Click here for a Google Map showing my progress to date

My last full day in Maine wasn't really spent in Maine, actually.  I started and ended the day by the lake like the last few days, but today's ride was down to visit my aunt and grandfather for lunch in Hingham, Massachussetts.  The trip began and ended dry, but I got soaked from roughly Medford all the way through Boston to Hingham and then again from Hingham pretty much all the way in to downtown Boston before I rode back out of the rain again.  There's a stalled front sitting right on the eastern seaboard all the way from Cape Cod back to roughly New Orleans.  A big high pressure area out in the Atlantic is holding it there and causing tropical rains to be funnelled up the coast.  Today, it's raining pretty much from Alabama and Georgia all the way up to Boston.  It's just another in a long set of days of pouring wet that they've been having here in the Northeast.

The ride was uneventful and I don't have a ton of pictures today.  But, the Big Dig in Boston is done (at least the underground part anyway) and they've demolished the old Central Artery that the new I-93 tunnels replaced.  I had to take a little time to go in to downtown Boston and explore a little now that the old highway is gone.


Panorama shot of an area near Atlantic Ave where the old Central Artery used to be.  Try to envision a giant, ugly, green, steel elevated highway snaking along about 25 feet off the ground in between the buildings.

It's strange to see the city without the artery.  It's been there since 1955, so all I've ever known of Boston has been with that road.  When the Mayor cut the ribbon at the opening ceremony last year, he said, "... this changes the face of Boston forever..." and he was right.  The North End neighborhoods along this stretch are now quiet, people are out walking, it has the feel of a neighborhood.  All I've ever known of this area is the dark, dank, noisy, smelly environment created by that elevated roadway.  If they can get their stuff together in finishing the new surface improvements (there are supposed to be parks and such being built in the blocks once occupied by the artery) then this is going to be a very pleasant part of this city.


The new Zakim Bridge shot from out behind Bunker Hill Community College in Charlestown.

The Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge, the widest cable stay bridge in the world, carries I-93 in and out of the Big Dig tunnels over the Charles River.

And when I stumbled across a beginner motorcycle class being run at BHCC, I couldn't resist stopping to watch and talk to one of the instructors for a bit.

Click here for a Google Map showing my progress to date

Today marked the final exit from Maine for this trip.  I slept in a bit, got some breakfast, watched some news on TV and then headed out, wishing mom and dad all the best.

What possesed me to take the route I took today is beyond me at this stage, but this morning it seemd like a good idea.  I decided to take US 1 all the way from Waldoboro, ME to Amesbury, MA to "see the sights" and play tourist a little bit.

.... I forgot what a dismally crowded and wretched place US 1 can be in some place in New England in the summer.  Oy.

At any rate, the photographic day began at a place famous to anyone who has travelled Route 1 in the mid-coast Maine area any time in the last 60 years or so - Moody's Diner.


I ain't changed much in all that time either - except maybe it's gotten a little bigger.  People still come from all over just to eat here though.

Not long after Waldoboro and after passing through Nobleboro, Damarascotta, Wiscasset and other towns, one come to Bath, home of Bath Iron Works and the giant 220 metric ton BIW crane


The red and white 220 metric ton BIW crane has been a landmark in this town for almost 40 years.

Next to the iron works, workers are in the process of dismantling the old Kennebec River Bridge that was replaced several years ago.


What's left of the old bridge over the Kennebec River in Bath.

A little farther down the road, after passing through the outdoor mall that Main Street Freeport has become, thanks to LL Bean and the other insignificant retailers along that stretch, we come across what is almost universally known to locals as the "B.F.I."


... that would be the Big F ... uh ... Freeport Indian.  It's been there for ages and advertises a souvenier shop on that corner.

I paused for a quick lunch at Bill's in Yarmouth.  I had a hot chicken parmesean sandwich.  Bill's is another of those places that hasn't changed in 30 years.  If you go, try to avoid getting there at noon on a workday.  Every tradesman from Brunswick to Kittery must have pulled in to the parking lot right when I did.  Doesn't matter - Bill's sandwiches are worth the wait.

