We woke up to rain and lots of it. A lovely, dreary, rainy, Monday morning. The kind of day where you just want to stay inside and watch a movie, or play cards. Not the kind of day you want to ride your motorcycle. Not the kind of day you want to take a trip to NH. So we checked the weather, messed around, rechecked the weather. I bought another knife, the Bear Grylls Scout folder. Its just a small 3.3 inch blade that I plan to carry for whatever I need it for. But back to the rain for my love of knives is legendary by now.
The weather called for the rain to taper off around 7 and then tomorrow it would just be showers. Our options would be to take the car instead of the bike, take the bike anyway, or wait untill tomorrow. Option one would defeat the purpose of the trip. Option two would mean getting wet. Yes we have rain gear but it is not very good for riding in the rain. It is for hiking in the rain. And our boots and gloves are not waterproof either. Option three would shorten our trip by one day, may provide better weather, but we already had reservations setup for every night.
We debated things for a while, ok not really. At three it turned from raining hard to just raining so we said let's do it! We will take the Appalachian Trail approach to this trip, which is...just do it! Weather matters not! We will get wet but we know a hot tub will be waiting for us. We saddled up and hit the road after four.
It soon became apparent that rain plus wind plus motorcycle equals cold. Ok, I already knew that, but Joyful was new to the whole long motorcycle trip experience. Riding in the rain is ok for a while, but for extended periods of time it becomes weary. We stopped a bunch of times at rest stops and such, so you don't get too cramped and sore. We had dinner at the Tilton Diner and after that it was dark but we only had another 1.5 hours to go. The only way to beat the weather was to get where we were going.
If riding in the rain is no fun, then riding in the rain at night is not fun at all. Helmets do not have windshield vipors on their visors you know. You can use your glove to wipe off the rain or tilt your helmet side to side so the wind blows the drops off, but other than that you just have to deal with it. Which means when you are traveling down a one lane highway with no street lights, raindrops all over your visor, and a car comes the other way, you can't see anything. And its a narrow semi-mountain road so there are curves. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Or it would have been without rain and darkness.
But we made it there, wet and sore, and took a nice whirlpool bath before calling it quits!
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