Seven Hours Out and Six Hours Back

Steve was finally off on his Great American Road Trip, from New Hampshire to Minnesota, and I was finally off on my Mini American Road Trip, from New Hampshire to Auburn NY. Bear in mind, reader, that I first rode a motorbike one year ago, passed my motorcycle driving licence one year ago, bought my first bike one year ago, and that there are at least five months of the year when you cannot ride a bike at all in this part of the world. Bear in mind too that I am 62, and that my second bike, bought in June of this year, weighs 840 lbs and vrooms with 1700cc.

Bear in mind all this and marvel at my audacity. Or, as the wife biker (matching Harleys, his ’n’ hers) at the Holiday Inn in Auburn NY said “You’re crazy, lady”.

There’s a freedom in leaving behind familiar roads and flying into the unknown. We rode to Brattleboro VT, so far, so humdrum, then up the thrilling route 9 towards Wilmington and Bennington. I took the lead, because I knew the road well, and the Doppler effect hit me hard. So many times I have been up, up that road to the summit of Hogback Mountain with its remarkable views across heart-stopping Vermont and New Hampshire, and its tacky souvenir shop where Joe and I stopped more than once to buy moose-related items and maple syrup. So many times I have pulled into the antique store at the corner of Route 100, once to buy a 10’ toboggan, once to buy two globes with a Joe who was sliding daily more deeply into dementia. The globes made him think of our son who was then in Chile, and we called him from the bowels of the store. On the way back from that day trip, one of the last we took together, my husband Joe pulled out his phone to call his wife and tell her what a great time he was having.

So many times I have had pancakes and bacon and maple syrup in Dot’s Restaurant in Wilmington. The original Dot’s, wooden and cantilevered precariously over a rocky tributary of the Deerfield River, was swept away by Hurricane Irene in 2005, pitching into the rushing torrent. Dot’s has risen from the wreckage, still cantilevered, but more solidly built and brought up to something closer to code. We rode past the entrance to Chimney Hill, where Joe and I once had a sweet little ski house, although we never skied. We had the illusion that we would stay there on and off  during the clement months and rent it out profitably during the ski season. That was before we learnt how much insurance for ski rentals costs. Apparently skiers like to party, and rarely leave a house standing. We rode past the shuttered Ace hardware store where Joe spotted Whoopi Goldberg in the power tool section, and up over the hills to Bennington. Here I once had fish and chips in an improbable British fish & chip shop, and I was surprised to see as we sped through the town that it appeared to still be in business.

Then into New York state, and into the unknown. Steve and his magic bluetooth earbud took the lead, and I followed as we swooped through rolling farmland, past peculiar little stores selling upstate New York artifacts. US Route 7 is pretty, until you get to the Albany/Schenectady/Troy urban knot, where it stops being pretty and becomes pretty awful. Urban traffic and a GPS glitch sent us onto a freeway and then a tolled highway, which we had begged the GPS not to do. It knew better. It knew we needed to get to Auburn fastest. It was wrong. One terrifying moment was when Steve heard me honk at him, and pulled over onto the hard shoulder of the highway, with trucks thundering inches from him. Because he had pulled over, I pulled over, with trucks thundering inches from me.
“What’s up?”, he said.
“What do you mean, what’s up?”, I said.
“You hooted at me”
“I did not. Somebody hooted at somebody, but it wasn’t me”.
“Ah”, he said. “So we have to get back on the highway then.”
“Looks like it. Thought we weren’t supposed to take the highway. Thought we were supposed to take that road over there.”
Over there was a fork with four lanes of thundering trucks and a million miles of impossibility between us and it.
“I think we’d better take the highway. You go first, and I’ll follow you to make sure you’re okay, and then pass you.”
“Sounds good”, I said. It didn’t, but nothing would have sounded good at this point. All I can say is I was so nervous that I forgot to attach my helmet, which forced me to pull over again a couple of miles further on, and that I am very, very glad that my bike has tremendous acceleration, and I am also very glad that I have 40 years of highway driving experience behind me. “You got this”, I said to myself, “and Steve’s got this too”, and we had, because we pulled out, each between two different sets of thundering trucks, twisted the throttle and survived.

Highways are very, very boring. It’s boring on a bike like it is in a car, with the added dimension of the crosswinds from the thundering trucks not just gently rocking you as you find yourself in their slipstream, but actively pushing you from side to side. You are faced with a dilemma. To stay swaying and ingesting exhaust, or to pull out into the next lane of oblivious SUV’s, and deal with the maelstrom of confusing winds as you fly by the truck. By unspoken agreement, we stopped at the next service area, regrouped, where we chatted with a couple of Triumph enthusiasts about my wonderful bike. If you have a bike, particularly a big beautiful one, bikers will stop and talk at you. If you are a man and a woman, even if the woman is clearly riding the bike they are interested in, they will talk at the man. If you are a woman alone, they will talk at you, but not in the same way. We and requested politely of the GPS that it take us off the highway ASAP and onto gentler, less challenging roads.

