Jeff researched everything and we decided to go back around the bend and up through the middle of Ontario. He punched Sudbury ON into Google Maps and told it no highways (yea!) and no ferries. I rolled my bike out of the garage and it was overcast and warm, and sure enough it rained on the bike just long enough to soak it. Oh well, it softened the dead bugs up and the fancy Israeli seat cover doesn't retain water so no biggie. I wore shorts under my motorcycle pants and then did the full rain job (boots, pants, jacket, lobster claws, the whole thing because if I didn't it would pour before I got the stuff on and if I did, it wouldn't rain.
We ended up on the scenic lake shore route (or whatever all those signs said, which was scenic and did go along the lake shore. Lots of farms mostly just cutting hay but you can see they had some pretty grand farms way back when. Lots of boat people stuff since they live boating up here. We gased up in Ogdensburg just before the bridge (to $5 a gallon gas) and a couple on bikes chatted us up. They owned 19 motorcycles and lived in Pittsburgh PA and just bought an X300 and were so excited to see one with a lot of miles on it and good reports. They had two Honda's today but had BMWs at home and who knows what else (remember 19 motorcycles).
So the Ogdensburg Bridge on a motorcycle is an exercise in confusion. First you pay a toll, which on a bike is a pain (stop, remove rain over gloves, remove gloves (don't drop them on the ground..), unzip rain jacket, pull down rain pants, find rear pocket (not the side pocket), fiddle with the velcro, remove the wallet, find a bill (any bill at this point), hand it over, get the change, give finger to guy behind you honking his horn (that did not happen, either one), put the bills back in the wallet (don't drop the coins and if you do, screw it), pull rain pants down again, fiddle with velcro in back pocket again (not the side pocket), put the wallet back, catch the gloves as they fall to the ground, zip the jacket back up, put on the gloves, put on the over-gloves, throw the change across the parking lot (not really), start the bike, say something pleasant to the toll guy, another finger to the guy behind you, put it in gear and now cross the bridge doing 25 mph because it's one of those steel mesh things that makes you feel like you are going to crash into the tractor trailer coming the other way, and then guess what, customs is on the other side and you do everything you just did on the east side of the bridge, but this time, dig through the tank bag and find that @#$% passport you buried in a secret place.
The custom guy gave me the usual "Canadian Customs grilling. "Where ya headed, eh?, Have a nice trip, eh?", and that was it. He did not even mention Trump like every other Canadian we ran into all day. "You poor bastards,eh?" kinda summed it up.
So thank goodness for the on-dash dancing compass ball. Jeff had Google Maps telling him where to go, but sometimes it doesn't say anything for a long time nd get to thinking, is it still working or?? I had a dancing compass ball on the BMW for years and it saved my bacon many times when would miss a turn. So N-NW pretty much all day going pretty much 10kph over the speed limit all day on little 2 lane roads. Very pleasant day.
We stopped for lunch somewhere and the women working there were very chatty (as was I) and thought Vermont was beautiful of course. Another Trump question in the parking lot and then on our way. And then the deluge...
We saw the big ugly black clouds and then the lightning and then a little rain and then buckets of rain. All the rain gear worked flawlessly so we kept going, but then finally saw a tiny gas station / mini-mart and pulled in under the awning and decided this would be a good time for a cup of coffee and wait it out. We did and 20-30 minutes later the really heavy rain turned into just normal rain, so we apologized for soaking her floors (she had the mop out before we came in so we were not the first ones). So the rain did taper off and the next excitment was seeing a sign out of the blue for "Champlain's Astrolabe", which I had just read about in a book about Samuel Champlain. So he was on an expedition in 1613 and lost the astrolabe (used for determining latitude). A 14 year old farm boy found it in 1867 and it is now in the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Very cool.
We crossed the Mississippi River and Snake River today, but they are in no way related to the famous ones. Weird.
So Sudbury was going to be too late and we stopped at North Bay, which is big town (51K people) so plenty of options to stay. Mexican food, oil the chain and bed.
Jeff's rear tire is looking like it will need to be replaced so we may swing back into Minnesota to get it replaced. Figure it out in the morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment