Day Ten – The Long Road Home

Answering the call of the road is something I do as naturally as a flower opens to welcome the rays of the rising sun. Once it is in you, it is something you cannot resist. When that beckoning hand of the horizon bubbles through the nonsense of the day-to-day it is a thing of no small wonder to be able to throw a leg over the saddle and point the front wheel in the direction of the evening stable that the sun calls its setting home.

Today is the last day on the road on this installment of my exploration of this great land and it finds me in Iowa City. An unscheduled stop that is the result of my exuberant exercise of the phenomenal amount of power available under my right hand as I took the opportunity to wring every last ounce of horsepower out of the willing engine of my steed in the plains and valleys of Montana. The rear tire was worn to the wires and with the help of my Cleveland dealership, I found and made a service appointment at Gina’s BMW Motorcycles in Iowa City for a set of new tires.

I am a morning person and when I am on vacation I am normally on the road or up and mixed up in some activity at the crack of dawn; you only have so many days away from the desk to enjoy and I like to make the best and most of each one! With my appointment set for 11:00 am, all I could do all morning was wait. For a morning person who normally has several hundred miles of riding done by that time, sitting around in a hotel room for those few hours was an almost exquisite form of torture!

I was so thankful to have my computer and an internet connection but by 7:00 I had read every news story that was of any interest to me, checked the weather in a dozen cities along my intended route several times and made an exhaustive study of the radar images and weather forecasts of a number of sites. And, I still had four hours to kill!! I thought about riding around and exploring the city but that was out of the question as I didn’t know how many miles I had left on the tire before it gave up the ghost and my preference was to use them driving the ten miles to Gina’s.

I flipped through the TV channels and there truly is absolutely nothing on there that is even remotely of any interest to me ......... 7:05 ........ 3 hours and 55 minutes left.

I arranged my stuff really slowly, took a really long shower and then went to the lobby to get a couple of bowls of cereal and a bagel. Back in the room I took my time packing everything back into the bags and then loaded the bike. I managed to make all that last a couple of hours. I was out of there by 9:30 and at Gina’s an hour early. Gina herself was at the counter, she welcomed me with a warm smile and a hearty handshake and she quickly had someone helping me.

Just like my dealer here in Cleveland, they were very friendly and got my bike in line for service at the appointed time. I unloaded the bags so that they mechanic would not have to fuss with them and then poked around the showroom. I spent some time chatting with Woody the salesman who showed me a BMW GS that is now on my mind. I really do not need two bikes but I am thinking about it!

I talked to a guy who has a condo in Breckenridge Colorado and keeps a GS there and has a BMW GT for tooling around Iowa City. He was having new tires put on his GT and we chatted about both bikes and the strengths each has.

There was a fellow there from some place in the middle of Nebraska, west of Omaha and north of nowhere. He had his bike in for new shocks. He rode a GS and his had over 130,000 miles on it. The GS has the same motor as my RT so I spent a lot of time talking to him, hearing about his adventures and also talking about the motor on his bike, the kind of oil he put in it and how he maintains it. He has had no problems with it and with all those miles had not yet opened the engine up for any major service! He said the engine felt and sounded broken in at around 80,000 miles so I had a while yet to go on mine.

There were a few more riders who had come in to kill some time and we variously chatted about adventures on the road and close calls with deer and other road hazards.

My bike was soon ready and by 12:30 I was on the road. Less than an hour later I stopped in Davenport Iowa for lunch at Cracker Barrel. I did not have coffee with lunch as I wanted to save that for later but after half an hour on the road I had to pull over at a BP station to get a cup of java for the afternoon. With that I was back in the groove and headed for Chicago. As I was passing through the several exits near Joliet I saw a couple of custom V-twins, their riders sporting tee shirts and bandanas. One of them was a considerably proportioned and generously bejowled woman whose ample chins and cheeks were fluttering and flapping in the fierce sixty-mile-per-hour hurricane created by her beautiful motorcycle. Each has their own way of enjoying time on two wheels and, waving to them as I passed, I was thankful for my helmet upon hearing the sound of a large insect splatter against and add to the smeared decorations so many other bugs have created on the outer shell of my brain bucket.

It was beautiful blue skies all the way to Indiana when the sun started it’s final descent towards the western horizon and the skies lowered with gray clouds threatening rain. I stopped at the first rest area on the Indiana Turnpike and donned my rain gear. Good thing too, because it rained all the way to Cleveland!

The eastern part of northern Indiana is so infested with deer that they have an electro-mechanical system for alerting drivers to the presence of deer in the vicinity of the road. They have half mile beams similar to the safety-stop ones that are used on modern garage doors so when the beam is broken, rather than activating the stop switch on a garage door, it activates an on switch for a flashing light. One such light flashed as I approached and, sure enough, there were the two blinking reflectors of deer eyes in a pensive furry head on the right side of the road. I braked hard and swerved to the left lane in order to give myself more margin should it decide to bolt across the road. It stayed put and continued on my way.

I stopped somewhere near Toledo on the Ohio Turnpike to fill up the bike and grab a bite to eat. When I was done I moved back under the shelter that covers the pumps at the filling station to gather myself for the remaining couple of hours in the rain. A black Chevrolet Suburban pulled up and a man with military-style close-cropped hair rolled down his window and asked me if I knew where Canton, Ohio was and if he was headed in the right direction. I considered for a second, taking in the woman in the front seat, the kids in the back and the luggage behind them and then beckoned him out of the car to look at my map. I showed him where we were and where he needed to go and also how to read the turnpike ticket so that he would know the exit number he needed to take in order to get on I-77 south to Canton.

He said he had come down from Ann Arbor on I-75 (he would have shortened his trip by about thirty miles if he had taken route 23) and asked where Ann Arbor was on the map. I told him it was off the map as what I was showing him was a map of northern Ohio. That did not seem to register, it was as if the map was just a pretty piece of paper with a bunch of colored lines on it, and he asked me, again, how he would know where to get off the Turnpike for the road to Canton. I explained again and he thanked me, getting back in his SUV. As he buckled his belt, he turned to thank me one more time and I put up my first finger indicating he should wait for something, which he did. I fished around in my tank bag and pulled out my map of Ohio and handed it to him. He was very grateful and they pulled off to the side to consult the map as I was putting my helmet on.

I smiled in wonder. How does a grown man take with a car full of family find himself on the road in the middle of the night, it was about 10:30, and, a dark and stormy night at that, with no clue of where he is or how to get where they were going? It is one thing to look for adventure but it is totally another thing to get on the road clueless when you do have an intended destination and others relying on you. Oh well, his problem and not mine; I simply have to buy another map and he somehow has to figure out how to get to Canton!

The rest of the drive was uneventful and I arrived home after midnight safe and in one piece. What an adventure it has been! I already have three days of my next one partially planned :)