Our Adirondack motorcycle tour entered its final day when we awoke at the borrowed camp at Loon Lake.  Our plan for the day was really no plan at all, just a vague sense that we’d wander around the northeast and eventually end up back at Essex NY to take the ferry back to Vermont.  Naturally Steve and I were eager to find some more backcountry dirt roads where nobody else would be found, and Colin’s low-slung Harley and vulnerable crankcase would have to tough it out.  Our first shot was an old railroad grade that was great fun but after a couple of miles of slewing around on loose gravel, we took pity on the old hog and turned back.

Not, however, before I captured this shot with my helmet-mounted video camera.  Colin commented that it was the toughest road so far for his bike, perfectly graded but the loose gravel atop hardpack made it “like driving on marbles.”

It wasn’t long before we found another dirt road, the Thatcherville Road that becomes Buck Pond Campsite Road.  This one was more comfortable for the Harley and a few miles down we stopped at an idyllic overview of the horribly misnamed “Mud Pond.”  It looked crystal clear and absolutely unspoiled from where we were standing.

One great aspect of the Adirondacks is the numerous lakes and navigable rivers.  You can’t go 10 miles without bumping into another beautiful and uncrowded northern lake.  Along this road we discovered into the little-known Lake Kushaqua and several ponds, each one a paradise for canoes and kayaks.  Eventually we came out at Rt 3, stopped in Bloomingdale NY for breakfast at a diner, and then decided to take the scenic drive up to the summit of Whiteface Mountain.

The road to the summit of Whiteface Mtn serves no purpose other than as a monument.   It was built during the Depression as a public works project to honor military dead.  The road to the top costs $10 and is a fantastic drive, with spectacular views at the top if the day is clear, as it was for us.  I shot video all the way up and all the way down, which is included in the YouTube video here.  It was well worth the ten bucks, especially for the opportunity to do it on a motorcycle.

Of course, going up meant Colin’s cell phone would start ringing again, but it was a small price to pay for the 360-degree views with eighty mile visibility.  We were hovering over Lake Placid just west of us, and off to the east Lake Champlain was easily spotted.

At this point in the ride we had long since gotten over the need to ride as a pack, so I went down the mountain first, and we re-grouped at a gas station down below in Wilmington.  We still had no real plan, but Steve led the way from there, through the town of Jay and down Rt 9N.  There we found one last glorious winding paved road that had us all grinning:  Hurricane Road.  I hadn’t expected it, but it was definitely the best set of twisties we hit on the entire three days.  From there, it was anticlimactic  wandering through fields all the way back to Essex.

We parted company with Colin there and hopped the ferry back to Vermont, reflecting on the success of the trip. We had no breakdowns (although plenty of Ural-tweaks).  We had no arguments, or even tense moments.  No crashes (Steve later said he had expected I’d wipe out at some point.)

We didn’t get lost, although we tried.  The weather was uniformly spectacular, and it seemed like every road had something to offer.  Even the worst road food we ate wasn’t really that bad.  We had covered 450 miles in three days with two German bikes, one American hog, and a Russian artifact and had a great time doing it.  It seemed a shame to be going home so soon.  Now I was feeling some regret that I had rejected our longer trip plan: a ride around Quebec’s Gaspe Peninsula.

Still, I won’t be buying my own motorcycle anytime soon.  It’s not the same down in southern Arizona.  This tour was special because it was in the northeast, where the rural roads seem endless.  I have a feeling we’ll be doing it again sometime, the next time I’m in town.  This may be something that, for me, can only happen up in the northeast.  So my jacket and helmet will stay up there, waiting for the next chance to hit the road.

This wrapped up my visit to Vermont.  Work and other obligations were calling, so on Sunday Eleanor hauled me to the airport and I flew back to Tucson.  (You’ll notice that I’m flying the Temporary Bachelor Man flag again.)  I will be here, in the heat, getting some intense work done, for the next two weeks.  Then I’ll return to Vermont to gather up the family and the Airstream and begin the long journey back west.  If you’re only interested in Airstream adventures then tune in after July 4 (and incidentally, why did you read this far?)  If you are curious what TBM is up to in Tucson, I suspect there will be further updates coming soon…

The nice thing about traveling with a group of guys is that there’s not much delay between waking up and hitting the road.  In fact, there’s a small element of competition, since nobody wants to be the one who took too long in the bathroom or got labeled “high maintenance” by the other guys.  No dilly-dallying admiring the lake, no makeup, not even much chatting.  Grab your gear and load up, because the road awaits!  So less than an hour after waking, we were ready to go and the camp was cleaned up.  Steve even mowed the lawn for the owners.

