Friday, I was so excited about my weekend's ride, I could hardly sit still at work. It was a slow day on the tech support hotline, and by lunchtime I had all the things done that were due that day, so I petitioned my manager to let me out early. I had a 3pm meeting, and as soon as the meeting was over I tidied my desk, called Russell's voice mail to say I was on my way, and left. I had packed everything onto the bike that morning before work, so I didn't go home, I just got out of town.
It was little after 4pm. The sun was shining and the temperature was in the upper fifties. My hands were so warm in the ski mittens that I briefly contemplated switching to my summer gloves, but I decided against it. Rather than deal with the traffic congestion getting on the freeway in rush hour, I followed the country roads south eleven miles to Milan, MI, where I stopped for gas. I noted my mileage and hopped onto US-23 south. This is a very straight, uncrowded section of road. I felt so happy to be moving along in the sunshine, that I couldn't resist the temptation to go very fast. After all, I only had 30 miles or so before I'd reach the Ohio state line, and I wouldn't want to break the ton in Ohio. I laughed and cheered to myself as I flew down the freeway.
Across the state line in Ohio, I slowed to a more sedate pace. It was rush hour in Toledo, and there was a ton of traffic. I was too busy just watching out for BDCs to be indulging in hijinks, and the section of freeway between the Michigan border and the turnoff to the 80/90 turnpike is a hotbed of LEO activity.
Despite having been very warm only an hour ago, my hands started to get really cold. I stopped at the rest area on I-75 outside of Bowling Green to put some hand warmers in my mittens, and to look for an Ohio map. They didn't have any maps, so I continued on without one. Soon, I reached Findlay. It's been years since I last drove this way to Columbus, and for a little while I almost thought I'd made the wrong turn getting off I-75, because it was farther east to US23 than I remembered. I wished that I had the map to look at. Just as I was thinking I might turn around and go back, I saw US23, yay!
As I rolled down US23, I saw a huge hawk circling in to land on a fence post. This stretch of freeway was almost deserted, and the sun slanted in at a low angle, which made the trees on the roadside stand out, brightly lit with deep shadows underneath. There's something really neat about this kind of light.
I remembered from past trips that US23 is a real zoo near Delaware, and Ray Campbell had warned me of construction there, so I decided to get gas in Marion. Besides, the sun was setting and I needed to take off my sunglasses.
Sure enough, there was a lot of traffic, grooved pavement, and general unpleasantness in Delaware. I was happy to exit the highway and travel east on SR-36. I've been that way before, so I knew what to expect. There's an old building that was probably a train station once, the paint is peeling but it's still interesting. I imagined the place on a sunny day at the turn of the century, agriculture and industry, wagons filled with crops rolling down the street. I suppose SR-36 became a major trucking thoroughfare when the railroad was busy, and now that the rail depot has fallen into disuse, the trucks still roll through on their way to US23. On the outskirts of Delaware, the road opened back up to four lanes and the traffic congestion eased. Then it was I-71 south. I was getting cold by this point, and eagerly looking forward to reaching Russell's house.
I followed Russell's directions to his subdivision. What a maze that subdivision was, and he had left one of the turns off his directions. Still, I found my way to his house with only a little difficulty. Something about the rumble of the V4 engine causes garage doors to open, it seems. Russell came out to say hello.
Russell's house has a lot of stuff in it (not surprising since it's got two households in it; Phil's and Russell's). Strange features include the phone in the garage and the second refrigerator in the laundry room. There is a huge deer head over the fireplace; when I asked Russell about it, he told me he got it with a bow his first time out hunting. I told him it was a good thing he got it, because if someone hit that thing while riding their bike, they'd be killed for sure. There were bike parts scattered here and there; a windshield in the living room and plastic ST pieces downstairs.
Russell's plan was to make stir fry. This meant chopping up a lot of vegetables, and I offered to help but he declined the offer. So I sat in the kitchen and tried to be entertaining. I chattered away about the places I had lived and the people I'd lived with, and he seemed entertained. He seemed to think I had lived an odd life with a strange cast of characters. I suppose that's true, but really, when you get down to it most people are strange in their own ways. He's far from average himself. Brilliant and boisterous, good at everything he puts his hand to, personable and friendly, but not quite on the same plane as other people. Always one cool remove away, like he's watching the world from someplace deep in his head that no one else can get to. I think Russell would be a hard person to really know well.
