Day two dawned cloudy, but definitely better weather than Kenosha the day before. It appeared from the weather reports that we had gotten ahead of the storm, and it had turned north while we were headed south, so it appeared that we were going to stay dry. After breakfast compliments of the Hampton Inn, we headed outside to pack up the bikes and get moving. It was a good bit warmer this morning than the day before, and we were surprised to find that there was no morning dew to wipe off of the bikes. We dispensed with the rain gear, only to see a few raindrops on the bikes. Fortunately, that was all it was, and we stayed dry today. We realized now that we were able to see the surroundings of the hotel in daylight that it was somewhat strangely located. It was literally in the middle of a cornfield! There was a grain elevator across the street, and a cell tower behind it, but as far as you could see in nearly all directions, it was corn, grain elevator, corn, grain elevator. We were both anxious to get away from the cornfields and into some more interesting riding.
Also, September 19th is the annual observance of "Talk Like a Pirate Day" so I posted all of my Facebook status updates whenever we stopped in some form of Pirate speak.
We headed out on US 421, and picked up State Route 48, which skirted us up north of Cincinnati. It was a nice rural road, with some curves and even a few hills. Chris and I were both amused by the sign when we came onto a part of the road which warned trucks not to use the road due to steep hills and dangerous curves. Sounds like fun! Outside of Cincinnati, we picked up I-71 to get to US-35. 35 is still a divided highway most of the way, but it goes through some cool towns along the way. We stopped in Chillicothe, OH for lunch, for my first experience eating at the Steak 'n Shake. Burgers were good, shakes were better.
From there, we hit State Route 327, which eventually connected to US-50, and both were really great roads. This was really the first of the nice curvy, mountain roads we were looking forward to on the trip. A brief stop for fuel and rest in Coolville (how could you *not* stop there??), and we were on our way again.
From there we caught State Route 47 in West Virginia, which is an amazing road. I found it using this website, and it is strongly recommended for both the scenery and the drive! One thing I will say about the late Senator Byrd and his ability to bring home the pork... WV's roads were in a completely different class from the comparatively awful roads in Indiana and Ohio - almost no frost heaves, and nice smooth pavement even on these little secondary two-lane roads. 47 ended at US-119, which took us into our landing point for the night, Weston, WV. We stayed at a Comfort Inn there that was obviously a converted motor lodge of some sort - still had the external entrances to the rooms, but they had built a new building in the front to house the check-in and breakfast area. We went to the plaza next door to the hotel and grabbed some "Italian" food from a place called Genos. The food was passable, the beer was cold. I ordered an Italian Sausage sandwich, but instead of your standard tube-shaped sausage with peppers, onions and maybe some tomato sauce in a bun, this had sliced sausage, peppers, onions, and the entire thing was covered in cheese, like a pizza, but on a sub roll. It wasn't bad, but definitely not what I was expecting. We arrived a good bit earlier tonight than we had last night, so we were able to get to bed earlier in preparation for an early departure the next morning so that we could get into Richmond in the early afternoon.
I can honestly say that a lot of the roads we traveled today more than made up for the relatively boring, tiring freeway slog that we did the day before.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Motorcycle trip - day 1, Kenosha to Greensburg, IN
Day one dawned bright and sunny and beaut... oh, wait, no... we woke up to a thunderstorm! Just exactly what you hope for when you're setting out on a 900+ mile motorcycle ride, right? So, we set ourselves to packing the bikes and getting ready for the trip, hoping that it would blow over. In fact, it actually got worse for a time, but fortunately by the time we were packed, and had met Heather's sister at the Coffee Pot restaurant for a hearty breakfast (great Corned Beef Hash!), it had mostly stopped raining and the roads were just wet. Either way, it was still looking pretty cruddy, so we suited up in our rain gear, and packed our clothes and electronics into plastic bags to keep them dry. We got a later start than we thought, probably around 10AM, but given the weather, I'm not sure that was a bad thing.
This being the first time I have ridden a Harley (that happened to also be someone else's bike), I was less than thrilled with the idea of starting out in the rain. However, apparently I've gained enough XP for my motorcycle riding skill that I was able to manage the -10 rain and -5 unfamiliar motorcycle modifiers and keep the shiny side up. This is not to say that it was exactly easy. I definitely had a couple of close "saving throws" (ok, I'll stop with the gamer references for a while, I promise) where the bike fishtailed or the front tire tried to lock up on braking, but it didn't put too much of a damper on our travels. Once we got into Chicago, we headed towards Lakeshore Drive, and were able to see the Chicago skyline and Lake Michigan, including Navy Pier, the McCormick center, etc which was really nice despite dampness and intermittent actual rain. Our rain gear kept us reasonably dry, and we drove out of the rain as we got out of the city. As an aside, by the end of the riding day, really the only part of me that was wet was the part of my jeans that stuck out of the bottom of my rain pants, which in turn had wicked moisture down my socks, making my boots pretty damp. Guess there's something to be said for overboots.
One thing to note, because we were avoiding interstates, this also had the practical upshot of allowing us to avoid Chicago and Indiana's repressive toll road system, with one small exception, where we were on a toll road for all of 2 miles to get from one secondary road to another. Chris had an EZ pass, but since I don't have one, I had to pay cash. The smallest bill I had was a $20, so I ended up with 18 one dollar coins as change - fun!
After we got out of Chicago and into Indiana on US-41 and 52, unfortunately the roads were pretty stereotypically midwestern. That is, flat, straight, and flanked by corn. As I will cover more in my actual post on my riding impressions, these are not bikes that really make a 1+ hour run at 75 mph exactly comfortable, so we were squirming a little between stops on this section. The one highlight was that we drove through a portion of the Fowler Ridge Wind Farm. While I have seen wind turbines before, this is the first time I was able to see them from a short distance like this, and it really did give a better impression of their size. I honestly don't understand why people are so worried about the aesthetics of a wind farm - I think they're sort of graceful and beautiful in an industrial sort of way.
We stopped for lunch (and gas - with a 3.5 gal tank, this is a regular occurrence) a bit late, but since we had gotten a late breakfast, we weren't really hurting for having pushed along for a few hours first. Lunch was White Castle. Since neither of us live near a While Castle, I was pleased to have found one right on our route - it's like going to In-N-Out Burger on the west coast - you gotta take advantage of the opportunity when it presents itself. A bit further along the path, we encountered a car show in a car dealer's parking lot, and decided we had to stop and wander around for a few minutes. It was pretty cool. They had the usual cross-section of muscle cars, but they also had a first generation Honda CVCC, which I'm pretty sure is smaller than a first-gen Mini, and a couple of nice choppers. We only spent about 20 minutes wandering around, but it was a nice diversion.
The second half of our trip brought us through the middle of the Purdue campus in West Lafayette. Another unforeseen upshot of getting a late start is the fact that we didn't come through Purdue until well after the football game was over. I don't know how Purdue is in terms of traffic pre/post game, but if it's anything like PSU, we would have been stuck in bad traffic. As it was, traffic was slow on our way out of town because of 2 or 3 different accidents.
Next stop was the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. This was mainly a place to allow us to stretch our legs, especially since we were mainly on the Interstate and there was some pretty major construction and traffic outside of Indianapolis, but we did take the obligatory pictures in front of the main entrance. From there, we headed for Greensburg, IN and our reservation at the Hampton Inn. It was well after dark, probably almost 8:30 by the time we arrived, and we were quite happy to be done traveling for the day. Last order of business was to find some food. There wasn't a lot of options, because Greensburg isn't exactly a huge town, but we ended up at Buffalo Wings and Rings, which had decent wings, good beer, and TVs where we could catch up on the day's college football action. We splurged and had dessert in celebration of my birthday, and then headed back to the hotel.
Preemptive Advil applied, we dragged ourselves into bed and enjoyed some needed rest before the next day of traveling. Day two would see us headed for Cincinnati, covering pretty much all of Ohio, and then a portion of West Virginia.
This being the first time I have ridden a Harley (that happened to also be someone else's bike), I was less than thrilled with the idea of starting out in the rain. However, apparently I've gained enough XP for my motorcycle riding skill that I was able to manage the -10 rain and -5 unfamiliar motorcycle modifiers and keep the shiny side up. This is not to say that it was exactly easy. I definitely had a couple of close "saving throws" (ok, I'll stop with the gamer references for a while, I promise) where the bike fishtailed or the front tire tried to lock up on braking, but it didn't put too much of a damper on our travels. Once we got into Chicago, we headed towards Lakeshore Drive, and were able to see the Chicago skyline and Lake Michigan, including Navy Pier, the McCormick center, etc which was really nice despite dampness and intermittent actual rain. Our rain gear kept us reasonably dry, and we drove out of the rain as we got out of the city. As an aside, by the end of the riding day, really the only part of me that was wet was the part of my jeans that stuck out of the bottom of my rain pants, which in turn had wicked moisture down my socks, making my boots pretty damp. Guess there's something to be said for overboots.