The rest of the day was spent dodging cars and tourists all the way down route 1 in to NH and Mass.  There's long since been anything romantic about travelling route 1.  It's largely just one strip mall after another, one 35 MPH speed zone after another, one set of long traffic lights after another.  It took me
about five hours to travese a distance that would take about 2 1/2 hours on the interstate.  It would be worth it if route 1 was even fun anymore, but in all honesty, it stops being fun pretty much south of Moody's actually.  Nowadays, route 1 is just one long tourist trap and is best sampled in small doses.

That's all for tonight.

Click here for a Google Map showing my progress to date

Well, I'm in a crappy little motel on the outskirts of Albany tonight and I only have dialup internet available, so this initial chapter will be brief.  I'll upload the full version later on once I get broadband again.

My first day west was supposed to have included a stop at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.  Unfortunately, none of the news I had looked at this morning in the Boston area mentioned anything about serious flooding in the Mohawk Valley on NY State and the fact that several counties here are under states of emergency tonight.

So, after getting drenched riding through southern Vermont on my way to Cooperstown, and finding that the Hall of Fame was closed due to the state of emergency that I had just ridden right in to the middle of, the rest of my day can be summed up with this one single photograph...


A road south of Cooperstown near I-88 ... only the first of many I would encounter like this.

I wasted a solid five hours trying to find a way through to the west from this area.  I was directed in opposite directions by at least half a dozen law enforcement people and ended up circling right back to where I had started not once, not twice, not three times, but FIVE TIMES.  After trying every road I could find on the map or find out about from locals - even trying roads that were "rumored" to be open - I finally gave up around 6:45 PM and just beat feet back to Albany to get a room for the night.  All the motels and other establishments in the emergency area were either full by 2:00 this afternoon or had no power, or no water, or both, or were completely cut off from the rest of the town they were in.

So, tonight, I'm doing what hundreds or probably thousands of other people are doing - looking at maps trying to figure out where the closed ones are and where it's possible to get through.  At this point, we're being told that anything south of here is a no-go and that the best bet is probably to head far north.  For me, that probably means a brief jaunt through Canada....

.... to be continued.

Today was a transit day with one purpose - get the heck out of the "emergency area" that is currently in existence in eastern New York State and eastern Pennsylvania.  As such, there are no pictures today - I slabbed it the whole day with one eye on the weather radar and the other looking out for roadblocks and detours.  The route ended up being south on I-87 to I-84, then west to Scranton and Wilks-Barre, PA to I-80 and then on west through Pennsylvania to Ohio.  I'm now pretty much near where I had planned on being last night before running in to the wall 'o water.

So, what I'm going to do tonight is to tell yesterday's story in full....

Rewinding to Day 19 - June 28, 2006.

The story today is completely summed up by one word - "rain".  Rain governed my morning and seriously affected my afternoon and evening.

With my bike ready to go with a crackcase full of fresh oil, a new filter and spark plugs, my friend Glen and I had a nice breakfast and some final conversation while I packed up the bike.  The day had dawned mostly sunny, but we could see from the weather report that it was raining significantly in central NY State - right where I was heading for today.  It had been raining Tuesday night there as well.  What I was to run in to apparently hadn't become big enough by Wednesday morning to make anything other than local NY area news shows, because there had been no mention that we heard on the Boston morning shows or CNN that morning regarding a state of emergency in Ostego county and other areas near Cooperstown, Oneanta, Utica, and so forth.  As far as I could tell, all that was going to happen was that I was going to get significantly wet as I rode through southern Vermont and on in to NY State.

When I hit the road, it was getting warm north of Boston.  It had been damp all night, although the humidity had broken somewhat and wasn't anywhere near as bad as it had been in recent days.  I said goodbye to Glen and his pup and headed for southern New Hampshire.  The route today took me through Salem, Nashua and Keene, NH and through Brattleboro and Bennigton, VT in to New York at Hoosic.  The first bits of rain had started by the time I got to Nashua and it was raining heavily by the time I got to Troy and Albany.  I zipped through Schenectady and jumped on to I-88 toward cooperstown, getting off at Warnerville in order to follow some of the backroads in to Cooperstown.