Eventually the vegetables were all chopped, and it was time to cook. Russell cooks stir fry in an unusual way; he set up a huge propane burner in the driveway, and cooked the stuff out there, throwing up clouds of smoke. It was quite dramatic and the results were excellent.
After eating, we watched some skydiving videos. These people actually swim around in freefall and make patterns in the air! I never knew they did this. I thought it was amazing. The combining and recombining of the brightly colored jumpers reminded me of a kaleidoscope. One of the videos was a professionally produced video that only showed the perfect formations, with music and narration. The next video was Russell's group doing similar things, which was even more interesting because it wasn't edited to only show perfect formations, it actually showed how sometimes it works and sometimes it's ragged. The sound of that video was the real sound, too, which was interesting; it had never occurred to me that there would be that incredible amount of wind noise. Someday I must go to one of the DZs and see it live. The thought of actually jumping out of a plane fills my heart with fear, so unless I'm feeling particularly adventurous that day I'll probably watch from the ground.
We stayed up pretty late, which is easy for me to do; I find it easier to stay up past my bedtime than to get up early. If I had heard back from Mike saying c'mon down to North Carolina I might have made more effort to go to sleep earlier, but since I was without a plan for the next day I didn't feel the need to keep to a set schedule. I asked Russell if he wanted to go riding the next day and he said sure.
The next morning he had to bang on the door and wake me; I tend to sleep heavy and late. I dragged myself out of bed and downstairs to be greeted with a perky "Good Morning!!!!" I accused him of being a morning person, and he denied it, said that he just does that to be irritating. It works. Kevin Kirkendall had called and they'd made arrangements to meet up in Chillicothe. Kevin was expected to get there first, and when he got there he would call Russell's voice mail and leave a message telling us where to find him. It sounded like an excellent plan. So after some wonderful breakfast burritos that I couldn't do proper justice to (my stomach is always the last part of me to wake up) we were off. I left my saddlebags and camping stuff at Russell's; that way I wouldn't have to carry them all day, and it wasn't like I had somewhere else I had to be that night. Russell found an Ohio map and since I had a tank bag with map case I carried it.
We rode through the Columbus freeways and out to the south. We ended up riding a familiar route. Seven or eight years ago, I traveled to Columbus for TOSRV (Tour of the Scioto River Valley). This is one of the more well known bicycle tours in the midwest. It's a two day event, 105 miles each day, from Columbus to Portsmouth and back. Bicyclists call it the Ohio Death March, because it takes place over Mother's Day weekend, and your average northern bicyclist is not in good enough shape for such a long ride to be anything less than grim, that early in the season. Anyways, I rode the TOSRV and got lost. It's a long story, but suffice it to say that this wasn't the first time I had ridden a "bike" down US23 from Columbus to Chillicothe.
One of the farms we passed had a sign proclaiming that it was The Sabre Farm. I decided that was auspicious. Eventually we pulled into a McDonalds on the edge of Chillicothe. It was around 12:30 and the place was very busy. Russell hadn't been paged by his voice mail yet, so we sat in the sun and waited for the pager to go off. We each checked our oil, and we examined each other's bikes, and talked about their histories. Russell got his bike brand new, lo these many years ago, when he was a poor college student. It took him a year of eating brown bag lunches and saving his lunch money to pay for it. He'd had it painted a year or two ago; the original color was maroon but now it's a bright red. Both bikes were dusty and dirty. He said he might detail his soon. I doubt I'll ever get around to anything like that, but at some point I do intend to clean off the spilled and blackened oil.
Eventually Russell started to wonder if his pager had failed to go off, and called his voice mail to check. Sure enough, Kevin had called; according to what I understood from Russell, Kevin was at a Dairy Mart on Route 104. We looked at the map and found 104, in the northwest corner of town. I hadn't been paying close attention so I wasn't completely sure where in Chillicothe we were. I figured Russell knew where we were and where we were going, so I followed him out of the McD's parking lot onto the side street. At the light, he signaled left, so I did too. But then he turned right. OK. We rode under the freeway; I thought we'd turn left onto the on ramp, but instead he pulled off to the right and turned around, and we went back under the freeway and got on the freeway going the other way. We rode along the freeway for a little ways, and I realized we were leaving Chillicothe behind. This seemed weird. Also the road signs said we were on 50 East. I realized we were going the wrong way. I wondered if he knew? How long would we go this way if he didn't realize? I try not to interfere with someone else when they're leading, I hate it when people do that to me, so I tried to settle down like a good little soldier. Russell's not at all stupid, he'll figure it out eventually, right? Right??
