This morning a very large dude asks “Where are you riding to?” How does he know we’re riding? Oh… maybe the long jeans and motorcycle boots are a clue, or the Deal’s Gap T-shirt I’m wearing.

As usual, people with the best of intentions tell us of destinations we should visit and things we should do there. We try our best to help them understand we're in it for the ride, not for the destination. We make polite noises and say innocuous things like “Oh, thanks — maybe we’ll have to check that out.” You know, whatever you say when you have no intention of doing any such thing. But inside I’m thinking “I DON’T CARE, PEOPLE!! I JUST WANT TO RIDE MY MOTORCYCLE!! IT’S ALL ABOUT THE RIDE!” Ok, I feel quite a bit better now, thank you.

The weather clears at about 10:00 AM as predicted and we stow the still-wet towels in the trailer and pull out to head northward from Fancy Gap (Milepost 199) on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Behind the weather front, the sky is clear and the temperature is a cool 62F. Jacket weather. Traffic is very light this morning, and we see only one other vehicle traveling north.

In less than 25 miles we stop at Mabry Mill (Milepost 176), one of the major attractions on the Parkway. It features a working gristmill driven by a water wheel and from time to time has numerous activities depicting life in a bygone era. We’ve been here many times and this morning stop just to get a few digital photographs and to give Kitty a chance to wander around through the gift shop.

After we leave Mabry Mill, we are both quiet. I’m reflecting on the trip and thinking about whether we should ride home tonight instead of staying in Waynesboro, Virginia as planned. This is easy, swoopy riding, and I find myself using higher gears and lower RPMs than usual when running curvy roads. The bike feels steady but a bit sluggish without the power curve I usually maintain in curves. Kitty notices this and says “You’re in a mellow yellow mood this morning, aren’t you? Going-home syndrome?”

Going-home syndrome is what we call those last couple days when the trip isn’t over but most of the highlights have been registered and we start turning our minds toward home and what to expect as we ease back into work and our usually routine. I guess we both have going-home syndrome today, because mostly we don’t talk and are each lost in our thoughts as we ride the graceful curves and hills of the BRP.

At about 2:00 PM we reach Milepost 86, the Peaks of Otter Lodge, and decide to stop here for lunch since we’ve run out of picnic lunch food. Or, if we decide to ride all the way home, we’ll eat some protein bars and keep traveling. We discuss this for a little while before getting off the bike and finally decide to keep the reservations in Waynesboro. The ride home from there would make for a very long day.

As we are eating lunch, an elderly couple walks in and I notice the man’s ball cap. It’s a Navy hat with “PT 104” inscribed on the side. It reminds me that it’s Memorial Day weekend. As we pay our bill and leave, I get up and walk over to the guy. “I just want to shake your hand and say ‘Thank you’,” I say. He’s hard of hearing and I have to repeat it. A grateful look comes into his eyes and says “Well, I just did my job as best I could.”

Continuing our ride northward, we talk about the vegetation. There’s some flowering laurel, but the rhododendron are still at least a month from flowering; in late May they aren’t even pushing buds yet. The higher elevations feature budding maples trees that give entire mountainsides a reddish-brown hue, and flame azaleas with their pastel tangerine color grace the roadside from time to time.

Two days ago, we stopped between Cherokee and Asheville at the highest point of the Blue Ridge Parkway (6,053 feet). Today, after a precipitous drop from the highest Parkway elevation in Virginia at about 4,000 feet, we reach the lowest point at the James River Locks (Milepost 62), at about 650 feet.

Sometime later, we swoop around a bend to find several people in road flagging down passing vehicles. We slow to a stop, and a woman comes running up waving an empty bottle. "We're Appalachian hikers and the water supply is dry. Do you have any water?" The spring they were depending on for water is dry and they have over 10 miles of hiking to the next known water source. On March 12, they started hiking from the southernmost point of the Appalachian trail in Georgia and have hiked 800 miles so far; at their current rate of 10 to 12 miles per day, they expect to get to Mount Katahdin in Maine by mid September.

We give them all our bottled water and they take some pictures of their "motorcycle trail angels." Where we're going, we can easily get more.

And then, once again, we are at Mile Marker 0. This one is different from Key West, because it isn't the end of the road. But we’ve decided that for us today, it’s the end of the line.

“We’re getting on the Interstate!?” Kitty asks in alarm as I navigate the entrance ramp to I-64 west.

“Well, yeah, for four miles,” I respond. “Otherwise, we’d have to ride all the way through Waynesboro to get to our hotel. She concedes that it’s ok to ride four miles of Interstate if necessary.

We check in, I clean and cover the bike one last time, and we walk across the parking lot to the South River Grill for dinner. The waitress describes a dessert with melted Reeses Peanut Butter Cup and ice cream over a brownie. Kitty lights up. She would walk hot coals for peanut butter!

But when it comes out, it is huge! “That dessert will probably cost us $10.00!” Kitty mutters.

“It’s our last night. How much more damage could one more meal do?” I ask. “And how many calories could one dessert add?"

Thus we end dinner with Kitty scraping up every bit of peanut butter from the dessert plate. In a little less formal setting, I get the feeling she would even lick the plate. This woman loves peanut butter!

“I’m going to the exercise room,” she announces, back at the motel.

“Good,” I say. “I’ll join you. If they have wireless Internet access so I can post my blog.”

They do. I’m writing, Kitty is running on the treadmill. Something seems slightly off about this arrangement but for tonight, I can live with it.