Getting off the highway presents its own challenges, if there are tollbooths. We had already negotiated one to get on, where the tollbooth attendant was handing out tickets. I did not understand this, and thought I had to pay. I did not understand the man, either, who eventually screamed at me “ARE YOU DEAF?” And handed me a ticket. When we came off, I thought I was ready. In a car, you take the ticket from wherever you stash tickets, take your handy wallet, smile, hand over the money, smile some more, and go. On a bike, you have first of all to turn off the engine so you can put the kickstand down while you fumble around for the ticket and your money which you have inconveniently placed behind you in a saddle bag. Or at least I have to turn off the engine, because the only times I manage to put the bike in neutral are by accident. This time, the zipper of the pocket into which I had slid the ticket I had acquired with such difficulty at the previous tollbooth jammed. It took me agonising seconds to extract it through a quarter-inch gap that I managed to force the zipper to give me. Meanwhile, Steve was waiting more or less patiently and wondering what was holding me up.

The now-tamed GPS led us past Betty Beaver’s truck stop (slogan: Get the Fever! Fuel with the Beaver!), across meandering country roads to Route 20, which had been so inaccessible to us back in the urban sprawl. On this, we rode and we rode, through pastures and Amish country, filling the tanks at a Christian Traders’ truck stop, meeting a very large man who owned two Triumph Bonneville’s, one from 1966 and the other from 1978 and who would have crushed either of them if he sat on them now, hesitating wistfully as we sped past the Museum of Petrified Creatures. Six hours into the journey and the expression that looped through my mind was “grim determination”. The sun was setting, and there is no sun-visor on a bike, as we rode and we rode due west. As we passed the sign that said “Welcome to Auburn”, my heart leapt. When we pulled into the parking lot of the Holiday Inn, Steve parked my bike for me. I did not have the strength to pull it backwards into a spot.

The burger I ate that night, washed down with Kendall-Jackson red wine and accompanied by chips soaked in vinegar was as nectar to the gods. The hot shower I had before collapsing onto the acres of bed was the best I have had in my life.

The next morning, like a good girlfriend, I fetched a towel from the hotel room and wiped the dew off Steve’s saddle, and mine too, before he set off westwards and I headed home eastwards. It was sad to see him go, but he was off on his adventure and I on mine. I dillied and dallied before leaving because this time I would be riding into the rising sun, then clamped my bluetooth earbud into my ear, crammed my possessions into the saddle bags and rode off alone.

The first two hours were the worst.
”I will never make it”.
“The Harley lady was right, I’m crazy.”
“I haven’t had coffee.”
“If I drop the bike, who will pick it up for me?”  (answer, I’m fairly sure, because I did not have occasion to prove it, any errant Knight of the Road who wants to help out a lady) 

"I still haven't had coffee".

First I had to ride for coffee and dear life. I found a gas station not too far along US Route 20, scored coffee and a disgusting but delicious breakfast sandwich, and consumed them out on the sunny forecourt next to a sign reading “This space left available unintentionally”. Here I met a older male biker. I met a lot of these, one each time I stopped. They tend to be nice. I have nothing to say to them, since I don’t know about camshafts and carburetors, and they have little to say to me since I’m 62. There is genuine and welcome camaraderie amongst circulating motorcyclists. We flash the two fingers down sign as we ride past each other, eye each other’s mounts more or less surreptitiously, and offer a helping hand to a sister or brother in distress. However, we don’t necessarily have anything more in common than that. The “Bikers for Trump” Facebook page has 352,000 likes; the “Bikers for Biden” one has 146 likes.

Refuelled with coffee, sausage and egg, I became the optimistic adventuress I had hoped to be. Back over the rolling hills, past the patchwork farms, past the stores selling grain and machinery, past spanking barns and broken down barns, past signs warning of tractor crossings. I stopped in one sleepy town in a sleepy gas station, where I topped myself up with chocolate milk and an apple, and a German in a bandana and an electric blue and rust Corvette told me he liked both my bike and my jacket. Opposite was a dusty storefront with a Trump 2020 sign in the window and a faded life-size photo of the president, and I watched as an Amish lady in a buggy with a small child and a prancy little pony waited for a break in the traffic before giving the pony his head and flying across the road to a life I can hardly imagine. 

 

Further on I paused by the side of the road to sip water and drink in the view and the openness and the adventure of it all, and a kind and grizzled Harley rider stopped to check that I was okay.

I was okay, all the way home, except I nearly wasn’t when I once again hit the tangled mess of roadworks and uneven surfaces and lane changes and stinking traffic that is the Albany/Schenectady/Troy nexus, and spent 45 minutes sweating in my nice leather jacket and inching my heavy bike along next to a pick-up truck whose driver liked my bike but whose large and vocal dog didn’t. Soon after that I was back on the familiar roads, and home seemed more than attainable. Indeed, I reached it before the evening turned too cool, ate a large meal washed down with a glass of Côtes du Rhône and slept for 11 hours.