The MisterEd 8000; Grande Tour of America

Labor Day in the Rain

So, I bet you've been wondering about this picture:



Well, it was taken a litte before 1:00 in the afternoon at a rest area along I-80 near Bloomsburg, PA.

After spending some time with my Aunt and Grandfather at their house in Hingham, I struck out at 6:00 AM sharp on Labor Day.  I wasn't sure about travelling on Labor Day, but I had been looking at the weather forecasts for the previous couple of days for the roads along my westerly route.  They all called for lots of wet, lots of wind and lots of dreary.  There was a warm front stalled basically along I-80 from roughly Chicago to the East Coast and it was being fed with a ton of tropical moisture being fed up from the Gulf.   Vacation was winding down and I had to be back at work one week from today.  I had decided to give Labor Day traffic a try - worst case, I figured, was that I'd cut the day short if it got bad and pick it up again on Tuesday.

I actually got fairly lucky in retrospect.  Traffic never really was much of a factor, except in places where traffic and heavy rain combined.  I took off north out of Hingham in to Boston to catch I-90, the Mass Pike, westbound.  The return trip to Oregon wasn't going to be much more than interstate cruising - my time didn't allow a lot of backroad detours.  As I headed out through Quincy and Wollaston, the sky to the east was revealing a spectacular sunrise.  The sky to the west, however, was looking very dark and gray indeed.

The sunshine was pretty much gone before it had a chance that day.  I was in to gray skies by the time I got on to the toll part of I-90.  The rain began right around Sturbridge - I didn't even make it in to Connecticut dry.  The ride through Hartford and Danbury on in to NY State was on and off wet.  I stopped in Brewster, NY for breakfast for about an hour and just sat there watching the raindrops bounce off my bike while I sipped my coffee.

Just about the Pennsylvania state line, about 50 miles east of Scranton, the skies simply opened up and never closed for the rest of the day.  The rain got to "frog-strangler" intensity many, many times that morning and afternoon, but since it wasn't all that cold, I found myself basically settling in to a pretty comfortable ride.  My "rain" gloves, I discovered, can't deal with that much rain.  My fingers looked like prunes, but at least the gloves fulfilled a basic purpose of keeping the wind off my fingers, so my hands weren't uncomfortable.

Lunch was a sandwich at a gas station in Mackeyville.  The day was getting darker and wetter as I went, so I began thinking about when and where to stop for the day.

At around 2:00 PM, the rain intensified - as if I thought that had been possible at that stage.  Visibility became very poor and I found myself hitting standing water on the highway.  Many times, traffic slowed to 25 or 30 MPH due to the rain and I was starting to get worried about being more invisible than usual to the truckers and cagers around me.  This became the kind of rain that is so heavy that it begins to infiltrate through the air vents in the helmet.  The inside of my face shield was covered with a fine mist of spray and my face was dripping wet, even though fully enclosed.

3:15 PM found me at a gas station in Clearfield, PA.  It was just plain pouring and it hadn't let up, even slightly, for over an hour at that point.  I took a quick look at my mileage for the day and made the decision that 489 miles in 9 hours was an OK day, given the conditions.  The Holiday Inn right across the street from the gas station looked really comfy at that point, so I checked in for the night.

It was when I went to unpack that I discovered that while I'd found my tourpack to be water resistant, it couldn't cope with a day like today.  The pack weighed about 20 lbs when I put it on the bike this morning.  This afternoon, it weighed about 60 pounds... oops.

So, after I got settled in, this is what my hotel room looked like:


I had managed to pick a hotel without any guest laundry facilities, so I found that the room heater makes a pretty good clothes dryer.  A lot of the cable channels were running Labor Day marathons of things like "Monster Garage" and "American Chopper", so there was entertainment available while I dried my stuff.

Meanwhile, Quicksilver sat in the parking lot just outside my window:



The only dry clothes I had were the ones I had on under my rain gear, so they went back on the next day since I never really did get everything in my bag nice and dry.  I did pick up some trash bags, however, to wrap everything in for Tuesday's trip.

I had picked a 100 year rain event to start my westbound trip.  It was going to be wet for at least the next couple of days.  But, tomorrow was my day to visit the AMA Museum!  So, I had something to look forward to besides keeping my boots dry.

 

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