01 October, 2009

Day One

I woke early August 21st in the hopes of getting started as the sun rose and possibly ending the day around sunset. The goal was Bloomington, Indiana, a distance of 600 miles. Riding a motorcycle requires stopping every hour or so just to stretch, and is much more exhausting than driving a car. On quite a number of occasions I’d driven for 10 to 12 hours in a day and gone 700 or more miles, but this would be a couple hundred miles further than I’d ever driven in a day on a motorcycle. (I did drive from 6am until 4 or 5pm on a motorcycle from Foya, Liberia to Bo, Sierra Leone back in 2006. While that was maybe 200 miles, it took all day as the road was mud and dirt until the last 50 miles of pavement. But oh how nice that pavement was to drive on as I hadn’t seen any for the month and a half prior to it. But I’m not going to get into stories about driving motorcycles in Liberia, because that could take a while as well.) So I had what was an ambitious goal for me, but given the delay in the start to the trip, I wanted to cover some long distances early on.

I hadn’t gone more than 20 or 25 miles, and it was maybe a quarter after 8 in the morning when the rain started. A steady rain at first turned into a downpour in another 20 miles or so, and just as I was nearing the West Virginia border on I-68 cars were slowed down to 30 mph on the interstate due to the lack of visibility. I actually could see much better than the cars with their windshield wipers flying back and forth, but it was too wet to really continue too easily, and after going through several huge puddles and realizing I didn’t want to end up having a hydro-planing caused accident in the first hour and a half of the excursion, I stopped to wait out the rain a bit and get a hot drink. After about half an hour the rain had slowed to a normal rain, so I continued. It rained until about lunchtime almost all the way across West Virginia and finally as I was entering Ohio on US 50 the clouds started breaking up. After shedding my rain gear, the next couple hours were pretty enjoyable as Southern Ohio is a lot more scenic and a better drive than Interstate 70 is. I’ve driven along 70 between Indiana and Pennsylvania probably 25 times, so was really surprised and pleased to find such a scenic route only 50 or 60 miles south.

I managed to meet up with my good friend Jonathan and his wife Sara in Cincinnati for a few hours, but was feeling pretty good and decided I’d try to make it to Bloomington still instead of stopping early. So I left Cincinnati about 9pm for the hundred and fifty mile stretch. It wasn’t too long until I started to recognize the wind picking up and realize that ahead there were no stars or anything visible in the sky. After half an hour I’d realized it was a mistake to try to go farther, but I’d already started, so I thought I’d just push through the rain that was starting. So the rain wasn’t too heavy, but I was right at the edge of the storm, so the wind was just howling and really tried to whip me around on the little motorcycle. I’d lean one way and then a gust would hit from the other direction causing me to drive about 15 miles an hour under the speed limit for the rest of the way to Bloomington. The first day ended with me soaked (I was optimistic in thinking it wouldn’t really rain, so didn’t put on my rain pants until I’d already gotten pretty wet) at about 12:30am at the University of Indiana campus where my friend Corey lives. It was great to see him, but I soon fell asleep while he was talking as it had been a long day, but I had managed to cover 625 miles on the first day of riding on the trek. Not the way I’d have chosen to start the trip, but thankfully the rain held off for a few more days after this.

To be continued again (it won’t be one day per post most of the time, but I’ve realized this is already a long post so am not going to add anything else now and don’t feel like going through and editing this. In fact, I should be packing right now as I leave in 12 hours for Nairobi, but I wanted a distraction because I really don’t feel like packing.)

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