Day 3 - June 12, 2006
Departure time:  0550 CDT
Departure City: Kearney, Nebraska
Departure Mileage: 1485.7
Arrival time:  1800 CDT
Arrival City: Urbana, Illinois
Arrival mileage: 2170.8
Day 3 mileage:  685.1
Click here for a Google Map showing my progress to date

Middle America is a pretty amazing place, you know that?  What brings to mind "America" more quickly than the rolling fields of corn grwoing in Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas?  Rolling through Nebraska at sunrise brings to mind songs, poems, grand epic movie scenes from a bygone era.  The early morning fog brings with it the misty sunlight as well as the heady aroma of fresh cut hay - even if the more pungent aroma of a giant stockyard is a less welcome harbinger of the day.

It's easy to relax out here.  The roads are largely empty and the scenery goes all the way to the horizon.

So, today began the transition away from "transit" mode and more toward "vacation touring" mode.  I headed out a touch later than I had been over the last couple of days - although only by a few minutes.  As I pulled out of the parking lot of the hotel, I looked at the weather radar on my GPS and saw this gigantic green, yellow and red squall line about 15 miles to the west.  As I headed east, that big angry rain storm kept coming, but I was successfully outrunning it.  About 30 minutes after I left, it went right over the top of Kearney and not long after that, it started to fall apart.  I managed to stay dry for a third day in a row.  The GPS came in handy later in the day as well, but we'll get to that in a moment.

It was overcast leaving Kearney in advance of that rain storm, so it wasn't until about 50 miles east of Kearney that I finally got to see the sunrise:

A Nebraska sunrise...

I stopped in Omaha for a proper breakfast (as opposed to the coffee/granola bar gas station stops of late) and in the local Omaha newspaper, saw an interesting story of a professor who studies the sicence of "splatology" - that is, figuring out what kind of bugs the smears on your windshield used to be.

The article was interesting because on the morning ride, I had noticed that some of the insect remains on my windscreen sort of glowed with a rainbow hue when the sunlight struck them from in front just right.  I have a good collection to view and try to identify:

Bugs to date - at an Iowa gas stop.

I've decided that flatbed trailers are much, much more interesting than vans.  After all, you can see what the trucker is hauling with a flatbed.  Today, I saw a flatbed with five Bobcat excavators on board, all brand new - buckets stacked neatly at the front of the trailer.  I saw an 'oversized load" flatbed go by with full escort, carrying some kind of giant white tank with valves and tubing and pumps and such attached.  There was a flatbed that had parts of houses on it - I mean assembled parts, like partially assembled roof parts - gables and dormers and such - all shingled, painted and ready to go on to ?something?

About 50 miles east of Des Moines, there were signs indicating that the right lane was closed for construction.  The left lane ground to a standstill and creeped along at about 2 MPH.  There was an interchange coming up, but we were out in the middle of the middle again, so nobody was getting off the highway.  This is where the GPS came in handy - I took a second to zoom in on where I was and found that about 1/2 mile north of the highway, it appeared that there was a local road parallelling the interstate.  I took the exit and headed north.  Sure enough, there was a gravel road of good to fair quality.  This is one of those moments when I was glad to have brought the GS on this trip.  I headed east on this gravel road and travelled on it for a good ten miles until the next interchange - all the while looking accross the fields to the interstate and seeing it still crawling along, all while I was going along at between 35 and 50 MPH.  At the first interchange, I could see that traffic was still slow on the highway, so I continued on the local road.  The GPS map showed that there was another interchange in about two miles, and when I got there and looked to the right, I saw that the freeway was once again moving along well.  I got back on and had just avoided roughly 12 miles of stop and go crawl behind 100 semis.  I think I'm going to get used to this ability to go pretty much where I need to go without worrying too much about the kind of road in front of me.

So now, with right around 600 miles remaining until Canaan Valley, and a day and a half to get there, tomorrow will be a very relaxed day.   It's time to start sightseeing a little.

Day 4 - June 13, 2006
Departure time:  0710 CDT
Departure City: Urbana, Illinois
Departure Mileage: 2170.8
Arrival time:  1630 EDT
Arrival City: Charleston, West Virginia
Arrival mileage: 2633.9
Day 4 mileage:  463.1
Click here for a Google Map showing my progress to date

Well, that whole "do more sightseeing" thing kinda fell apart today due to the roads that I took and how different they were from what I thought they were going to be by looking on the map.  The idea today was to head out of Illinois on the interstate to Dayton, Ohio and then peel off on to US 35 to slowly cruise the little towns in souteastern Ohio before heading over the line in to West Virginia.

Well, US 35, I found out, isn't the little two lane road it appears to be on the map, gently snaking through 50 little burgs in southeastern Ohio.  It's actually a freeway.  Four lanes of limited access, 65 MPH, out in the middle of nowhere freeway.  In fact, there's a chunk of it that's so new that my mapping GPS didn't even know it was there.  The track on the device looks as if I spent an hour speeding along at 70 through farms and fields.

