With apologies to Robert Pirsig and the Chautauqua Institute
Restoration
The family visit went pretty much how family visits go. There was a lot of talking and catching up and some drama. We all have family, and we know how these things work. But Wednesday morning, my faith in humanity was restored when I got a Facebook message request from someone I didn’t know. It was a store owner in Tennessee. Someone had found my wallet and turned it in to her. She looked at the name, thought my profile picture on Facebook was a pretty good match for the driver’s license, and reached out to me. She agreed to mail my wallet to me and wouldn’t take anything – including postage costs.
My faith in humanity is somewhat restored. There are at least two good people left in the world.
Rejuvenation
I didn’t sleep well Thursday night, which wasn’t surprising considering that I’d received emails from several of my clients with problems I just didn’t want to deal with. I made a conscious effort to not think about them, but failed miserably. I was awake by 4AM, and never quite got all the way back to sleep. I gave up around 6AM and laid in bed listening to the sounds of morning through the windows I’d left open all night.
When I heard Mom in the kitchen making coffee, I got up and got dressed. I went out and had breakfast and coffee with my parents, threw the rest of my stuff on the bike, hugged them goodbye and hit the road.
The weather was perfect and the roads beautiful, but most of the day I had a nagging itch in the back of my head that was the stuff I had tried to ignore the night before. It would go away for a while and then come back on some of the duller stretches of road. Finally, during a stop for fuel, coffee, a snack, and to lube the chain on the Ninja, I decided the best way to rid myself of the demons was to face them. I got on my phone and responded to every email that was bugging me and forwarded a couple to people who could answer questions. It was cathartic. I was able to ride through the rest of the day without thinking about it at all, until I stopped for the night and started writing this.
The four-day return looks like a winner. I was able to stop more often, take a few pictures, and enjoy the ride, which is exactly what I was supposed to be doing. I also took the time to figure out a rough stopping point and reserve a campsite during my lunch break. The combination of tenting and one-night stays makes it pretty easy to find a spot, even now on Labor Day weekend.
The Berkshires and Poconos are some of the most beautiful country on earth, by my estimation, and I saw some things I’d not seen before – one, a wind farm at the top of a mountain. From the base of it, the largest turbine looks to be as big as the mountain. There’s a certain elegance to watching them slowly turn in the wind.
Then there were the hang gliders and parachutists. I’d seen them individually before, but I came around a bend and there were at least a half-dozen of them in a seemingly small area of sky. I stopped and watched them a while, marveling at the grace of their unpowered flight before trying to capture a few pictures.