One thing to note, because we were avoiding interstates, this also had the practical upshot of allowing us to avoid Chicago and Indiana's repressive toll road system, with one small exception, where we were on a toll road for all of 2 miles to get from one secondary road to another. Chris had an EZ pass, but since I don't have one, I had to pay cash. The smallest bill I had was a $20, so I ended up with 18 one dollar coins as change - fun!
After we got out of Chicago and into Indiana on US-41 and 52, unfortunately the roads were pretty stereotypically midwestern. That is, flat, straight, and flanked by corn. As I will cover more in my actual post on my riding impressions, these are not bikes that really make a 1+ hour run at 75 mph exactly comfortable, so we were squirming a little between stops on this section. The one highlight was that we drove through a portion of the Fowler Ridge Wind Farm. While I have seen wind turbines before, this is the first time I was able to see them from a short distance like this, and it really did give a better impression of their size. I honestly don't understand why people are so worried about the aesthetics of a wind farm - I think they're sort of graceful and beautiful in an industrial sort of way.
We stopped for lunch (and gas - with a 3.5 gal tank, this is a regular occurrence) a bit late, but since we had gotten a late breakfast, we weren't really hurting for having pushed along for a few hours first. Lunch was White Castle. Since neither of us live near a While Castle, I was pleased to have found one right on our route - it's like going to In-N-Out Burger on the west coast - you gotta take advantage of the opportunity when it presents itself. A bit further along the path, we encountered a car show in a car dealer's parking lot, and decided we had to stop and wander around for a few minutes. It was pretty cool. They had the usual cross-section of muscle cars, but they also had a first generation Honda CVCC, which I'm pretty sure is smaller than a first-gen Mini, and a couple of nice choppers. We only spent about 20 minutes wandering around, but it was a nice diversion.
The second half of our trip brought us through the middle of the Purdue campus in West Lafayette. Another unforeseen upshot of getting a late start is the fact that we didn't come through Purdue until well after the football game was over. I don't know how Purdue is in terms of traffic pre/post game, but if it's anything like PSU, we would have been stuck in bad traffic. As it was, traffic was slow on our way out of town because of 2 or 3 different accidents.
Next stop was the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. This was mainly a place to allow us to stretch our legs, especially since we were mainly on the Interstate and there was some pretty major construction and traffic outside of Indianapolis, but we did take the obligatory pictures in front of the main entrance. From there, we headed for Greensburg, IN and our reservation at the Hampton Inn. It was well after dark, probably almost 8:30 by the time we arrived, and we were quite happy to be done traveling for the day. Last order of business was to find some food. There wasn't a lot of options, because Greensburg isn't exactly a huge town, but we ended up at Buffalo Wings and Rings, which had decent wings, good beer, and TVs where we could catch up on the day's college football action. We splurged and had dessert in celebration of my birthday, and then headed back to the hotel.
Preemptive Advil applied, we dragged ourselves into bed and enjoyed some needed rest before the next day of traveling. Day two would see us headed for Cincinnati, covering pretty much all of Ohio, and then a portion of West Virginia.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Road trip!!! - the beginning
These next few posts are going to be about a fantastic road trip that I just recently took over the weekend of my birthday. This will serve as the introduction.
Logistics were a bit... interesting. First, I had to fly to Chicago to meet my traveling companion. He had flown to Chicago from Richmond earlier in the week, met up with his wife in Michigan, driven to her parents' house in Kenosha, WI, where we would actually set out on the trip, headed for Richmond.
I was able to use my frequent flier miles on United to get a super-saver ticket, which only cost me 8750 miles plus $5. The only downside is that I misread the times, and booked what I thought was an 11AM flight that ended up being an 11PM flight. Doh! While I was a little disappointed that I wasn't going to be able to meet my Uncle Mark (who lives in Chicago) for lunch, for a free flight, I guess I don't have a lot of choices. Side note - I tried "Mobile Check-in" for the first time, which had me using my smartphone's web browser to display a 2D barcode that could be scanned at TSA and upon boarding. I printed a paper pass too, just to be safe, but didn't end up having to use it. Welcome to the future!
Friday night found me going through airport security wearing steel-toed boots and carrying a motorcycle helmet under my arm, which went surprisingly smoothly. I refrained from making any "this is my insurance in case the plane crashes" jokes until we landed in Chicago.
So, I should probably pause here and explain how this all came about, and why I'm carrying a motorcycle helmet (and jacket) on an airplane bound for Chicago.