So, I took a couple of pictures, but today just turned in to another transit day, mostly.  I left a bit later, rode fewer miles, arrived earlier and in general had a much more relaxed day, so that was good.  As I passed through Dayton, I though about making a stop on the USAF Museum at Wright Patterson, but by the time I passed through, it was almost 1:00 in the afternoon and that wouldn't have made a very fun tour of the place.  I plan to stop there for a full day on the way back west again.

The start of the day began in the daylight this time!  I watched some Weather Channel in the morning to see what Alberto was doing, then packed up the bike, grabbed a cup of coffee and a bagel from the continental breakfast counter at the motel and hit the road.

It was a nice day all day, with only a few fair weather clouds in the sky.


A rest stop in Indiana.  Flat ground and fair skies.

It's amazing how long things stay flat and level out there.  All the way through the rest of Illinois, all the way accross Indiana and almost all the way through Ohio, the ground was flat.  Not a hill.  It is, after all, the plains, I guess.

It wasn't until about 35 or 40 miles west of West Virginia that the terrain started changing.


Southeastern Ohio - it's finally getting hilly again.

So, on I rode.  Stopping regularly to relax, but seeing nothing out there that looked much different than what you see above.  Ahh, what the heck, I'll just chalk up this part of the trip to "getting there" and call it good.

Tomorrow, I've got something like four or five hours to ride to get to Canaan Valley.

That's all for tonight.  I'm strangely tired, even though it was a short day.  Maybe those somewhat longer days past are catching up with me.

Day 5 - June 14, 2006
Departure time:  0930 EDT
Departure City: Charleston, WV
Departure Mileage: 2633.9
Arrival time:  1450 EDT
Arrival City: Canaan Valley, West Virginia
Arrival mileage: 2856.3
Day 5 mileage:  222.4
Click here for a Google Map showing my progress to date

Ladies and Gentlemen,  welcome to West Virginia!

A lazy, warm, quiet morning along the river.

Wow, what a place.  This state is all hills.  What's more is that you don't see rocks anywhere on those hills.  Out west, I'm used to seeing bare basalt cliffs and naked outcrops of ledge with a few scattered fir trees.  In this place, the trees are so thick you can't see any ground under them.  There's a certain peace around here.  Folks are relaxed and everywhere you go, nothing seems to be rushed or high pressure.

I headed out fairly late today after taking a leisurely shower and having a little breakfast at the motel.  I only had about 200 miles or so to go and all day to get there.  So this promoted more stopping, more sightseeing, more breaks.

As soon as I walked out the door I knew that I was most certainly back in the east.  It was quite humid though not overly warm.  The sky was a broken overcast - the very outer edges of what was left of tropical storm Alberto.  Still, there was no rain showing anywhere that I was going to be riding, so it appeared that I would once again stay dry today.

The first part of the ride curved along the Kanawha River through towns like Smithers and Alloy and Boomer.

In Alloy, home to the plant for West Virginia Alloys, I took a break across the tracks from the mill.


And not far up the road, I stopped alongside the Kanawha Falls public fishing area.


The falls stretch along a for a ways - I'd guess a good 1/4 mile or more diagonally across the river.

I took another break in a little town called Birch River across from what used to be Moss' Used Cars

Today was ride day at the National.  The first small groups headed out early to do a longer more intense ride on some of the best kinky asphalt that eastern WV has to offer.  Other groups left a bit later.  I headed out somewhere around 9:30 enroute to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) site at Green Bank to see the new offset feed Green Bank Telescope.


NRAO Green Bank telescope (GBT).  This picture is taken from the visitor's center.  You aren't allowed to use digital cameras and other personal electronics devices inside the "quiet zone" near the telescopes.  In fact, even vehicles with spark plugs are banned - all the vehicles that drive in the area around the telescopes are diesels.  When you're trying to detect extremely faint radio emmissions from a few billion miles out in space, almost any ground based electrical noise can seriuosly degrade the data.

The NRAO tour took about an hour and then we hung around the visitor's center for a bit.  They have a nice model of the GBT in the display area.

GBT model in the visitor's center.

The telescope is the first radio telescope with an active reflector surface.  The computers can drive some 2000 motor actuators mounted at the corner of the panels that make up the reflector in order to maintain its parabolic shape and counter shape changes caused by gravity and temperature changes.

The drive to route out electrical and electronic interference is serious business at the site.  Even the visitor's gallery was lined with copper and copper mesh on the windows.  Basically, any room or facility within the site that contains electrical noise producing hardware gets surrounded by a Faraday Cage.

If you look carefully, you can see that there is a fine copper mesh in behind each of the copper panels that surround the windows.  In the windows, you can see the copper screen material.

