Back in Power

Our power went out close to 7:30am on Sunday morning. At that point the storm had been downgraded to Tropical Storm Irene but the weatherman, with all their hype, had actually been right. The wind still caused lots of damage, mostly in the form of downed trees that took out power for a lot of people. A lot of RI and CT was out of power.

I decided to check out the storm's intensity, or lack thereof, at noon at Sunday. There was some light rain and some decent wind gusts, but nothing to scare me. I have hiked up Mt. Washington when the wind was steadily blowing 60mph and gusting much higher than that. I have camped on top of mountains where trees where creaking and groaning all night long and our tent was flexing in the wind, when there was a tornado warning and a wind blown branch ripped a big hole in the tent next to us. And I have surivived for days at a time without electricity, modern plumbing, tv, or a shelter like a house. I don't mean to boast, just to say that for anybody who has done serious hiking and backpacking, it was not at all life threatening or something that couldn't be handeled.

We did our part though, stocking up on food and bottled water, filling the tub etc. We got out our lanterns, headlamps, and our camp stove. The latter being used by my grandma to make her much needed coffee. Spam was even had for lunch! But back to going outside. The road was covered in debris and there were some downed trees. I hiked up to "The Ledge", a cliff a few hundred feet up that gives a nice view of the surrounding area. There was some wind blown rain and strong wind gusts, but the storm was leaving our area. After the ledge I helped my uncle and cousin clear some trees from the road before heading back inside.

I can't imagine life without electricity...I got bored pretty quickly. So Joyful and I decided to take a drive and see what was going on. We saw many down trees and the first few stoplights were not working. As we drove further into Norwich though, the electricity was flowing. There were some gas stations open, so of course I had to stop and get a COLD SODA. PapaGinos was also open so we thought of maybe getting dinner there. Everybody was out and about as well, like they had no power and were bored. Wow, sounds like me! We stopped at the Marina in Norwich and there was a big yacht there, the Thrirteen. It looked ridiculously big in such a small area. Norwich is on the Thames river, not the ocean. At any rate we headed back, didn't get pizza, and instead went to dinner at my Aunts. Grilled chicken and cake over candlelight. It tasted very good. Mmmmm. But still no power.

I had thought the power had come back on as I awoke early the next morning, but I was mistaken. My Grandma suggested breakfast at Friendlys so we hopped in her car and drove there. But it appears everybody else without power had the same idea as we tried 2 Friendlys, 2 McDonalds, a diner, multiple Dunkin Donuts, and Burger King, and they all had lines out the door. By then it was around 10 and my other Aunt called, saying we could come there for food as they had a generator. So we obliged and headed to their farm, finally eating at 10:30. They raise sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, and I think thats it. It was our first time and we got a tour and saw the animals. Wow the pigs are big! This one pig knows how to open his "pigpen", he did once while we were there! Smart animal.

By the time we got back, the power finally came back, but we had to go to RI once again. Joy is taking her motorcycle classes on Tues. and Wed. and they start at 7:30am. So rather than driving over really early, we are sleeping over my parents house the next two nights. Then on Wednesday night we get to see Kamelot in concert.

Big Boat in a small marina

The Road less Traveled

View from the ledge

Baaaaaaaaa!



Three not so little pigs


Here are some other bonus videos...now that I know you can upload them

Irene Approaches...

The hurricane approaches...and will destroy us all!!!! Are you prepared?

Here in Connecticut, there was some rain, some calm, some more rain when Joyful and I were taking a walk, and now more calm. I think the brunt of the storm will miss where we are but we are still prepared with our buckets of water, plenty of food, bottled water, camping stoves, headlamps, etc. We shall see in the new few hours how it goes. Being out in the country our biggest fear is probably power loss...

Which means I can't use my computer that I finally hooked up! Its nice to have a big 22" monitor to view the inter-tubes instead of Joyful's netbook or my droideka.

Hard to starboard!!

Joyful and I had a wonderful day at sea, sailing off of Fishers Island in CT with my Aunt on her 27 (or was it 28?) foot sailboat. We took a launch (correct term?) from the marina piers to where her boat was moored and ate lunch as she explained some of the terms and showed us the boat. She just started sailing herself but is still very capable. We used the motor to get out a little bit before spreading out the jib and mainsail. At first the wind was light but then it picked up and we were moving along at a speed of up to 7 mph or around 6 knots (the GPS we had measured in MPH). We had a good heel going and it was a lot of fun cruising along. Joyful and I each took turns at the tiller and helped with the sheets and such.

You will notice that I am trying to use a lot of technical sailing terms. If you want to be a sailor, you have to learn the language! It also helps that I have been reading the book series that the Master and Commander movie (with Russell Crowe) was made from. That takes place during the Napoleon War when English had the great ships of the line. The books are fascinating and I have grown to love the Age of the Sail and the great ships. Those ships were amazing. They could travel all around the world without using any fuel! They used wind, a renewable energy source! And even if the wind is blowing in the direction you want to travel, you can always tack and get there eventually. Then there are the great navy battles, tactics, and commanders such as Nelson. I also failed to mention the physics of sailing, ships, navigation back in the day, etc.

Granted our little one masted boat with two sails did not have any cannons, but it was all fun nonetheless. The feeling of gliding along on a beautiful day, with your sails full of wind, was amazing. Hopefully we can go out with her on some more trips on the boat!