Now, bear in mind, by now, roughly 1:30 PM, the rain had passed off to the east, the sun was out and it was a perfect day - warm and nice as far as I knew.

I knew it had rained hard in this area the night before and sure enough, on some of the back roads, I started seeing the occasional minor washout, mud an gravel on the road, the rain ditches along side the road eroded away and so forth - all signs of heavy, continuing rain, but nothing to bad until I got to this part of the road...


Roughly 10 miles east of Cooperstown the road was briefly closed while a crew dug out a drainage path to get the water back in the ditch.

Still, even this didn't set off any alarm bells in my head yet.  The backhow moved in about ten minutes and I continued along to Cooperstown ... which was strangely quiet for a nice summer afternoon...


Main Street, Cooperstown, NY.  The Baseball Hall of fame is the set of buildings on the left.

There was nobody around.  This is when I started to get a clue that things weren't quite right around these parts.  The sign taped to the front door of the Hall of Fame confirmed things nicely.


Well, so much for this afternoon's planned activities.

Oh well, so I missed out on seeing the Hall of Fame again.  It'll be there next time.  I needed gas, so I headed down route 28 toward I-88 and stopped at the local Sunoco station.  It was there that I started hearing about some of the problem in the area as I watched this scene on route 28 -


The river had washed over the road earlier in the day, depositing a large layer of crud and crap which the road crews were mopping up.

Even here, I didn't understand the enormity of the problem.  The locals were just talking about this road and some problems with the NY State Throughway up near Syracuse.  I still thought I was OK.  Apparently, the problem I was about to encounter on I-88 wasn't yet known to these locals.

Approaching I-88, I saw this scene that I posted last night:


Near I-88 at Route 28.

I got on to I-88 and headed west under sunny skies.  There appeared to be no problems and I was tooling along happily at 70 MPH looking forward to getting to the Niagra Falls area and the Great Lakes.

The full issue became apparent about 15 minutes later.  I got to the Oneonta exit and the freeway ahead was closed - even though it appeared OK.  Traffic was being routed up on to the overpass road and it was there that I saw that a large section of the eastbound section of I-88 was deeply under water.

So, GPS to the rescue - find an alternate route, I told it.  And it did.  And I followed it.

And I found this:


Near Oneonta, NY


Near Ostego, NY


Near Ostego, NY

I kept trying to find alternate routes and I kept running in to seriously flooded roads.  On the way to the seriously flooded ones, I ran across less flooded ones that were still open, with vehicles only having to ford a few inches of flowing water.

I started to ask the locals for alternate routes west and they gave them to me and I followed them.

And I kept running in to flooded roads.

THEN, I started hitting the bad areas.  I had been directed to take a couple of roads to the south that led to Bloomville and it was there that I saw real damage, not just some roads under water.  The first thing I ran in to was a large orange barrier preventing traffic from driving in to a 30 foot wide gap in the road that had a very rapidly flowing stream running through it.  Back down another street, there was a senior care center with a bunch of what seemed to be oddly parked cars out front - it took me a moment to realize that these cars had been pushed in to those positions by a flow of water and trees that had come down from the hills a couple of nights before.  One of the locals said that Main street had been under three feet of water and that and entire section of hillside, of perhaps two or three acres in size, had come flooding down in to town, pushing everything in its way out of the way.  And indeed, there were broken tree trunks and branches and brush and such all over the place - road crews had been out, apparently 24x7, moving stuff out of the way to clear the roads.

I had to get out of here, so I kept asking for directions.  The news kept getting increasingly pessimistic.  Each time I talked to someone, they had a little more information.  As the day wore on, people had talked to friends here and there and people were startig to assemble mental lists of what roads were out and so forth.  It appeared that there wasn't any way west out of here.  One person told me that he had heard that "route 30 is supposed to be open all the way to Grand Gorge, but nobody knows anything about it past there."  Route 30 went in the wrong direction - it went north and east, I wanted to go west.

