Last Day - Coming Home

Last day today. I don't feel like having this end. A day or two off maybe, but I loooove seeing the ever changing landscape and meeting amazing people.
Dave is always first up and sneaks out for coffee. Dick is always next and I am always dragging. These retired people get up too early!
Today's plan is to relax and take the secondary roads back through New York. We had a fender bender of sorts at one of the "go, no wait, no go, no wait" intersections and the only casualty was my license plate falling off. So I zip tied it to my bag and we carried on. So now I have an expired licence plate hanging off my bag with zip ties. Any self respecting police officer should be at least a little curious, but I made it all the way home without incident (I have a temporary registration so I am actually legit).

The wonderful thing about an interstate is that they leave behind roads with nobody on them except the farmer moving his squash from one side of the road to the other. Rt7 runs just far enough away from the interstate in NY that you don't know it's there. Very quiet, no traffic, very relaxing. The small valley farms are just beginning to harvest the corn and most of the hay is all wrapped up for the winter. We met a guy who talked about how the horse people have ended up keeping the ex-dairy farmers from starving since horse people are used to dumping vast quantities of money into their hobby, Kinda like boat folks I guess (a hole in the water to dump money into?). So here is a kind thanks to you horse folks out there.

The one stop I wanted to make (other than coffee stops) was the real Bennington Battlefield site, which is not in Bennington, but rather just over the border in New York. The big Bennington Monument marks where the stores that the British were trying to capture were kept, but the Brits got spanked over in New York before they got there. Of course, there was no Vermont in 1777 when the battle was fought. The monument was built in 1887 for the 100th anniversary (ok, we are a little slow here in Vermont) so..
My prep school roommate Skip had texted me that he was in Claremont, NH so I decided to head there after splitting up with the brothers in Bennington. It was great to have the three of us together the last week.
Rt 11 goes all the way across the state right into New Hampshire and right into Claremont. Skip had just finished up at work so we went to dinner at a beautifully restored mill building and caught up. He has the "snow-bird" thing figured out by the sounds, spending summers in NH and winters in Florida.
One last cold ride home up the interstate with a stop in Randolph to pour hot liquids inside me and add another layer. I have not ridden on dirt for 2 weeks and it was very odd sliding around the long back way home. Deb was up, the dog was asleep, and it felt good to just crawl in bed and fall asleep.
America is big and beautiful. The news outlets are doing us a real dis-service, scaring us into thinking that there are lots of "bad people" out there. I met nothing but wonderful people who want to help you out if you need it. Today we just stopped to zip tie my licence plate on and an electrician stopped to make sure we did't need help, So turn off that crap and go out and talk to people, they are wonderful.
A motorcycle is the perfect vehicle to see the country. If you add a Vermont license plate, it is a huge talk magnet. How can you walk by an unshaven old guy with a couple weeks of grime, a motorcycle with a Vermont tag, and a big smile on his face without saying "where ya headed?"
And it's perfect because you never get bored with the scenery (Dakota grasslands, Kansas or Nebraska emptiness, south-west desert, mid-west corn and soy (or soy and corn), because you are only 2 days away from the next landscape. And you can ride faster than the weather so with proper planning and no itinerary, you never get bad weather. I started at 93675 on the clock and ended at 97900 last night so 4225 miles this trip.
So sell your house, buy a motorcycle and get going. Life is short my friends!!