Homeward
Sept. 17
36,802 miles on the odometer
It must have been a late night on Bourbon Street because we didn't wake up until 10 a.m. After all, this was a hotel, not a campground or a beach where we'd been pitching a tent and throwing down a sleeping bag. The extra sleep was good because it was going to be another long day of riding.
We left New Orleans and were soon into Mississippi, where we stopped for breakfast and decided to stick close to the gulf shore and make Florida our next destination. The rear tire was holding up fine and the weather was agreeable as headed east along U.S. 90, at one point passing Jefferson Davis' last home.
In Alabama, we took I-10 through Mobile but quickly veered south toward the gulf on U.S. 98, which took us right into Pensacola, Fla., by mid-afternoon. It was no problem finding the beach, which was enormous, although the rough seas had roiled up tons of seaweed. But we were in Florida, this was a beach, and we were destined to swim.
We found some changing houses and hit the water, which was about 80 degrees. While the temperature was fine, the red seaweed was a bit of a bother and we were soon out of the water, brushing off sand and suiting up again for the last leg of the day.
With a few hours of light left, we motored back to I-10 and then due north on U.S. 29 across the Florida Panhandle. Somehow we must have gotten sidetracked to Route 97, which took us into a berg called Atmore, Ala. It was in a Pizza Hut there where we found out a lot about what was going on with our families, and what we would be doing with our lives for the next couple of years.
Calling home from the Pizza Hut, I learned that my oldest sister Marilynne, a Peace Corps volunteer in Central America, had been evacuated from Managua, Nicaragua, due to political turmoil and would be home soon. It would turn out that she would do another stint, in Coast Rica and later in El Salvador.
Bet got news about her brother Chris, a Marine, who would be coming home on leave in a few months. It seemed like we were all headed back from our far-flung adventures for a collective breather. Some other news for Bet: She had won a rotary International fellowship, which would take us to Ottawa, Ontario, for her master's program at Carleton University after our year on the QE2.
We had stayed pretty much to non-interstate highways for the bulk of our motorcycle trip, but perhaps the news from home influenced us to find a faster track back north. From the town of Atmore, Ala., we got on I-65 for and made a straight shot from the warm dusk to still darkness in Montgomery. The weather was cooperating; we found a KOA outside the city and set up camp for the night.
Sept.18
37,240 miles on the odometer
The weather still holding, we took off early and headed for Atlanta on I-65, stopping at a truck stop for breakfast and then alternating on U.S. 29. The two-lane highway zigzagged us through small towns and long stretches of woods, taking us to warm ridges at the tops of hills and then down into shaded hollows where the air was it was cooler.
The rear tire had held up well, but the tread was beginning to run thin and I didn't want to take any chances, so we found a BMW dealer in the town of Decatur outside of Atlanta and bought a new tire and plugs. In the hit muggy air, I changed the oil outside the shop. The whole operation took about two hours, and we lost a third soon after that as we crossed into the Eastern Time Zone.
By now, our main objective was to get home. We had ridden more than 10,000 miles and were beginning to get into familiar environs. The unspoken commitment to stay off interstates was being supplanted by the need to find the straightest line back to Philly. That meant taking I-85 across northern Georgia to the headwaters of the Savannah River and into South Carolina. We stopped for dinner at a Day's Inn (pretty bad) and around Anderson we found a campground near a lake _ probably the impoundment from a dam in the Savannah _ in a place called Fair Play. It was a weird place.
The campsite reminded me of Brimley State Park in Michigan, both in general layout and the number of campers. The campsites were not lodged in little openings in the woods, but spaced along the edges around a large open area.
Once we found a site and set up the tent, I got directions to the nearest bar from the camp owner, who seemed friendly enough, but a little distant. Bet and I found the way up a back road to a bar, where the bearded proprietor who was sitting in a chair outside enjoying the night air. We stopped and talked for a while, then fetched a six pack and headed back.
At the campground, the owner came over and started talking to us, and seemed to want some company for a while. We got chatting over a couple of beers and soon the subject turned to matters of the occult. His wife, who seemed just a tad out of it, had convinced her husband that she astral planed regularly about the campground and beyond. She then told us stories about what she had seen while making these aerial circuits. I suggested she might skip flying over our site because there probably wouldn't be much interesting to see, but she said that where she flew was beyond her control.
There wasn't much point to arguing, and not much point in going on about this. After all, we had just astral planed over 10,000 miles across the continent, albeit close to the ground.
Sept. 18
37,547 miles on the odometer
It was hot when we got up, so we went for a swim in the lake before packing up our gear and astral planing our of Fair Play.
We took I-85 across the state line to Charlotte, North Carolina, then opted for a smaller highway, Route 49, where we stopped at Trucker's Grille for hamburgers and beer for lunch. Bet got talking to the woman who ran the place; she said she works 5 a.m. to 10 or 11 p.m. every day. From there, we were on Route 64 over to the familiar I-95, where we headed north. The plan was to hit Williamsburg, Virginia, but we sidetracked into a KOA in Enfield.
Sept. 19
37,912 miles on the odometer.
Bad news to start the day. The rear tire has gone flat. I dug into my tools, pulled the wheel off and removed the tube. Mixing fun with drudgery, I took the tube into the campground swimming pool to find out where the leak was. I patched it, pumped enough air into it to get me to a filling station, and we both decided to forget Williamsburg and head home, with hopes the tire would hold out.
Luck was with us. The tire held as we headed north on I-95 through Virginia, stopping for a tour of Philip Morris Tobacco along the way (all I got was a pack of Marlboros and Bet got a pen).
We got around the Washington on the beltway and cleared Baltimore before rush hour, took the tunnel then picked up U.S. Route 40 where we stopped for oysters and crabs and beer. From there, it was I-95 through Wilmington, Delaware, and then U.S. Route 202 into Pennsylvania and back to Boot Road in West Chester, Bet's parents' home.
Mileage: 38,275.
Then, one last leg: We drove up 202 to Fort Washington because Marilynne was just back from Nicaragua that day. We partied until 3 a.m. Home again, at least for a while.
We had driven 11,324 miles in 47 days, a long cinema playing out from ribbons of highway circuiting through the lower 48 states. We crossed or at least nipped the edges of 30 states and a couple of Canadian provinces, and touched down twice in Mexico. We were sunburned, wind burned, stopped by snow in the Rockies, baked in the desert of the Southwest and soaked to the bone more than once.
Strangers who might have been our friends booted us out of one place, but we made friends where we least expected. We met a few weird ones, and had the fortune of reuniting with relatives and friends, some of whom we haven't seen since.
We didn't talk much along the trail, because there was so much going on around us. We let the wind and low the low hum of the engine do the talking as, instant by instant, we became part of the mountains, prairies, deserts, cities and forests that passed us by.
There are X's out there, somewhere, where Jake's path crossed ours nearly a half century earlier.
The BMW _ it's still around as I write this in 2004. It's been a good old friend that never let us down along the way. While we were going around the country, people at filling stations and diners would stop and admire what was still a relatively new motorcycle. "Where's the chain?" they'd ask. "You mean it has a drive shaft, like a car? Wow."
Now, the R75/5 is an antique, but people still stop and gawk, but for a different reason. Sometimes strangers tuck notes of interest on it while it's parked and I'm off somewhere. To people who ask how old it is, I usuallyrespond, "What year were you born?"
And still, the old Beemer usually starts on the first kick.
