NY, PA, OH, IN, IL, MO, AR and KY or "to the Ozarks and back"

[ssevy]

Welcome to my latest ride report. This time around I did not take nearly as many photos, as we covered many more miles per day and at a faster pace. While last year's group was four riders for the entire trip, this year it was just Randy and I, except for adding our good friend Denny for two days. We were pretty lucky with the weather, hitting Jasper AR under perfect blue skies, and only riding in the wet for a few hours here and there. The bikes were flawless (even though my mechanic is sometimes a dolt :icon_wink:), and we stayed off interstates except for a few miles here and there. Overall, it was the most demanding riding I have done, with long days following other long days for a total distance of 3500 miles (not to be disgusting, but the blisters on my ass were literal and not figurative )
Before I get into the details, here are some general impressions:
1- Keeping to the back roads is a mixed bag of experiences. You do meet some great people and see some real variety, but the economic hardships that we saw in nearly every small town and rural setting were quite sobering. Old historic structures are mostly boarded up and for sale, while Dollar General has a new store seemingly on every corner (they make WalMart look like a rare encounter they are so plentiful).
2- We saw literally hundreds of campaign signs on lawns, and of all of these, only one sign was for Clinton. The most ironic Trump sign was the one placed right next to the cardboard "10 commandments" that I saw in KY.
3- As was the case last year, Hardly Decent, son were the most common bike we saw. There were just a handful of other brands, not one of which was a Triumph. In fact, we saw very few bikes at all, which seemed strange, especially in the Ozarks, and especially since September is one of the best riding months we have.
Overall, it is always interesting to ride new roads and regions, and while I enjoyed seeing the Ozarks, there are actually much better roads in Ohio and especially where I live in the Adirondacks. I'm glad I went there to see what all the fuss was about, but neither of us has any interest in going back, as there are just too many other great roads to find elsewhere.

Day #1 - Home to Whispering Pines Campground
370 miles



Dave joined me for half a day as I headed to my first destination. The first 200 miles were all on familiar roads, and we made good time. Dave split off and looped back just before lunch, and I continued on and grabbed a bite in Cazenovia NY.



After lunch I turned on my new Interphone Tour intercom to listen to directions from my Iphone, as I would soon be turning south onto unfamiliar roads. Imagine my delight when I discovered that the volume level was so low as to be inaudible! Now, before you jump to any unfair conclusions, you should know that I did use it with my buddy prior to this trip, and while the volume output was never what I would characterize as impressive (feeble would be a better word), I could, in fact, hear it. Maybe the firmware update that I did just prior to this trip affected something, or maybe it just decided to shit the bed when its status on this trip had been upgraded to "crucially important", but regardless, it was now utterly useless to me. Being such a clever lad, I had decided to forego paper maps and instead upload the directions for the entire trip to my phone. So...here I am not yet 300 miles into a 3500 mile trip, and I'm already feeling lower than whale shit. What to do?

Continuing on my ride and pondering my options, I saw a Walmart ahead in the distance and quite suddenly I heard a trumpet fanfare in my head (clearly it was my imagination and not my new Interphone Turd). Pulling into Wally World, I proceeded into the store and grabbed a set of the smallest ear buds they had, and then headed back to the bike. Unpacking the ear buds, I carefully stuffed them as far into my ears as possible, then gingerly donned my helmet. It took a few tries to get them to stay in, and I made a mental note to write a thank you card to the engineer who decided to go with the stickiest coating he could find for the cords coming from each ear bud, as this ensured that they would cling to every fabric one might encounter on a riding jacket, thus making it childishly easy to dislodge the ear buds with just a quick head check when switching lanes.
Voila! I could hear the directions and was back in business. It took a few tries to get the volume just right, but now I could concentrate on the road and not worry about missing any turns. Or so I thought...
I finally pulled into the campground about 6:30 PM, having been in the saddle about 11.5 hours for the day. Randy was all set up with his tent, and I followed his lead in short order, as there were storms in the forecast. It felt great to get off the bike, and we turned in at a decent hour.
About midnight, a torrential electrical storm of biblical proportions went through, and the wind and rain were epic. I opened the weather app on my phone, and lay in my sleeping bag and read the distances of the lightning strikes as they hit around us: 11 miles away, 9 miles away, 5 miles away, 2 miles away, then suddenly there was a sound like someone ripping a very large canvas sail, accompanied by an intensely bright white light, followed by a boom that shook everything. The weather app read "0 miles", and I decided at that same moment (coincidentally of course), that I had really been disrespectful to the campground owners not to have better inspected the inside of the shower building earlier, and proceeded to right that wrong immediately! In fact, Usain Bolt couldn't have crossed that patch of wet ground from my tent to the bath house any more quickly!
The storm finally abated about 2:00 AM, and we got some sleep.

