Monday Morning, June 22

It's hard to imagine that I have been doing this for three weeks. All the days seem to run together. The scenery, the culture, the experiences. Too much information for my brain to process in such a short time. Got up to a soggy day. Everything is wet. A glimmer of sunshine at 6am so I had everything hanging up on tree limbs. My motorcycle has become a clothes line. I hate packing everything wet because it is wet in the evening when I unpack it and it has acquired a bit of a musty odor. The inside of my tent is dry as well as my sleeping bag so I will quit whining about a little smell. I am an ex-dairy farmer (no problem with smells!) First thing every morning I take a shower (where one is available), and there is usually just one water temperature; Wow! Wakes me right up! Then I heat water on my handy-dandy one-burner camp stove and make coffee and my oatmeal-flax breakfast. I put the balance of hot water in my bowl and use my finger to wash away all the sticking oatmeal. Then I sit down and read my Bible and pray and ask God to keep me safe and to experience Him to the fullest, and drink two cups of the finest coffee ever made. Praying for my family and my church. Whooeee, the Bike started another morning. Praise the Lord!

At 9am I was in Connecticut. Oregon type rain - intermittent drizzle. I sat for a while in a Dunkin Donuts drinking a cup of coffee and warming up (No donuts!) I am riding through a lot of little burgs. Old houses. Mostly 45mph limits on semi-winding roads and 30mph in the towns. Fun speed because I can look at the scenery, but slow covering ground.

At Noon I found another Dunkin Donuts in Chepachet, Rhode Island and drank coffee while I waited for the rain to let up. Raining hard right now. If this keeps up I won't make Maine tonight. The rain is not letting up and the weather report is for even worse. SO, I am spending the night in the STICKS TAVERN. There are evidently a lot of motorcyclists through here and a lot of the taverns have rooms for bikers to stay overnight. So that's what I'm going to do. The owner even gave me a souvenir T-shirt. :-) Only made 250 miles today, but can't ride in a steady downpour.

One of the things that I knew when I left on this trip was that I was a motorcycle riding novice. I had never ridden a motorcycle in my life except for a Yamaha Trail 90 on the farm when I was a kid, but never on the road. When I got started , all the habits that I had developed to drive a car no longer worked. Everything was different. I had to think every time I shifted: "Let's see now, is it one down and four up or the other way round." Sometimes I would shift down when I should have shifted up and I would get this sudden unexpected slow down as I released the clutch. Speaking of the clutch, it is no longer on the floor, it is on one of the handle bars. Most of the time I remember that it is the handle on the left but occasionally I forget. You don't even want to know what that looks like! The throttle is now a thing that is run by my hand, not my foot. Do I twist it up or down to go faster? Sometimes I just do it a little bit and figure it out by trial and error. I have figured out that if I turn loose of the throttle that it will slow down on its own as long as I remember it is the right hand, not the left. I have yet to decide if all of this is a result of being a novice or being old and senile! I have now ridden over 6000 miles on this trip and I seem to be doing more by habit. Though because of being a novice I have been incredibly attentive in my driving. Brings back the days of learning to drive a car and worse yet, the days of riding in the car that one of my kids was driving as they learned.