Ride With Tank

What with our very late arival at our motel I gave up on the thought of riding New York City.  We had over 400 miles to get home and I knew we would not get out of the motel until late.   I just figured on getting on the road at 11 and heading home.

Around 10 i got a text from Mark asking if NYC was still on.  Something snapped in my brain and I checked the route in my laptop.  It said we could do NYC and only add 30 miles to the trip home.  In a fit of brainless reaction, I texted him back that we were,in fact, going to ride NYC.

We actually got back on the road at 10:30 and took the Palisaids Parkway to the George Washington Bridge.  It was $7 to cross this bridge!  Welcome to NYC!

Once into the city our first destination was Times Square.  The Sunday traffic really was not very bad.  I got into the spirit and blew my horn at people.  I saw a transvestite hooker.  I saw the ball.

New York has a lot of construction going on, yet their roads are in pretty sad shape for the most part.

Here is Mark in Times Square.

I could spend a lot of time in this city, and I hope I can go back soon when I have more time to explore.  It is a real teaser when you are on a tight time frame and you are having fun and watching the time fly.  In some ways riding NYC is like riding the Gap.  It sure is compeditive.

We made our way south to Battery Park,  passing by many things I have seen in pictures before, including the site of the World Trade Center.  We stopped for lunch at Battery Park where they served me the biggest crawdad I ever ate.

Above you will see our waiter.  He was either pretending to be French or he may have actually been French.  I think he was pretending because he handled my silliness far better than a real Frenchman would.  He actually had a sense of humor, so I suspect he was faking.

It was great hanging out and watching all the boats, ferries, helicopters, and whatnot going about.  Eventually we had to get back on the road.  Our path out was to be the Holland Tunnel, and just as we left Battery Park my GPS quit on me.  This was a huge problem.  I was coubnting 100% on the GPS and had absolutely no idea where I was going.  I had to fake my way through and this is where the driving got super compeditive.  The great thing was I was getting excellent video, or so I thought.  It turns out I never stopped the video at Battery Park and my memory card was full so I got none of this great stuff on video!  You can’t imagine how much it bummed me out when I discovered this.

Eventually we found our way through the tunnel and then got lost in Jersey.  It was a real struggle since my GPS kept dieing on me.  Eventually Mark took the lead with his working GPS and got us out of Jersey.

We basically took 80 all the way home. Ran into a few rainstorms on the way.  A ways out we decided to split uop because Mark wanted to take his time home, and letb me tell you 80 is a lonely road on the eastern side of PA at night.  Not much but trees and darkness.

I kept the throttle pinned and tried to ignore the pain in my rear end and ended up making it home a little after 11PM.

All in all it was a really great ride.  I saw many new things and put a few places on the list to return to and explore in more detail.  My only regret is that my tiome was so limited, but no matter how much time I have it never seems like enough.

Day four meant it was time to start working our way home and the plan was to work our way along the coast.

Lucky for us the White mountains were between us and the coast so we had to ride through them.

I have to admit it was hard to head for the  ocean and leave these awesome mountains.  I am not much of a “beach” guy, but I sure do love the mountains.  There is no doubt I will return to this area to explore it more!

As much as I loved the area, there were more states to see and time was running short so we headed south.

We caught US1 in Maine and took it into Portsmouth, NH.  This was a bustling area with big crowds and lots of activity.  Lots of action, but not really my cup of tea.

A guy at Prescott Park told me that in WW2 a German sub went underneath this bridge and into the bay.

There were many places to eat here, but I really was not hungry yet and decided to wait for our next ocean destination.

Our next destination was not the ocean – it was a pond.  Walden Pond specifically.  One of my favorite books of all time is Walden by  Henry David Thoreau.  I encourage everyone to read this book.  It is a book that will make you think about your life and it could very well be a life changing event.

Anyway, I was pretty excited about seeing the location where this book was written and upon arrival was quite surprised at how busy the place was!  i never knew there was so much interest in Thoreau!

Like far too many parks in the United States today there is an admission fee.  We were lucky and they allowed our motorcycles in for free and gave us premium parking!

First stop was a recreation of the house he built and lived in.

The bummer about the house is the fact that it is not in the original location.  The original location was “on a hillside elsewhere in the park”.

On we went to see the actual pond.  Over the years I had formed a image in my minds eye of what the pond loooked like.  In the picture below you can see exactly bwhat I had pictured:

Unfortunately, that carefully framed image is not an accurate representation of what we saw.  This is what we saw:

Good God.  The place is nearly a theme park.

I have been thinking ever since about how Thoreau would feel about this.  I don’t think he would like it.  On the other hand he might like the fact that people were enjoying the simple pleasure of his swimming hole.  All I know is that I was disappointed.  This is not at all what I was expecting.

Back on the bikes we start heading for a lighthouse at Beavertail State Park on Conanicut Island, New Hampshire.  There was no disappointment here.  This is an absolutely stunning location that made me forget all about the mountains.

I also got this great video of a couple guys trying to land a fish!

I was so overcome with the place I began sending pictures to bunches of people.  It is honestly one of the nicest places I have ever set foot – nearly the equal of the Deals Gap overlook.

The weather was absolutely perfect, and then almost instantly the sun was gone abnd we were buried under a heavy blanket of fog.  It was a bummer to have the weather change, but the reality was that we needed to move on anyway.  Our final destination of the day was to be Nyack, NY and it was still a long way off.

It was pretty late when we arived at our motel and we realized we were very close to NewYork City.  Neither of us had ever been to NYC so the temptation was strong to detour through the next day on the way home.

Watch for the next update to see what decision we made!

After we accomplished our first goal of the day it was time to work on the second – find moose.

We got some tips from a waitress at Mr. Pizza and set out to find them.  She gave us great advise because in no time at all I saw my first moose!

I have to say that it was pretty exciting to finally see one!  We had been seeing signs for hundreds of miles warning about them, but never saw any.  Byn the time our ride was over we had seen six in total, including one that ran down the road with Mark and I!

Click here to see video of a Drooling Moose

Early in the morning Friday our luck finally ran out.  The hurricane that was making its way up the coast finally caught up to us.

This was not entirely bad because we needed some rest.  Every time I woke up I would check the radar and if there was no end in sight I went back to sleep.  It was frustrating because we were on the westernmost side of the storm, almost out of the rain, but  the storm was moving pretty much straight north.

The rain finally cleared up around 2:00, so I packed up and headed for the mountain.  I thought Mark had already left, but when I got top the mountain he texted me asking when we were going to leave.  I told him I was already there and I would wait for him.  While I waited I talked to this lady:

She gave me a bunch of inside information about the area and was really nice to talk to.  I was a little worried because their signs were kind of scary:

She said “Just stay away from the edge and you will be fine.”  That seemed like good, solid advice to me.

After a while Mark showed up.

By now I was just itching to get to the top.  We started up and the higher we got the worse the weather became.  Mostly fog and rain with a decent amount of cold thrown in and a bit of wind.  Here is some video of the ride up.

It was very strange at the top.  It almost felt like we were on another planet.

A lot of folks chose to ride the train to the top or ride in one of their vans.  I think that would have taken much of the fun out of it.

The tracks just seem to drop right off the side of the mountain.

After we had explored the top we were very cold and wet and decided to head back to the bottom.  I think the weather was actually worse on the way down.

If you are ever in the area this is a place that you need to visit.  It was an amazing thing to see, and I hope I can do it again on a clear day.  The ride looks scarier than it actually is on the video, and any reasonably skilled rider on most any motorcycle should be able to make the ride safely.  The few hours at Mt. Washington will always be one of my fondest memories.