Finally I couldn't take it anymore. I poured on a bit of speed and passed him, and waved and pointed back the way we'd come. I don't know if he had realized we were going the wrong way before, but if he didn't, he reads hand signals well; he waved that he understood. I dropped back behind him, and started watching for an off ramp. Suddenly, he signaled a left and before I could react, he was turning around on one of those gravel driveways through the median. It was completely unexpected and too quick for me to stop in time. I rode on up the freeway away from him, praying for an offramp. I didn't see one, and eventually I came to another turnaround and decided to take it. I checked behind and no one was close, so I slowed way down, rolled into the turnaround, and stopped. I put my foot down on the gravel, and it slipped. Suddenly my bike was at this crazy, untenable angle! I tried to pull it back up, and my foot slipped some more. That foot was too far out for me to properly get my weight on it, and the bike was heavy. I couldn't get it upright without changing foot position, and I couldn't shift position without making it worse. I knew I'd had it, the bike was going to go down. Cringe! I tried to drop it as gently as I could. Argh!!! I knew I wouldn't be able to pick it up; I hadn't been able to pick up the Seca 550 the day it fell over in my driveway, and it's much lighter than a Sabre. Besides, I was on a hill, and the bike had tipped over to the downhill direction.
Thank goodness for the kindness of strangers. In the time it took me to step back and put my helmet visor up, four cars stopped. I was surrounded by nice men who wanted to know if I was all right, had I been hurt, etc. They helped me pick up the bike. It had stopped running when it fell over and it wouldn't start. I reached into myself for calm. I smelled gas, it was probably flooded. I thought I would catch my breath, check it over carefully, steady my mind and try to start it again once some of the gas had evaporated. It didn't show much damage, just a slight bend in the clutch lever. One of the good samaritans said "I used to work at a Honda dealership. It's just flooded. Twist the throttle all the way open, and then push the start button." This seemed dubious to me, but I figured it wouldn't hurt, so why not? To my amazement, the engine roared to life. I would have stayed to catch my breath a little longer, but even more cars were stopping; I was becoming a first class road hazard. I could see that my erstwhile helpers would not leave me and go about their business until I was moving, and I needed to be alone to calm my nerves. Being a nine-day wonder is not very relaxing. So I started down the road back, at a nice sedate pace. It was about a mile back to where Russell had turned around, and he was waiting for me on the shoulder. A cage had stopped there too. I learned later that the cager had stopped to tell him I was down. He waved me on.
We made it to the Dairy Mart with no more incident, and Kevin was waiting. I was still feeling shaken and embarrassed, but I did my best to put a good face on it. I teased Russell that he'd been testing my low speed maneuvering ability, and earned an expletive from him; I guess I was keeping my chin up well enough. We examined the map and Russell laid out the riding plan. We would take 50 east to 681.
Russell described 50 as "the slab" but it was actually a two-lane, relatively empty, with long sweepers and rolling hills. I thought it was nice. Soon we came to 681. Within a few miles I knew that I was never going to keep up, and that it would be foolish to try. I was still pretty spooked from my stop and drop; I'd lost a lot of confidence there, but even if I hadn't had that happen I still wouldn't have the skill level the other two had. (I don't feel badly about that; I'm a new rider and I know better than to think I should be as good as riders who have ten times the experience I have.) I was in the middle, with Russell ahead and Kevin behind. Russell was soon out of sight. I wished that Kevin would pass me and ride on ahead with Russell. I went around several curves with my life flashing before my eyes, and finally had to sternly tell myself that keeping up with these hooligans wasn't worth death.
I would have been perfectly happy to ride alone and meet them up ahead somewhere, rather than hold them back. If I had psionic abilities, I'd have used them to broadcast this thought to the other two, but I don't even have a Chatterbox, let alone telepathy. Eventually we came around a corner and Russell was waiting; we stopped to confer. Kevin asked if I minded if he rode ahead with Russell, and I said no, not at all! (Hmm, maybe the telepathy worked!) That set the pattern for the rest of our time in the twisties. The guys rode ahead, and periodically waited for me. It suited me just fine. I rode calmly along, and enjoyed looking around at the scenery. (What are those trees with the bone white branches, anyways?)