Day #2 Whispering Farts Campground to Randy's house
280 miles



We packed up our soaking wet gear (always a treat) and loaded the bikes. Then we headed southwest through the Allegany National Forest and into northeastern Ohio. With all of the fracking for natural gas that has taken place in PA, the state has spent some serious money on their roads, and they were much improved from the last time I was here. Overall, however, as soon as you cross into Ohio, you immediately notice that things are better economically. The farms look to be more prosperous, and the roads are mostly all in good shape. Ohio roads are something really different, as many were originally buffalo paths, which were then used by Native Americans, and eventually by white settlers as roads. If you can imagine taking a ribbon of blacktop and just dropping it out of the sky onto a bunch of rolling hills, then you could be a road engineer for the state of Ohio! These are really a blast on a bike, but the nonchalant way they warn you about upcoming hairpin turns can be a bit worrisome the first few times
Our route brought us through Amish farm country, and that always means lots of tourists and traffic, which we hit just as the temperature was getting hot. Finally getting around the worst of it, we bear left onto some state roads that are just awesome as we head south towards Randy's house. We finally pull into the garage late afternoon, and drape all of our gear over lawn chairs to dry it all out. Our buddy Denny is scheduled to arrive sometime today, and tomorrow we leave for Spring Mill IN. (Poor Denny has to ride through torrential rain most of the way, and he arrives pretty late after dark).

To be continued...

[Sin_Tiger]

How are the rim seals holding up?

[ssevy]

How are the rim seals holding up?

Great! I needed to top up the air a couple of pounds mid-trip, but they have been fine since.

[nickjtc]

Is there a Steamer under all that luggage?? 

[ssevy]

Is there a Steamer under all that luggage?? 

Hah! Yes, although it looks bulky because I have a soft cooler bungeed onto the back to keep some food and drinks cold. Otherwise, about the same as I usually carry

[Sin_Tiger]

The Mosko Moto gear is excellent 

[ssevy]

Shit shit shit shit shit!
I did the same boneheaded thing just now that I did a few months ago:  I was trying to insert a photo, so I went to preview to check it, and it wasn't working, so I hit the back button on my browser and lost the two hours of work I had just done

This is why I had not finished the ride report earlier, as it had pissed me off so much that I had to just walk away.

Oh well, now to try and rewrite all of the stuff I had just written. They say the third time is the charm, so we'll see I guess. It may be a few days until I can muster up the enthusiasm to try again.

[Timbox2]

Nice, what is the black bike, Daytona or Sprint? Hang on, its got luggage, must be Sprint with a full fairing added??

[Sin_Tiger]

I hear ya Just about done when she shouts "yer tea's oot an it's goan cald" and it's gone I do it in a text file now so I at least recover some of it.

[London_Phil]

I know the feeling, I use notepad for anything more than a quick reply, then copy n paste as required.
Happy New Year anyhoo.

Regards

Phil

[ssevy]

Nice, what is the black bike, Daytona or Sprint? Hang on, its got luggage, must be Sprint with a full fairing added??

Randy has a Sprint Executive and a Daytona Super 3. This is his Super 3, which he painted and then swapped in some of the Sprint pieces for luggage. Goes like a stray cat with turpentine under his tail, and he has not had any issues with his valves closing up. Checks it regularly.
The six pot brakes are something else!

[threepot]

Why paint it black though?

[ssevy]

He didn't like the yellow.

[Sin_Tiger]

  the yellow ones are very sought after.

[ssevy]

"Take number 3...roll 'em"

Okay, heeding the excellent advice of others, I am writing this in Word, and then pasting it into the box so that I don't spend hours typing and then lose everything for a third time (sigh). Wish me luck!

