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