Since we weren’t cooking on this trip (traveling light), we had to ride to breakfast.  I had a stock of breakfast bars in my bag to tide me over.  I ate a couple of those and then we saddled up and rode 14 chilly morning miles or so to the nearest town with a breakfast place, which was Long Lake, same town where we had dinner.  Even with the cool morning temperatures it was a nice ride, with continued sunshine and wide green views all around us.  The restaurant in Long Lake had a sign left out from last week’s Americade, saying something like “Welcome bikers!” and we weren’t the only ones there.

Our plans were a little in flux at this point.  Steve had a route in mind but we didn’t want to overwhelm Colin’s bike with too many rough dirt roads.  I spotted a nice long backcountry road on the map that probably would have rivaled the previous day’s 30-miler, but we skipped that in favor of a more sedate tour up Route 30.  We took a lengthy detour to Little Tupper Lake, where the state has acquired 15,000 acres of land and a lake (great fishing, they say), then back to Route 30 up to Tupper.

I had left a crucial bag of supplies at home by accident, so Tupper was my only chance of the day to find a proper pharmacy and pick up a few replacement items.  While I was in the store, Eric’s Ural attracted another admirer, so we ended up spending half an hour there.  Nobody took notice of our cool BMWs as long as the Ural as in sight.  A few miles north we encountered a Border Patrol roadblock, and they stopped us.  The officer said, “It’s OK, I just stopped you so I could check out the Ural!” Steve replied, “That’s what everyone says!” and the officer replied, “Oh, your bike is nice too.”  So we got pity from the Border Patrol.

The Ural definitely got attention but most of it was from Eric.  Every day he had to make another adjustment to it.  The day before we left it was the brakes, and today it was the carburetors.  The original Russian carbs were replaced with Japanese ones, but still Eric ended up taking them partially apart and tweaking again, trying to eliminate a small “miss” in the engine at certain RPMs.  He never did manage to get it quite perfect (despite being a professional mechanic for many years) but the bike ran fine anyway.

Before we left Eleanor said her major safety concern was the idiot texting on their phone and not seeing me.  That’s no problem in the Adirondacks, since cell phones rarely work.  When we did pass through a town with cell service, Eric would whip his iPhone out and update his Facebook page or something, Colin’s Jurassic-era phone would ring with a question about axles, and Steve & I would reply to a few emails.  It was really horribly geeky but fortunately the phones didn’t work about 80% of the time and thus we were left alone by the majority of the world.  To keep the phones charged, Steve and I had installed waterproof mounts that plugged into the BMW accessory sockets.  This also allowed us to use the phones as GPS/moving maps while riding.

We continued to wander up Rt 30, eventually past Meacham Lake and east on Rt 26, then along a county road to the tiny village of Mountain View.  I’m not sure why we were there, but predictably Colin’s Harley needed gas again, and there was exactly one place in town to get it, at the price of $4.39 per gallon.  It felt like a remote spot in Alaska.

It turned out also that the same place was the only restaurant for at least 20 miles, so we stuck around.  As with almost every place we’d been in the past two days, we were practically the only customers.  I liked that.

From there we headed east to Loon Lake, on the absolute worst (meaning best in adventure terms) so-called-paved road of the entire trip, namely “Old Route 99” or the “Port Kent-Hopkinton Turnpike.”  Calling it a turnpike was certainly glamorizing it.  The road twisted and rolled, with wash-outs and potholes everywhere.  We didn’t see a single car the entire distance.  The BMWs loved it, and I think the other guys found it pretty fun too.

In Long Lake we had scored another free camp belonging to a fellow Airstreamer and friend of Colin’s, so it was the same procedure: divvy up the bedrooms, take a walk, hang out, listen to other guys snoring all night, and then in the morning mow the lawn and watch Eric do another service on the Ural (this time, tightening the steering head bearings).  But that was part of Day Three, which I’ll document tomorrow.

For quite a while I’ve been anticipating an unusual event as part of this year’s Airstream trip to the northeast.  My brother spent the winter acquiring and refurbishing a pair of BMW motorcycles, which we planned to take on a tour.  I just got back from that trip a few days ago, and finally have a chance to write it up.  I’ll post blogs about the trip over the next three days, starting with today.

