Home Safe and Sound

Just to let everyone know, we did make it back to Massachusetts safe and sound.  I pulled in the driveway about 7:45.  It was a 700 mile day from West Virginia (688 on my bike).  We had about 1-1/2 hours of drizzly rain and then that stopped, but it stayed in the mid 40's until we were in Connecticut and then it went up to 52 and by the time I was home it was back to 47.  So if we were to ride home tomorrow like we had originally planned I think it would have been in an all-day cold rain!

Total miles for the trip on my bike was 3,490 in 8 days.  As any rider knows, every bike reads the road miles and speed differently.  We would be riding together on the highway and have three different speeds, and at the end of the day have three different mileages!  So Maury broke 3,600 miles by the time he was home in Gardner and Rick had just shy of 3,600 miles.  I am still short about 316 miles short of 100,000 miles on my Goldwing... I will have to do that with Diona on the back!

In the entire trip we did not have any "motorist challenges" until we were in New York on the way home.  A lady in a little red car just decided she wanted to be in my lane and crowded me right over.  Thirty seconds later she had her right directional on and moved over into the left lane and did the same thing to Moe!  Then she started to speed up so we told Rick she was after him next!

We pulled into a rest stop just shy of Hartford, Connecticut to take a stretch break and there was a Cub Scout group doing coffee and treats as a community service project.  So that was a great distraction for a few minutes visiting with them.  They asked us where we were going and we said on the way home from West Virginia!  While there Rick thought that Friday was pizza night at his store so he called in an order so we could have a celebratory pizza before we broke up.  His clerk took the order, asked for a name, he said Rick, and we were on our way.

When we arrived at the store and said we wanted pizza, she said she had sold out all the "by the slice" and only had one left for "a Rick."  Then she realized she did not even recognize the boss on the phone!

We had a great trip and had a great time.  We visited 19 states:  (1) Massachusetts, (2) Connecticut, (3) New York, (4) New Jersey, (5) Pennsylvania, (6) Maryland, (7) Virginia, (8) North Carolina, (9) South Carolina, (10) Georgia, (11) Tennessee, (12) Alabama, (13) Mississippi, (14) Arkansas, (15) Missouri, (16) Illinois, (17) Kentucky, (18) Ohio, and (19) West Virginia.  And we also met a lot of fun people.  And everyone we met share there stories of travel and we shared ours -- and it was a fun time!

We had planned on Vermont and New Hampshire on the way home if we had made the ninth day, but oh, well that is for another day!

We also rode through a number of state capitals:  Hartford, CT;  Frankfort, KY;  Harrisburg, PA;  and Charleston, WV

Please keep checking back over the next week as I will post more pictures and edit some video to watch too -- as well as some other snippets that I did not type out "with my thumbs" on my cell phone.  (That's why you can easily find typo's and misspellings in some of the posts!

Thanks for following our trip!   ...Bob, Rick, and Maury