Day Eight – Last Leg Home

The hotel served a free continental breakfast starting at 5:00 am but I was well on my way before the first waffle was ready for a hungry traveler. As is my norm when I am traveling I had filled the bike up on arrival so that I would have one less thing to worry about the next morning so all I had to do once I was ready was get all the luggage on the bike, check out and hit the road.

I really prefer to leave only after having eaten a good meal but on this day I had over 800 miles to travel and waiting at the end of all those miles was my own sweet bed so I passed on the breakfast in favor of getting a head start on the day.

My first stop of the day came at around the 200 mile mark somewhere in Missouri where I stopped for gas, the bathroom as well as to change into my rain gear as the skies ahead looked rather threatening. It was at this stop that I received the ultimate complement for a road warrior. I call it the ultimate because it came from someone who spends the majority of his time plying the roadways of this country. I wear a fluorescent yellow vest over my black First Gear Kilimanjaro jacket. The vest has mesh portions to allow the jacket to vent in hot weather but it provides about 80% coverage in yellow on the torso and it also has highly reflective sections for nighttime visibility. The reason I wear it, though it may look nerdy to the tee-shirt-clad cruiser rider, is that it is kind of hard not to notice a bright yellow thing moving along the road and I would much rather every motorist notice me and laugh than have them swerve and curse because they didn’t see me. Anyway, a trucker that looked like he had more than a few road years on him and even more miles said “Damn! You can see that thing for miles! No way I could miss THAT! Smart! It is much better to have that than rely on that little square of light back there for visibility.” Coming from a guy who spends his life racking up hundreds of miles a day each working day it meant a lot.

I was not that far outside St. Louis but I was getting hungry so I decided that I would stop there for breakfast although I would only be through half a tank. I initially wanted to do the 200 miles between stops thing I had a managed the day before but things were not working out that way. I got into the northern part of St. Louis after rush hour and found my way to a Cracker Barrel without having to sit in stop-and-go traffic and ordered a huge breakfast as dinner the night before had just been a burger and a couple of beers and I was ravenously hungry.

I got back on the road in under an hour and had to stop for gas somewhere in Illinois. The plan, now, was to do the 200 miles between stops but with the sun rising higher into the morning sky it was getting hot, fast, so I stopped at the welcome rest stop in Indiana to take the layers off and got to chat to a guy on a Harley Road King who had gone to Kansas City for the weekend and was on his way back home just over the Indiana border in Ohio. He inquired about the best way to get around the traffic in Indianapolis due to the construction and I provided him the route I had used on my way out and planned to use on the way back in about an hour or so. He finished his cigarette, thanked me and was soon on his way.

One interesting thing about the interaction is that it made me think about the spontaneous conversations you have with strangers when you travel solo on a bike. Car drivers’ typical first question is on the cost of the bike next is the comfort of the bike and, if they have encountered rain on their way to that stop is a joke about the weather. Motorcyclists first ask where you are coming from and then where you going. The reason for the question is if they are headed in the direction you are coming from they can get some intelligence on the road ahead for themselves – road conditions, police locations, weather, construction, etc. The reason they ask where you are going is if they have come from that direction or along that route they will share any of the same intelligence with you. There is a special kinship that holds motorcyclists together and with that kinship comes a natural desire to be helpful in any way you can to a fellow biker.

After gathering and sharing information on the roads, the topic shifts to where you are from and then ends up with talk about the bikes – age, comfort, reliability, tires, etc. If the stop is long enough, you may start to talk about rides and war stories from the road.

I was also soon on my way with the intent of filling up somewhere west of Columbus in my last stop before turning north on I-71 for the last leg home. It was not to be!

About thirty miles shy of the Ohio border the freeway was backed up for as far as I could see, traffic totally immobilized. After filling up my water bottle (from the reserve I carry) I checked the map and saw that there was a secondary road paralleling the freeway a couple of miles to the south. I rode up a few hundred yards on the shoulder and executed a u-turn, got off on the next exit and proceeded towards that road. Quite a number of folks appeared to have figured it out and at the second town along the road the traffic here started to back up. At the first opportunity I turned back towards the freeway, figuring that having traveled a few miles I should have been clear of the accident that caused the backup. I was wrong, turned around to get back into the town I had just left only to find that the backup was worse than I had left it. I pulled over checked the map for another road, found one north of the freeway and headed for that and this time had more luck. Twenty minutes later I was back on the freeway and clear of the accident. All that screwing around cost me an hour that would have put me within spitting distance of Columbus.

I was tired, hot, hungry and frustrated so I rode until the bike was close to empty, an event that came up just east of Dayton, and, conveniently, there was a Cracker Barrel just down the road from the gas station so I fuelled both the bike and myself. Had it not been for the accident I would have arrived home at a decent enough hour to have waited to eat a late dinner here. As it was, the hour spent trying to work around the wreck and the hour getting dinner and gas delayed my arrival until close to 10:00 pm and I pretty much unloaded the bike, cleaned up a little, poured a well-earned drink and called it a day.

Although my bike is quiet and I sit behind a large faring and a huge windshield I still ride with ear plugs. After having spent well over 90% of my awake time over the past week with ear plugs, normally only removing them at gas stations or rest breaks on some remote road or view point, it took a day or so to adjust back to the world. We live in a world with lots and lots of aural bombardment! I was tempted to go back to the quiet peaceful world of ear plugs.

Another adjustment I had to make was normal human interaction. On the road, your interaction is an exchange – information for information or money for service (food, hotel, drinks) but once you get home you have pick up your mail, go to the grocery store, stop by the motorcycle dealer to schedule service and run other errands. Also, most of the riding having been done either on the highway or remote back roads, getting back to a more urban setting and dealing with traffic was a little tough – two or three cars an hour in New Mexico to thirty cars ahead of you in Cleveland, yikes!

Even though it didn’t go as anticipated, the last day on the road was a good day and a good end to an awesome vacation. Thank you so much for taking the time to look at my blog and I hope you find some of the stories interesting and enjoy the photos.