Motorcycling was never something I had planned to return to.  My last bike was a Yamaha 550, sold in 1989 after I realized that it just wasn’t fitting into my life anymore.  It was fun, but I never looked back, until Steve started sending me links to stories of “adventure” riders who have ridden their BMW motorcycles on long and treacherous roads in remote parts of the world.  At this point in my life, a motorcycle still didn’t fit and I had even more reasons not to get back into it, but eventually I softened on the issue and began buying the necessary gear.

I’ve already described my first ride in the previous blog entry.  We had planned to take a three-day tour through New York’s Adirondack region starting Tuesday (see map below), but the weather got iffy and none of us were eager to ride in the rain.  So on Tuesday we used the clear morning hours to take a local tour through Vermont, up to Rt 100 and back, which (with various zig-zags on dirt roads past numerous farms) gave me another 80 miles of touring practice before the rain arrived.

This also gave us time to prepare. Eric’s Ural needed a little more tweaking of the drum brakes, which are weak at the best of times, and Emma was still at work painting up some black Airstream Life t-shirts for our gang.  We named ourselves “The Black Flies”:  Steve, Rich, Eric, and Colin.  Each of us adopted a gang name.  Mine was “Wally”, Steve was “Pusher,” Eric with his Russian-made Ural & sidecar was “Putin,” and Colin was “Axel” (deliberately misspelled).  We pledged to wear the shirts all three days no matter how stinky they got, and almost managed it.

On Wednesday the weather was clear again.  Steve, Eric, and I rolled out of the driveway and a few miles to the Charlotte-Essex ferry that crosses Lake Champlain.  In the hamlet of Essex NY, we met up with Colin and his thunderous 1980s-era Harley FLHT “shovelhead.”  It looked like a black limousine with four inches of ground clearance, a typical Harley of the era, with plenty of added chrome, huge saddlebags, and a “King Of The Highway” emblem.

As Colin noted, the Harley was basically the equivalent of two BMWs, since it had twice the number of cylinder (two to our one), twice the engine displacement (1350 cc versus our 650 cc engines) and weighed nearly twice as much.  These characteristics proved to be highly relevant later, especially the fuel economy.  The BMWs got a steady 69 MPG, while the Harley and the Ural were running more like 29 MPG, with the same size fuel tank.  As a result, we stopped for fuel a lot but Steve and I only filled up every other stop.

From the very beginning the ride was spectacular.  After all the practice the bike was beginning to feel like a part of my body, which is exactly what you want, and the sun was shining, and the roads were sensuously curvy.  We browsed through the towns of Essex, Port Henry, Mineville, and Schroon, taking every off-beat twisty road we could find.  I leaned into the corners with a feeling of absolute freedom, remembering why motorcyclists love to ride.

It wasn’t long, however, before Steve’s route plan began to challenge Colin’s Harley.  That thing was built for straight-line highway cruising, and Colin wasn’t sure at first how much he wanted to lean it.  He came up to speed fast, especially when we went off-road a little to explore a defunct amusement park in the woods.

A few hours later, we hit the first long dirt road of the trip, and had to pause for a conference before proceeding.  Could Colin’s bike make it?  The road was 30 miles long of single-lane former logging road that was only marginally improved.  Every inch of it was either a pothole or a FBR (Big Rock) embedded in the road, and with the road dappled by sun filtering through the trees overhead it was difficult to see what was coming.  If you took your eyes off the road for a split-second, it was virtually guaranteed that another FBR would arise directly in front of you.

Colin and the Harley’s low-slung crankcase miraculously survived this treatment, with good humor to boot.  Riding the BMWs, Steve and I were in paradise. This road was like a game for our deeply-suspended bikes, and I soon found myself dodging and weaving around the obstacles at 30 MPH with pleasure.  This sort of road (or worse) is exactly what these bikes were made for.  The 30 miles disappeared far too quickly for me.

We eventually found ourselves in the village of Old Forge, and from there rode a relatively boring stretch of highway all the way to the Adirondack Inn at Long Lake, where we stopped for dinner.  After dinner the air had dropped into the 50s and it took every stitch of warm layers I had to survive the 15 mile ride at dusk to our cabin at Blue Mountain Lake.  The other problem with riding at dusk is that the bugs and animals come out, so by the end I was tired of watching for deer and my visor was coated with smashed insects.  We had been out for 11 hours.

The cabin was borrowed for the night.  We were under orders to return it in immaculate condition, and that was a bit of pressure for four guys but we managed.  The hot water was off, which prevented the glorious pre-bedtime shower I would have liked, but Eric got the hot water going for the morning.  We divvied up the beds, wiped the bugs off the visors, split a half-gallon of ice cream, and crashed by 11 p.m.  It had been an awesome day, and we were all looking forward to more…