It wasn't until about 6:30 PM that I finally got the last piece of news that sealed the rest of my evening.  I was trying what turned out to be one last possible road and it looked encouraging - there was a bridge that was intact and above the water and according to the map, led to a spot west of a broken area of route 10 on the other side of the river.  Route 10 was supposed to, according to a local, take me to a spot on I-88 that was beyond the flooded area, so I was hoping this was it.  I approached the bridge and found a local Police Officer standing guard next to three traffic cones (I guess it was all they had left) blocking the bridge.  I talke to him and he said it was flooded on the other side.  I asked "how deep" because earlier in the day, I had been told a road was "flooded" only to find that it only had about 8-10 inches of slow moving water covering it and it turned out to be an easy ford for the GS.  Well, this cop didn't say how deep, he just held his hand level with the middle of his chest and that answered my question.   There was no way I was getting out of here westbound tonight.  So, with daylight fading, I asked for the best way to get back to the open part of I-88 so I could get back to Albany and he gave me good directions to roads that were all open.  I pulled back in to Albany at about 9:30 PM and found possibly the last motel in the area that had rooms available.  It's a cruddy little place called the "Night's Rest Inn", but it has a TV and a clean bed and that's all I really care about tonight.  Tomorrow, when I can think straight again, I'll start figuring this out.  Now I see that this area has finally made the national news.  I went out to grab a sandwich and the clerk told me that a section of I-88 west closer to Albany had washed out, taken to Semi's with it and killed one of the drivers....  geez.

Click here for a Google Map showing my progress to date

A quiet, relaxing day on the road today.  I took off from Youngstown fairly early and stopped for a quick breakfast at one of the service areas on the Ohio Turnpike.  After a couple hours on the turnpike, I got off and headed for Sandusky and my first look at Lake Erie.


Part of the Sandusky waterfront with the big Cedar Point amusement park in the background

The local geese were lounging about looking for handouts


Along the Sandusky waterfront - the local geese out for their morning constitutional

A little farther up the road, I found the place that makes those cute three-eyed fish in Lake Erie:

The Davis-Beese Nuclear Power Station near Toledo, Ohio

I continued along route 2 and on up to Toledo, then over to route 23 north to Saginaw.  I stopped for lunch at WNEM-TV to visit with my friend Greg.  He's the station's Chief Engineer and he's retiring in a couple of weeks, so I thought I'd say hi and buy him lunch before he goes.  We had a nice visit and a full tour of the station and I headed out around 4:00.

The rest of the afternoon was spent on the little farm roads that run between fields west of Saginaw up toward Mount Pleasant.  They aren't kidding about those "amber waves of grain" ...


Wheat field in central Michigan


... and corn, too...

I continued riding through the seas of crops, turning left and right fron one dead straight road to the next until I got to the Clear Lake area in Big Rapids where there was ... A TWISTY!  In fact, the curves in the road came up so suddenly, and I had been riding the straights for so long, that I actually got surprised by the first couple of turns - it was on of those "oh yeah, I'm on a motorcycle..."

So, I come to you tonight from the Holiday Inn om the campus of Ferris State University in Big Rapids.  Supper was a "Big Shu" burger at Shuberger's Bar and Grill downtown on Michigan Street - Thanks Steve, it was worth looking for the place ... and I see why you like it so much!

This ends week three.  Week four begins tomorrow morning with a ride up to the U.P. over the "Big Mack" bridge.  Im headed in the general direction of the Aerostitch store in Duluth, Minnesota.  Since they're closed on Sunday, I'm planning to get to the Duluth area on Sunday night, giving me lots of time to explore the rest of the "Mitten" and a good bit of the U.P. here in Michigan.  It's also now the time to begin thinking about where I need to be as of next Friday.  I'd like to roll in to Portland around mid-day on Saturday so I've got some time to readjust to the real world before I go back to work on July 10.   So, beyond the next couple of days, I currently have no concrete plans on where to go.  It'd be nice to be someplace cool for July 4.

This evening I spend with the maps.

More later......

Go on to Week Four

A few links