Day #3 – Randy's to Spring Mill Campground
284 miles

We left Randy's house in an overcast mist, which eventually turned to a drizzle, and then the skies gradually began to clear as we proceeded in a southwesterly direction, the last pockets of the moisture from last night's torrential storm finally abating.
Unfortunately, even though the rain was finished with us, the storm was not, and we did encounter a power outage caused by the storm which left all of the traffic lights in Lancaster, Ohio dead. This meant that each of the four vehicles facing the turning area at the front of the very long line of backed up traffic had to come to a full stop and then take its turn one by one. My clutch hand was just about numb by the time we passed through all 300 intersections (okay, that may be a bit of exaggeration, but it sure felt like there were 300), and what normally would have taken no more than 10 minutes cost us closer to an hour. In addition, it began to get warm, and the humidity was still very high from the storm, so both we and our bikes were running hot. Needless to say, when we finally saw Lancaster, Ohio getting smaller and smaller in our mirrors, it was not a bad thing.
Continuing in a southwesterly direction, we eventually came to US Route 50, which was originally one of the themes of our trip. Randy and I had been tossing around ideas for interesting destinations, and we came to the conclusion that instead of focusing on each day's destination, we would choose a road which looked interesting and see where it might lead. He suggested US 50, and so I planned this route a bit differently than previous years. One thing we did not do was make reservations anywhere, instead planning a rough distance to a likely looking campground for the night, but keeping it loose enough so that if something caught our eye, we could stop and change plans accordingly. Since our public schools go back into session the first week of September, we thought the campgrounds would be nearly empty (wrong), and we could have our pick of the nicest sites (wrong again). As you will see, this overly optimistic planning really bit us in the ass a bit later on.
Getting back to our ride, Randy didn't like my plan of staying along the Ohio River just south of Cincinnati, so we jumped onto Interstate 275 and crossed into Kentucky and re-crossed the Ohio into Indiana at Lawrenceburg, where we had a great lunch at the Lawrenceburger Restaurant. They kept bringing pitchers of sweet tea, so we nearly drowned ourselves rehydrating.
I just noticed when reviewing our route map that we had passed the Creation Museum without realizing it, and I only mention it because  later on in a Kentucky diner a waitress really bent our ear about how the taxpayers were on the hook for part of the cost for this private museum.  We had never heard of it, but when I looked it up later online, I was not surprised such a thing could happen in that region, which is called the "bible belt" because of the many religious fundamentalists and evangelicals who believe in a literal interpretation of the bible (evangelicals were one of Trump's strongest voting blocs; this also explains all of the Trump lawn signs we saw throughout the bible belt). So much for separation of church and state I guess.
This day also featured a stop at the Seip Mounds, a Hopewell Native American site from 100 B.C. to 500 A.D.  I was so interested in these that Randy and I later drove up to the Newark Great Circle which is very impressive because of its size and age.  He also has a flint site close to his home, and samples of that unique flint have been found throughout many states, as they were widely traded. While you folks in Europe are used to walking on ground previously traveled by people thousands of years earlier, our country's history is primarily focused on the past 300 or so years, and so experiencing these mounds was really something special for me.
We continued to follow Route 50 west until we eventually turned to the south on some nice secondary roads, encountering one closed bridge, but still arriving in one piece at our destination because of our extraordinary navigational skills (blind luck). We noticed the camp sites were filling quickly around us, and set our tents (our middle aged men's version of pissing to mark our territory) to stake our claim, so to speak. This campground also has a big lodge on the premises, which has a large casual dining room with an all-you-can-eat buffet (which was closing in 30 minutes), so we stripped to our camp site attire, and jumped back on our bikes to look for the lodge. Several wrong turns later (sorry boys, it must be low blood sugar ), we finally arrived with 15 minutes to spare. Grabbing our plates, we enjoyed the last remains of what might have been a decent buffet a couple of hours earlier. The food that was supposed to be cold (salads) and the food that was supposed to be hot (meat and vegetables) were all similarly lukewarm, as was our reaction when we ate it. Since it was the only option though, and since we had some great conversation, it was just fine.
As we rode back to our tents, we noticed that the campground had filled up, and we were surrounded by RV's and loud families. Oh well, into our sleeping bags and the end of a good day!