The MisterEd 8000; Grande Tour of America

The final leg home

This was the last day on the road for a bit.  I must say that I was looking forward to a few days off the road.  This is day nine since I left Oregon.

I left Newfoundland at about 6:30 AM and just simply hit the Interstate without breakfast, coffee or anything.  The hot weather?  A long distant memory now.  The big news on the Weather Channel last night had been how this big cold front had finally pushed on south and was bringing relief to all those places that had been so hot - and that I had ridden through.  This morning in Newfoundland, it's a crisp 46 degrees when I leave the hotel.

I have no road pictures from this day.  Every stop was a pit-stop of less than 3 minutes - I was in "get there" mode.  The reason the trip time today is over 12 hours is that I stopped to see people on the way.  Lunch was at my friend Glen's house in Massachusetts and I also visited my friend Mike in Yarmouth, Maine along the way.

Heading east out of Pennsylvania, the weather finally started warming up a bit near Danbury, Connecticut.  By Hartford, things were comfortable enough again to shed the heavy gloves and get back to summer riding.  I hit the Mass Pike at about 10:00 AM and pressed on without any thought of stopping.  This leg of the trip did trigger some reflection though.  I started thinking about where I had been in the last week, the sights I had seen.  It had been an interesting journey.  I had visited places I had never been before and almost every day had brought something to smile about.  It had been a great nine days and now I was rolling in to my home states to visit with family and friends and relax a bit.

And isn't it just when you're about to finish a trip that you let your guard down?  Isn't it about this time that something catastrphic is supposed to happen?

Yup.  And it nearly did.  Here I'd travelled almost 4800 miles without any major issues.  No huge traffic problems, no major bike breakdowns, no deer in the headlights requiring rapid stopping.  Here I was less than 75 miles from my destination and in an area I know very, very well.  On I-95 in Freeport, Maine (home of L.L.Bean) a lady in a late 60's vintage Chevy pickup truck was sitting in the median at a maintenance crossover - you know, the things that only snowplows and cops are supposed to use and that are marked quite clearly with signs saying "Authorized Vehicles Only"?

Well, this gal decides that the empty space in front of my bike and about ten cars I was travelling with at the time was empty enough for her to jump in to, so she hits the gas and that old truck gave her everything it had... When she realized she was about to be clobbered by a really big SUV coming up the left lane, she veers quickly into the right lane - directly in front of me and Quicksilver, now travelling at about 70 MPH.  Since she was doing all of 30 at the time, I closed the distance between our vehicles at a rather astonishing rate.  Did she continue into the breakdown lane?  No.  She kept accelerating, black and blue smoke pouring out the tailpipe, hoping, I guess, to eventually get up to something approximating highway speed.

By now, I'm executing a maximum braking maneuver from 70 and hearing screeching tires somewhere behind me - never a good sound, but worse when you can't really tell where they're coming from.

Don't ask me how, but none of us hit her or each other.  I went around her and paced her, adjacent to the driver's side window for a bit - One of my fingers needed some exercise.

The maddening thing about this, however?  This mental giant didn't even need to do what she did.  She was less than 1/4 mile from an exit where whe could have gotten off the highway and gotten back on in the other direction safely.  I didn't get her plate number, but I saw the guy in the car behind me staring at her as he grabbed his cell phone.

After riding the I-95 high speed obstacle course, I pulled in to my mom and dad's driveway at a little before 7:00 PM.

This is what I had been waiting for all week long:

Yeah, there's a lot of nice scenery around the USA, but this is home and to me, it's the best.

A few links