Chris, my best friend from college, has been living in Orlando, Florida for the past few years. He met his wife there, and they were married last year. He and his wife both have motorcycles, specifically Harley-Davidson Sportster 1200s. However, when his wife moved to Michigan to start grad school (MSU, but we won't hold that against her), they moved most of their stuff and the motorcycles to be stored at her parents' house in Kenosha, WI, with the assumption that Chris would move into the general area once he found a job up there. Chris just recently got a new job in Richmond and moved up from Orlando in early summer. Not exactly close to Michigan, but closer at least, and definitely closer to me, which I'm ecstatic about. So, I've been after him to bring his motorcycle back down so that we could maybe ride together sometime. However, he wasn't really keen on having to load the bikes into the in-laws' truck and trailer and drive them down from Wisconsin, especially after already having to do that once when he moved their stuff down to Richmond. I suggested that they could ride them down, but he didn't figure that his wife would be overly interested in riding all that way. I immediately volunteered (assuming that they were ok with me riding one of the bikes, of course), and so that rapidly became the plan - we just had to figure out what weekend to do it. Well, coincidentally the best weekend for all concerned was the weekend of my birthday, and my very understanding wife agreed that this would be a most excellent birthday present even if it meant she had to be a single parent for a few days, so here we are.
Chris picked me up from the airport late Friday night in the in-laws' bright orange Ford Mustang GT convertible, and despite the fact that it was probably only 55 degrees out, we rode back from the airport with the top down (and the heat blasting). Nothing like romping on the throttle of a big V8 with an aftermarket exhaust while driving under an overpass with the top down to put a big, stupid grin on your face!
With all of the pre-trip traveling covered, I should talk about the actual trip planning a bit. It's pretty easy to get on the interstates and haul yourself across a couple of states at best speed in a day or two, but a real road trip is as much about the journey as the destination. So, I decided to take a page from my Dad's book on road trips and plan a more interesting route, one that avoided the miles and miles of tedium that most interstate travel represents in favor of secondary highways, small towns, etc - actually see the country instead of just driving past it at 80mph. So instead of just plugging everything into Google Maps and hoping for the best, I started doing some research.
I found two great websites, here and here that had maps/gps coordinates of scenic drives or otherwise interesting roads. I started with a list of candidates from all of the states/regions that I knew we'd have to go through in order to get between Kenosha and Richmond. A number of the routes I found on the Open Road Journey website were actually day-trip style loops, so I had to figure out which part of those to use in order to make forward progress, and then set about changing the route on Google maps to string those together and get a rough route laid out.
Once I was mostly happy with the route in Google Maps, I had to find a way to extract that as something that my GPS would understand, as I wanted to at least try using the GPS instead of a map and paper directions. Google has a button that says "send to GPS" and I thought, "AHA!" Well... all that does is send the destination address, which is pretty much useless. None of the multiple waypoints were coming over, so it was time for plan B. There are websites (little script bookmarklets, actually) that you can use to extract Google Maps directions to a file that your GPS understands, which worked like a charm. Once I had that, Garmin has this cool (free!) program called Base Camp that will use the maps in your GPS and allow you to import and export routes, change waypoints, as well as load the route to your GPS's memory. There was a lot of tweaking to be done, because I discovered that once I actually got zoomed down far enough a lot of the waypoints that Google generated were not technically on the road, so there was a lot of U-turns and doubling back to actually reach them that I had to fix. After all of that was sorted out, I was able to play back the route to determine stopping points based on distance and time so that I could figure out where we were going to stay each night, possible lunch and fuel stops, and the like, based on the fact that we'd basically have 3 days to make the trip.
Highlights of the route included riding along Lakeshore Drive in Chicago, through West Lafayette (Purdue), past the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, through parts of the Monongahela and George Washington National Forests, and a bit of Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park. It took me a good portion of Labor Day weekend to hack on this and get the route the way I wanted it, but looking back on it from this end, it was totally worth it! Next post - Day 1.
Logistics were a bit... interesting. First, I had to fly to Chicago to meet my traveling companion. He had flown to Chicago from Richmond earlier in the week, met up with his wife in Michigan, driven to her parents' house in Kenosha, WI, where we would actually set out on the trip, headed for Richmond.
I was able to use my frequent flier miles on United to get a super-saver ticket, which only cost me 8750 miles plus $5. The only downside is that I misread the times, and booked what I thought was an 11AM flight that ended up being an 11PM flight. Doh! While I was a little disappointed that I wasn't going to be able to meet my Uncle Mark (who lives in Chicago) for lunch, for a free flight, I guess I don't have a lot of choices. Side note - I tried "Mobile Check-in" for the first time, which had me using my smartphone's web browser to display a 2D barcode that could be scanned at TSA and upon boarding. I printed a paper pass too, just to be safe, but didn't end up having to use it. Welcome to the future!