We came to the river, and rode along it up to Marietta. In Marietta we passed up interesting looking local restaurants in favor of a shopping mall Subway. Apparently David Ryder ate there, and said there was a beautiful woman working there. It must have been her day off; there was no sign of her. Kevin showed us how he was trying to foil LIDAR by painting things black and covering his headlight. He was riding with one extremely bright fog light as his daytime running light.
We got gas and headed out of Marietta to ride another twisty Russell knew about. I think it was route 536. It went up over a high range of hills, and wound back down to the river. There was a fabulous view from near the top, of a large bridge over the river. Russell roared on ahead, but Kevin stayed with me. He set a nice, even pace down the road. I figured that since I had the same bike, I should be able to make mine do what his did. I followed his lines, and it mostly worked. I was grateful to him for setting an attainable example for me to follow, it really helped me a lot. Russell was waiting on the other side of the hills. By this time it was dusk, and we went back the way we had come. This time Russell also kept to a slower pace, and I was able to follow them quite easily. The darkness was an equalizing force.
We headed back towards Russell's house. The first part of our trip was over state highways with nice sweepers and the occasional curve. I felt pretty comfortable with this, although the guys still pulled away a bit on the tighter curves. We roared on through the night. As we entered the little town of Barnesville, we were following behind a white car. At an intersection in town, four Harleys turned onto our road ahead of the white car. I couldn't help but wonder how the car driver felt, with four bikes ahead and three behind. I wondered if we'd get around the car at some point and be seven bikes together. But Russell turned into a gas station, and the Harleys and the white cage disappeared up the roadway. Kevin was yelling about how we should go kick some Harley ass, but I don't know if Russell heard. The two of them proceeded to argue over who would pick up the gas tab. Then Kevin went looking for a bathroom, and somehow ended up on the roof of the store. I don't think he peed off the roof. He just stood over the door of the store yelling about being Sabreman. Poor Lee, his name is being taken in vain. I stood out by the gas pumps, laughing like a crazy woman.
The rest of the ride to Russell's house was pretty uneventful. Miles and miles on the slab. I felt a wild exuberance and had to wrestle with a foolish impulse to attempt sparking as we rode down the freeway. (I still have never sparked, or induced backfires, the way the maggots did that night in Cleveland, but I intend to try it sometime when I'm rested and in a familiar place.) At Russell's we had a repeat of the dinner from the night before, which was every bit as good the second time as it had been the first time. At one point a loud cage drove by outside, and Russell perked up his ears, wondering if it was Phil arriving home on the SlutSabre.
Around 11 or midnight, I loaded my stuff back on the bike and followed Kevin down the road to Harrison (outside of Cincinnati), to spend the night at his house. The highway was quiet, hardly any traffic, and the sky was clear and filled with stars. Orion was visible above and a little to my left. I thought about Orion, a winter constellation, and how I was getting a head start on summer. Later Kevin asked if I'd seen the shooting star, but I have to say I missed it.
Kevin's subdivision was dark and quiet. The garage door opened and I followed Kevin as he rode over the neighbor's grass, around an orange VW microbus, and into the garage. We stopped the bikes. It was well past midnight, and it turned out Kevin didn't have a key to his own house. He rang his doorbell many times, and pounded on the front door to no avail. Eventually he began throwing rocks at the upstairs window, until his wife Angie woke up and came down to let us in.
I awoke to the cozy sounds of a family downstairs, and sun shining through the window. I was in a room that obviously belonged to a preteen girl; there were posters of kittens on the walls and an inflatable chair that would never have supported an adult's weight. I lay there half awake and remembering what it was like to be a preteen girl. When you're that age, your bedroom is your castle. I was just thinking I should get up so this girl could have her room back, when the door opened. I heard Kevin telling Sara to get out of Dani's room and leave me alone. Sara talked back, but she closed the door. Ah, yes, the pesky little sibling, always invading the big sister's space. I once lived with a sibling like that, too. I got up and looked at myself in the mirror on Dani's wall. I'd gone to sleep in my clothes, with my hair still braided; I must have been more tired than I'd thought. My eyes were puffy and I looked like hell. I thought about trying to fix myself up before going downstairs to meet the family, but a quote from Jane Austen came into my mind, something like "Woman is fine for herself alone. Men don't notice, and other women are more pleased by an air of unfashionable shabbiness." That's not precisely the quote, but close enough. Jane Austen was pretty sharp. I decided to take her advice and go downstairs as I was, snarly hair, wrinkled clothes, and all.