In other news, Hurricane Irene is coming our way! The weather people are saying that this could be the worst storm the Northeast has seen since the 1930's! We could lose electricity and then what would we do? Well it is simple really. Joy and I will take our tent and live in the woods. We will purify water and cook on our stove, just like we were back on the trail! Ok, we have a bed here, so we won't be staying in the woods. And we have plenty of extra food and water but we could get water from a brook and purify it if necessary. It is good to be a backpacker and have some survival skills! Bear Grylls would be proud!

Lets give her a full broadside!

Home from NY and onto CT

Let me start out by saying that we are now living in Bozrah, Connecticut with my Grandma. We will be staying here for a few months until we both start working and get an apartment again, hopefully in Warwick, close to both our parents. We arrived here yesterday and are still working on getting settled in. We moved a bookshelf and a desk up from our cache downstairs and I think we have plenty of space and such now. We both have a desk to work on although I have not got my computer up and running yet. My grandma has wireless so I will need to get a wireless adapter for the box before I can get online. Hopefully soon though so I can start working on my book among other things.

Speaking of wireless, I felt like an idiot today because I could not hook up my netbook or droid to it. I stupidly copied down only 9 digits of the 10 digit password and XP was yelling at me, saying you need 10 digits stupid! So I asked my Grandma what the password was, explaining about the 10 digits and how I only had 9, and she quickly counted and said it was indeed 10 digits! Whoops, guess I can't read too good! The first thing you do when troubleshooting technical issues is to look for the obvious stuff: is it plugged in, turned on, etc. Guess I need to follow my own rules!

The ride home from Marathon, NY on Sunday was a lot of fun. Ok, maybe it was not a lot of fun, considering my shoulders are hurting a few days later. Google called for a ride of 5.5 hours, 315 miles. We started out at 9:45am and didn't arrive at my parents house in RI until 6:55pm. Many breaks and stops were taken, including a stop at Howe Caverns in NY. I didn't realize that place was such a tourist mecca! There were tons of people there. I saw signs for it off the highway and ended up stopping there as it was about time for lunch. The tour looked interesting but we decided not to do it this time. There was still plenty of miles left and wanted to get home sooner rather than later. We did eat lunch though before taking off until the sunset...I mean cloudset?

As we were riding we started approaching some storm clouds. It had been sunny all day until now and a few drops fell on us, but nothing major. We stopped at a reststop for a bit and the clouds moved on. Soon we ran into them again though. Just as we got off our bikes and into the next rest stop it started raining. Good timing! Luckily this time the storm was moving away from us instead of chasing us. So many times on our AT hike the storms seemed to catch up with us, storm on us, then follow us as we hiked. Today was different though. We had a place to shelter from the rain and the clouds were moving away from us. A great Android application for checking out the weather radar is Radar Now. It is a simple, lightweight app that displays the Doppler radar for your location, determined by either GPS or cell tower location. It shows a time-lapse map so you can see where the storm is moving, quite helpful. Everytime we stopped I checked it out and we were always right on the edge of the storm. So we waited it out, the storm passed, and we rode home, storm free!

So ends one of our last big adventures for now. Tomorrow is a small adventure though, sailing!



Chillin with some Harleys



Future Rider!

I love NY...well not really

It was a long road to Marathon, NY, where Joyful's brother lives, and where our B&B for the next few days was. Our original course was to travel down through the Green Mountains and take a bunch of back roads, avoiding tolls and highways. But we decided to take the most direct route instead, saving ourselves a couple of hours. There was still plenty of twisty back roads though and we came close to Fort Ticonderoga, Mount Independence, and Mount Defiance, where we visited last Summer on our Mt. Marcy trip. I would have wished to visit all these again on the bike, and take the bike across on the ferry, but that would have added a lot more hours to our already long trip.

We left Stowe, VT around 10am and did not get to the Chrysler B&B until 7PM, traveling over 300 miles. Sitting on a bike for that many hours in a row can be painful. There are little things you can do to stretch to relieve pain, but the parts that hurt the most (for me) were my butt and my right arm. While I can move my left arm anyway I want and steer one handed, there is no way to stretch my right arm because it controls the throttle. It is stuck twisting the handlebar to give the bike gas. They do make a sort of cruise control for bikes, a throttle-lock of sorts, and it would probably be a good investment in the future. At any rate, my right arm got very sore! So we stopped a bunch of times, for gas, food, to stretch, etc.

While the first half of the trip was scenic, the second half was a lot of highways. There was even a toll that we had to pay nothing for! A free ride on a toll road, hah! Paying tolls on a bike can be complicated. You have to stop, put the kickstand down, put the bike in neutral, unzip a pocket, get the money out, then do everything in reverse. Time consuming, especially when there is no toll to pay! Let me also tell you about directions on a bike. There is no GPS on your windshield or passenger playing navigator shouting out turns and such. I have thought about using the GPS on my phone and plugging some headphones in, but I have found that it hurts your ears after a while and my phone will eventually run out of battery. There is no outlet to charge my phone on the bike, although once again, you can get one. What would be cool is having some sort of navigation HUD on the visor of my helmet. That would be sweet. Hopefully we will get there in the future. So what do I do? I have a small map window on my tank bag where I place my directions. I memorize a few directions in advance and then glance down from time to time while I am driving. It actually works quite well, like how we used to do directions. Then when we stop, which is often, I can use my phone to verify where we are.

This is all the fun of a bike trip and the open road though! Yesterday we hung out with Joy's brother, watching movies and playing games. Today is the Bridal shower, which I thankfully don't have to go to. Not sure what we will be doing, but should be fun. And tomorrow is the trip back to RI, another fun 5.5 hour trip. We will be taking all day for that one though. So for now...vrooom vrooom!

Lunch in a random picnic area in VT