The entire site is located inside the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) which was set aside by the FCC in the 1950's in order to reduce outside interference to the telescopes at green bank and a nearby navy airbase.  High power transmitters are never licensed inside the NRQZ - and, this zone is why TV channel 37 is never licensed anywhere to any station in North America for any reason.  The frequencies that make up channel 37 are used for basic radio astronomy research.

After the observatory, we headed out along US 250 in to Virginia for a while, coming back along US 220, US 33 and US 32 back to the resort.

Upon returning to the resort mid-afternoon, I made the mistake of lying down for just a minute.  Two hours later...  The riding and all has been fun, and my poor old body just needed to recover from all that fun for a bit.

Dinner has now come and gone for most people and everyone's talking about where tomorrow will find them at the end of the day.  It's been another fun meet and it's been nice to see old friends and meet new ones.

Time to start packing up for departure tomorrow.

Day 7 - June 16, 2006
Departure time:  1045 EDT
Departure City: Canaan Valley, WV
Departure Mileage: 3025.7
Arrival time:  1735 EDT
Arrival City: Dunmore, Pennsylvania
Arrival mileage: 3397.3
Day 7 mileage:  371.6
Click here for a Google Map showing my progress to date

I was in a mood all day today.  I can't say it was a "bad" mood.  It certainly wasn't a "good" mood.  I slept in this morning, finally lollygagging up to breakfast around 8:45 or so.  Then I lollygagged some more back in my room making a couple of phone calls, checking e-mail, paying a couple of bills that needed to be taken care of (I'm on the road for a month, so I do have to do some personal business from time to time) and so forth.  Finally I packed the bike and headed out not much before 11:00 am.

The mood?  I dunno, it's hard to describe.  Some of it was just the plain old melencholy that comes at the end of anything that you've been doing fun that has to end.  These meets are kinda funny.  The long and short of it is that all we really are is a bunch of people that like touring on sporty motorcycles that talk to each other a lot on the internet.  But over time, you get to be friends with a lot of people.  Over time, you start looking forward to seeing people again.  Over time, you get so you miss them a little when we all dissolve back in to cyberspace.  Part of my mood was also probably thinking about our friend Brian who had some instant face-time with a deer on Wednesday morning on his way to the event.  His collarbone is broken and his bike is trashed, but he's besically OK otherwise.  But still, it was hard to put aside his crash as I rode over some of the same roads ... and kept seeing dead deer lying off to the side of the road that had been hit by various vehicles.

Part of the mood was probably also just being tired and looking forward to getting to mom and dad's house in Maine.

But at any rate, I was in a mood all day.  Being in a mood colors your riding, it colors your perceptions, it makes you a little short tempered when the traffic gets bad on the typical eastern interstate highway.  As such, I cut my day a bit shorter than I was planning.  I pulled off about an hour before I planned to tonight because I just finally got to a point where I just plain didn't want to be on the bike anymore today.

But, the ride...

I had one last picture left from last night of a lot of the bikes in the parking lot near one of the lodges at Canaan Valley

I believe this was during a period just before most people headed in for dinner and while the peak beer swilling time was going on.

I headed out on US 32 north through West Virginia toward Maryland where I joined up with I-68 and then headed up in to Pennsylvania.

Again, for the 7th straight day, I had dry, warm weather all day long.  Not a spot of rain anywhere in the eastern United States.

Near Mount Storm, West Virginia, I stopped for a break at a boat ramp / fishing spot on, oddly enough, Mount Storm Lake.  Mount Storm Lake is the cooling pond for the Mount Storm Power Station.  The power station outputs 1,600 megawatts and the lake water is kept around 100 degrees by the cooling processes in the plant.  The lake is apparently quite the spot for divers and dive training - the divers love the warm water.  In fact, while I was wandering around in the parking area, a dive instructor was setting out his red and white flag and buoy for a class that was going to start in an hour or so.


The 1,600 megawatt Mount Storm Power Station on Mount Storm Lake near Mount Storm, WV.  The station apparently burns some 15,000 tons of coal a day.  There's a handy coal mine about ten miles back down US 50.

After I crossed in to Maryland, I took a quick stop at the green ridge state forest to take in some shade, stretch my legs and swat at flies for a while.  Ahhhh, the east!


Green Ridge State Forest entrance area

At Hancock, Maryland, I stopped off to get a look at part of the C&O Canal that runs from Cumberland Maryland over to Washington, DC along the Potomac.  The section at Hancock is one of the smaller, nearly de-watered areas of the canal.  Perhaps I'll swing by the Georgetown or Grat Falls portion of it on my way back to Oregon later.


Old road bridge over the canal


A tiny piece of the C&O Canal at Hancock Station, Maryland.

The rest of the day was spent chugging up the interstate toward Scranton, where I rest this evening.  Tomorrow morning it's off to Westfield, Mass for lunch with a friend and his wife and then on to Amesbury, Mass for a visit with my best friend.

Off to relax for a while and take a nice hot shower before bed.

Go on to Week Two

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