Downstairs the older girl, Dani, was watching television with her friends. Sara was eating cereal in the kitchen, and she stared at me with eyes as big as saucers. Angie came in and Sara started crawling all over her, hiding from me and peeking out every now and then. I remarked that she was shy, and Kevin said that wouldn't last long. Sure enough it didn't; within fifteen minutes I was one more target for a child who was continuously seeking attention. It's hard being so much younger than everyone else, and having no one near your age to play with.
I sat at the kitchen table combing the tangles out of my hair. Angie and Kevin and I talked of the bikes. Angie had dropped her bike recently and this seemed to be a tender spot. I told the tale of dropping my bike the day before, and how embarrassed I was. I told her how hard it had been for me when I first rode, how I failed the road test in my MSF class, how I was pursued by mopeds. I don't think Kevin understood this line of conversation; he kept trying to reassure me that I was doing just fine. Sort of a men from mars/women from venus thing; Kevin was trying to solve a problem, but I wasn't asking for a solution, I just wanted to express understanding, let Angie know I'd been there. Kevin's a really skilled rider, and that's intimidating for a novice. I wanted Angie to see me as an example of someone who isn't really very good at this yet, but who is having a heck of a good time. Kevin and I invited her to ride with us, but she'd promised to take the kids to a movie. I would have liked it if she could have gone, but I wouldn't have wanted to deprive the kids of their outing. Next time.
We rode down 275, which cuts briefly into Indiana before the bridge over the Ohio River into Kentucky. Once across the river we left the freeway and lost ourselves in the hills.
We came to a small town where the porches stepped right into the streets, clothes flapped on clotheslines, and children and dogs roamed freely. I pulled up next to Kevin at a stop sign and said something about getting gas, and he said not to worry, that if I ran out he'd siphon some from his tank to mine. This seemed kind of odd; I mean we have the exact same bike so why would he assume I'd run out of gas first or that he'd have enough to siphon once I did run out? I asked him about this and he said he had the extra large tank. I never knew there were Sabres with larger tanks. In any case, he asked a child playing in the street where we might find a gas station. The child directed us to the other end of town, where we found a small store with one lone pump out back in the gravel, and a price of $1.39 a gallon. Whoa! The gas was probably terrible, too; it didn't look like they did enough volume to keep it from turning to water and varnish down in the underground tank. We decided to go on. About 20 miles farther along, we came to a busier looking store, with two pumps, several cars, and a lazy dog lounging in the gravel outside the door. We filled our tanks. We'd last filled up the day before near Russell's house, and ridden everywhere together since then. Our bikes are the same model, same color, same year, etc, and it took exactly the same amount of gas to fill each of them. How's that for precision engineering?
We traded bikes. Kevin had a lot more goodies on his bike, including a fairing, a GPS, and a radar detector. He also had different handlebars with less rise. Everything was clean and polished and well oiled. It was all very smooth, although the top of the windshield vibrated a little in the wind. I kept feeling like I would fall forward onto all the stuff on the front, without the wind to hold me up. His shifter pedal is at a different angle and it moves more easily than mine. The whole effect was just familiar enough to lull me into complacency, and just unfamiliar enough to startle me when something wasn't quite the way I was expecting it to be. Disturbing.
I followed my bike to the town of Rabbit Hash, KY. In Rabbit Hash, we stopped for cokes at an old general store; the sign above it said it had been there since 1831. The store had a big wood stove that had been made right there in Rabbit Hash, and local pottery for sale alongside the cokes and chips. One room was an art gallery with paintings on the wall, and a display of Rabbit Hash memorabilia, including one picture of the store halfway under water during a flood. The main (only) road through Rabbit Hash was called Mayor Goofy Road; the residents elected Goofy their mayor. Across the street from the store, a stonecutter in a tie-dye shirt was listening to public radio and chipping away at a pedestal for something. There were a couple of other bikes outside the store, including a brand new Magna.