Friday night found me going through airport security wearing steel-toed boots and carrying a motorcycle helmet under my arm, which went surprisingly smoothly. I refrained from making any "this is my insurance in case the plane crashes" jokes until we landed in Chicago.
So, I should probably pause here and explain how this all came about, and why I'm carrying a motorcycle helmet (and jacket) on an airplane bound for Chicago.
Chris, my best friend from college, has been living in Orlando, Florida for the past few years. He met his wife there, and they were married last year. He and his wife both have motorcycles, specifically Harley-Davidson Sportster 1200s. However, when his wife moved to Michigan to start grad school (MSU, but we won't hold that against her), they moved most of their stuff and the motorcycles to be stored at her parents' house in Kenosha, WI, with the assumption that Chris would move into the general area once he found a job up there. Chris just recently got a new job in Richmond and moved up from Orlando in early summer. Not exactly close to Michigan, but closer at least, and definitely closer to me, which I'm ecstatic about. So, I've been after him to bring his motorcycle back down so that we could maybe ride together sometime. However, he wasn't really keen on having to load the bikes into the in-laws' truck and trailer and drive them down from Wisconsin, especially after already having to do that once when he moved their stuff down to Richmond. I suggested that they could ride them down, but he didn't figure that his wife would be overly interested in riding all that way. I immediately volunteered (assuming that they were ok with me riding one of the bikes, of course), and so that rapidly became the plan - we just had to figure out what weekend to do it. Well, coincidentally the best weekend for all concerned was the weekend of my birthday, and my very understanding wife agreed that this would be a most excellent birthday present even if it meant she had to be a single parent for a few days, so here we are.
Chris picked me up from the airport late Friday night in the in-laws' bright orange Ford Mustang GT convertible, and despite the fact that it was probably only 55 degrees out, we rode back from the airport with the top down (and the heat blasting). Nothing like romping on the throttle of a big V8 with an aftermarket exhaust while driving under an overpass with the top down to put a big, stupid grin on your face!
With all of the pre-trip traveling covered, I should talk about the actual trip planning a bit. It's pretty easy to get on the interstates and haul yourself across a couple of states at best speed in a day or two, but a real road trip is as much about the journey as the destination. So, I decided to take a page from my Dad's book on road trips and plan a more interesting route, one that avoided the miles and miles of tedium that most interstate travel represents in favor of secondary highways, small towns, etc - actually see the country instead of just driving past it at 80mph. So instead of just plugging everything into Google Maps and hoping for the best, I started doing some research.
I found two great websites, here and here that had maps/gps coordinates of scenic drives or otherwise interesting roads. I started with a list of candidates from all of the states/regions that I knew we'd have to go through in order to get between Kenosha and Richmond. A number of the routes I found on the Open Road Journey website were actually day-trip style loops, so I had to figure out which part of those to use in order to make forward progress, and then set about changing the route on Google maps to string those together and get a rough route laid out.
Once I was mostly happy with the route in Google Maps, I had to find a way to extract that as something that my GPS would understand, as I wanted to at least try using the GPS instead of a map and paper directions. Google has a button that says "send to GPS" and I thought, "AHA!" Well... all that does is send the destination address, which is pretty much useless. None of the multiple waypoints were coming over, so it was time for plan B. There are websites (little script bookmarklets, actually) that you can use to extract Google Maps directions to a file that your GPS understands, which worked like a charm. Once I had that, Garmin has this cool (free!) program called Base Camp that will use the maps in your GPS and allow you to import and export routes, change waypoints, as well as load the route to your GPS's memory. There was a lot of tweaking to be done, because I discovered that once I actually got zoomed down far enough a lot of the waypoints that Google generated were not technically on the road, so there was a lot of U-turns and doubling back to actually reach them that I had to fix. After all of that was sorted out, I was able to play back the route to determine stopping points based on distance and time so that I could figure out where we were going to stay each night, possible lunch and fuel stops, and the like, based on the fact that we'd basically have 3 days to make the trip.
Highlights of the route included riding along Lakeshore Drive in Chicago, through West Lafayette (Purdue), past the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, through parts of the Monongahela and George Washington National Forests, and a bit of Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park. It took me a good portion of Labor Day weekend to hack on this and get the route the way I wanted it, but looking back on it from this end, it was totally worth it! Next post - Day 1.
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