Miscellania

There would be nothing quite like this to ruin a good scoot...

...if the officer didn't happen to be one of the kids you taught in your rookie year as a teacher who posed his squad car complete with flashing lights just so you could get the "pulled over" shot for your blog.

I'm really proud of this young man who's now 15 years older than I was when I taught him, and 26 years older than he was then, and I breathe a little easier knowing that he's out there keeping us out of harm's way. He never misses an opportunity to pull over just to say hello to me and I'm honored that he does. Anybody who chooses to teach for the right reasons hopes to make a positive difference in the lives that he touches. This man reminds me often enough that I did to him.

I met up with this rather talkative bird this afternoon while taking a long ride around a mountain that I'd taken only once before, in the dark and in the opposite direction.

I'd meant to retrace that jaunt in the daylight sometime, and today was the day. With tomorrow and Saturday looking dismal with those darned April showers headed our way, today was a good day to get some pleasant miles in.

I'd never been into a Kohl's store before Monday and I had no intention of ever setting foot into one, (because they don't usually have any cool stuff - just clothes mostly) but the Mrs. had a 30% off coupon for everything in the store and I was sorely in need of some new sneakers. She handed me their latest advertising circular in the car and told me to see if anything else looked good. I thumbed through it and my eyes landed on a GPS unit that, with the 30% off, would be a very good deal. Since I have the old Garmin V in my Neon I suggested that she get the one at Kohl's for her car. She did.

After we played with it for a while, we discovered that it was excellent for the price and I have to admit that I was a little envious. Though it can't interface with the computer as interactively as the Garmin, as is typical with the newer budget priced GPS receivers, it's quite capable of navigating effectively and intelligently. The next day, with the coupon still good, we decided to get one for our daughter who's away at school, and when I mentioned that if the store might have two I just might ask for one for Father's Day, I was told to see if the store had two more. It didn't. It didn't even have one. We called the Stroudsburg Kohl's which is about an hour away. They had one, but only one. We asked them to hold it for us.

Off we went to celebrate my mom and dad's 53rd wedding anniversary at the restaurant where we always celebrated it when my sister and I were kids. We told my sister about the GPS and she said that it's about time that she got one too. I Googled the Kohl's store in Easton from my cell phone to get their phone number. They said they had two. I asked them to hold them for us. With dinner in our guts we headed to Stroudsburg and then to Easton with my sister and my dad along for the ride, and a few hours later we were back with three more of the same GPS units that we'd gotten on Monday.

The old Garmin is shaped like a triangular prism and there was no way that I could rig up an easy, practical mount for the scooter that would hold it secure, enough that I wouldn't worry about losing it on a trip. The new one, though... My gears were turning before I even asked for it because mounting it seemed quite likely. That was my other reason for wanting to take a decently long ride today - to test out the mount that I put together while the sun was still warming things up.

The plastic inset that the unit came in, some stiff wire, four rubber bands, and a bungee cord later and I was in business. The whole thing hangs on the mirror mounts and comes off in seconds, but is comfortably secure even over bumps and bounces. It covers the cycle's speedometer, but its own speedometer function is much more accurate and reveals that the BV's meter does the usual scooter thing of reading about five miles per hour higher than the actual speed.

Although I can't manage my waypoints on it with the computer as I can with the Garmin, I can record tracks and then view them in Map Source or Google Earth and I like looking at my tracks more than anything else I can do with a GPS. I like revisiting them and the pictures I take, especially on rainy days, to remember the places I've gone and the things that I've seen.

Every good day of riding comes to its eventual close and today's did with long shadows as the sun was going down. I borrowed the side of this building that I was rolling past to get the shot of my doppelganger and his bike.

Tomorrow, even if the rain doesn't fall, I'll stay close to the house. It's Good Friday and the afternoon church service is a must. I'll miss the way it was when I was growing up, especially hearing St. John's Passion chanted in Slovak with my dad singing the deep bass part of Jesus Himself, but even in simple spoken English the sacrifice on Calvary will hit home. It will be a time for deep introspection - way deeper than the kind that being on the bike usually affords me.

For now... Good night.

We Need a New Name

I wish things like my BV had a different name than scooter because of these things that go by the same moniker...

At times I find the contrast amusing, but still, when the school kids ask, "Oh, you ride a scooter?" sometimes I think they're thinking of the thing grandma drives from the living room to the toilet.

Then again, you know what they say: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!

Vroooooooooooooooom!

But the GPS Called It a Highway!

Last weekend when I took off on the bike to try to revisit a road I'd taken in the past but ended up running a different road to its terminus before heading back, I was intrigued by a dirt road turning quickly out of sight and running parallel to both the Susquehanna River and a set of railroad tracks. I checked Map Source, the map software that came with my Garmin unit when I got back here to the desk, and confirmed my suspicions. Somehow that little patch of dirt road should lead to "Highway 3005" which runs alongside the river and leads all the way north to a bridge that crosses the Susquehanna to Route 92 with which I'm quite familiar. I'm wary of running the BV on gravel so the next day I took off in the car to see how far I'd need to run over the dirt road before I could connect with the highway. I figured I'd do the trailblazing with the Neon and then come back with the scooter when I knew where I'd be going.

By this view from Google Maps, there's Highway 3005 to the right of the river.

I arrived back at the mouth of the dirt road once more, scratching my head and wondering why the municipal powers that be wouldn't have bothered to make the access road to the highway a little more pleasant to travel. I suspected it was one of those squabbles between the town council and the state in which neither wanted to claim the responsibility of maintaining a small stretch for whatever reason. I got onto the dirt road and bounced around the bend to discover this sight before me...

Surely the highway would have to start just beyond that next turn I believed. After all, the dirt road itself wouldn't be labeled as a highway on a reputable map, right? Besides, it was too late to turn around now, even if I was starting to get a little suspicious, because there was nowhere to turn the car around and neither was there enough room for another car if one should come at me from the opposite direction.

A mile later and I was still looking at a bumpy, single lane, dirt road but by then I started getting the willies imagining a pickup truck coming at me from the opposite direction complete with shotguns in the rack behind the driver's head and a passenger as frightening looking as the driver. I could see myself coming nose to nose with said pickup, getting out of the car with both good old boys getting out of the truck, and in the back of my mind I could almost hear the banjo starting up. "Well, where do you think you're going?" would be all one of them would have to say before I'd scramble back to the car, lock the door, and then discover that I have no cell service. I kept driving, about 17 mph by the GPS record fearing that I'd break an axle on one of the ruts if I went any faster.

The road widened a little, but not before the whole scene got nightmarishly surreal with tires perched on old telegraph poles not unlike some big, black carrion feeders that might go for one's eyes first without waiting for one to be respectably deceased. Either somebody hauled a ladder down there to create the disturbing view or the tires were tossed up there repeatedly before coming to rest on their respective crossbeams. Either way, I don't think I'd want to have met up with whomever did the decorating.

Although it had felt like I'd spent about an hour and traveled 20 miles along that dirt path referred to as "Highway 3005," by the GPS track the gravely, bumpy, rutted part was only three miles long before pavement began with no rhyme nor reason accounting for why, from that point on, it was a maintained road.

I don't suppose I'll be making any hard and fast travel plans with the scooter over roads not traveled with the car first. If I do, I'll be sure to leave an electronic trail of crumbs, at least, so I can sheepishly arrive back where I started by retracing my route.