I remarked to Kevin that I would like him to help me find all the pivot points on the controls for my bike, and grease them up so they operated as smoothly as his did. He said sure.
We rode along Mayor Goofy Road out of Rabbit Hash, along the river. There were a variety of houses along the road overlooking the river; some new, some old, expensive retreats, shacks, trailers, and log cabins. It had a lot of character. Across the river in Indiana, there were a lot of faceless condos. I liked this side of the river better, it was far more interesting. The road wound and dipped, and I occasionally wondered if it might end in someone's driveway.
We stopped for a leisurely lunch at a roadside restaurant. We sat at a table by the window where we could see the bikes. Kevin had been there before; he said he always parked in that spot and got that table. The food was good but not special, basic middle American fare. Every now and then while we ate, a bike or two would pass by on the road outside; it was a perfect day and lots of riders were taking advantage of it.
When we went back out, Kevin suggested I lead for a while. I said sure. We went back to riding our own bikes, and I led us left out of the restaurant parking lot, onto what appeared to be a state highway. I rode along looking for a likely road. It seemed to me that the niftiest roads would be the low roads, along the streams. I spotted a road like this, signaled a left, and turned in, only to discover a "No Outlet" sign facing so it couldn't be seen before turning in. We stopped, turned around, went over the stream and turned on the road along the other side. This was a decent enough road, but too much of a thoroughfare for my taste. ("The best roads connect nowhere with nowhere and have an alternative that gets you there quicker.") I turned again, and then once more, onto a narrow shady road that wound along under the trees by a stream. This road wasn't even wide enough for two cars to pass each other. It was gorgeous, and so twisty I could hardly get out of second gear. We found numerous roads like this over the course of the afternoon. If you've never been riding in this area, go! It's excellent!
We rode along a ridgetop on Eagle Tunnel Road; there were beautiful vistas of the small valleys on either side. Eagle Tunnel ended at a road with a center stripe, and I liked the smaller roads so I picked the first one we came to. After a mile or so, this road dead ended. We stopped the bikes and looked around, taking off our helmets. My earplugs had been irritating me so I pulled them. I was practically knocked flat, as one of them just wouldn't give up; the suction on my ear was agonizing. I cried out in pain. Finally it let go. Ouch! I hate those things! We stood around and chatted and waited for my ear to calm down.
The angle of the sun was getting low, so we decided it was time to find our way back to Harrison. In Harrison, Kevin and I worked on my controls in his garage. My throttle doesn't spring back very well, and he knew just how to take it apart and get to the parts that needed lubing. He didn't have the right oil for the cables, though. I was telling him how on a bicycle I'd use Tri-Flow and it suddenly occurred to me that I had some Tri-Flow in my tank bag. I dug it out. A little while later his daughter needed a band-aid, and I dug one of those out for her as well. Kevin laughed and asked if there was anything I didn't have in there? I showed him the tire repair kit with the plug gun, and the pump that takes the place of a spark plug, run the engine and fill the tire. I borrowed these from Erik Kauppi but I'm getting my own asap. I showed him how the plug gun works, it's extremely cool. I told him I'd never tried this pump so I also had a bicycle pump in the bag with my tent poles, just in case. I was amazed to learn that he traveled without a tire repair kit. I don't think I'm overprepared; I'm painfully aware of the gaps in my equipment.
I had dinner with Kevin and his kids, and set out for home at around 9:30pm. The trip home was uneventful; it took four hours and ten minutes. I made very good time going north on I-75, no LEOs encountered. About halfway there, a heavy crosswind developed, gusting from the west and making the bike lean. It was a little unnerving but I managed just fine. The sky was cloudy and I couldn't see any stars. My low beam is very dim, and I experimented with leaving the high beam on. Hundreds of miles and no one flashed their brights at me, it must be a sign. I need to get one of those higher wattage headlight bulbs.
I got home and was in bed by 2am. Total distance for the weekend was 1148 miles, overall gas mileage was 38.5 mpg. I had an excellent time, and I thank Russell and Kevin and Angie for being such gracious hosts. Where shall I go next weekend? Are there any maggots within 600 miles or so of SE Michigan who would like to invite me to their house?