Scarecrows, Scenery and Stunts

A rare weekend free of tasks/projects/responsibilites had presented itself before us, so I decided to head up to the house in NH on Saturday morning. The weather was warm and somewhat humid - surprising for early October - but I wasn’t complaining. I was facing some incoming rain that evening, so I hammered the highway, looking to get up there and enjoy some of the sunshine before the clouds moved in. And when I say I hammered the highway, I hammered it….up until 4 miles before the 95/93 connection, and then I hit some heavy traffic, slowing me to about 15 miles an hour. I could see the overpass for 93 and the traffic was moving well - cool! That means this traffic mess is confined to 95 and all I gotta do is get to the exit and I’ll be rolling again. Some jockeying between lanes and soon I was in good shape, sliding up the 93 on-ramp and setting the speedo needle back on the high side of the gauge where it belongs. The blacktop was piling up behind me and I was back to making some decent time - things were looking good. I started hitting the expected backup right before the Mass/NH border and things slowed a bit. I figured I’d soon be rolling again, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Traffic had me stopped cold, feet planted unhappily on the roadway. I haven’t seen traffic that bad on that highway, in years and years. There was no rhyme or reason for it - no bad accident, no road construction, nothing. I was going to chalk it up to leaf-peepers, but that wouldn’t have made sense as the foliage really has a ways to go before it hits peak. Whatever the reason was, a trip that should have maybe taken 2.5 hours, wound up dragging into almost 4 hours in length.

Finally arriving into the outskirts of Wolfeboro, I started noticing many houses were displaying scarecrow-themed Halloween displays. I pulled over and snapped some pics of the ones I liked the best. Here’s one that was in front of a doctor’s office (they were doing surgery on a skeleton);

Here’s some scarecrow kids skateboarding on a half-pipe, in front of the town supermarket;

Here’s a scarecrow mailman, treed by some scarecrow dogs;

A lot of thought had been put into each of them, but definitely the one I thought was the best overall, was the Headless Horseman themed one.

I hit the house, unloaded the bike and headed back into town for eats and drinks at the Wolfe Tavern (love that place!). This place looks like an old town meeting house, or an old B&B or something, that has been converted into a cool tavern. Instead of one large bar area, or large function room, it has a lot of smaller rooms that are all interconnected. And in almost all of the rooms, thousands of cast beer steins are hanging from the ceilings. Here’s a shot from across the upstairs bar…

Here’s one of the smaller side-rooms, also awash with hanging mugs…

Here’s a shot of one of the front rooms - complete with fireplace (not shown) and a mounted moose head…and more mugs!

How does one get a mug of your own? The Wolfe Tavern has a beer list which contains something like 99 beers. They give you a beer punch-card and every time you have one of their different beers, they punch out the appropriate beer on your card. You’re only supposed to receive credit for 2 beers per visit (liability issues and all), but the bartenders are pretty cool and if you catch them on a good night, you can get credit for many more than just two.

So while I was eating and having a couple (wink wink) of beers, the bartender (Kathy) confirmed my guess that the town was hosting a scarecrow contest. Not sure if there’s a prize or not, I didn’t really get that far, we were too busy talking about the different displays and how cool they were.

Seeing that the daylight was fading into an ominous gray outside, I settled my account with the tavern and saddled back up on the bike. Thankfully, it’s only about 2 miles to the house, because turning onto the street from the parking lot, the skies in front of me were more than just gray; they were borderline black. I managed to get the bike into the garage and myself into the living room just as a deluge began to hammer down around me. There wasn’t much point in going back out at this point, so I just relaxed inside for the evening.

Sunday came all too soon. There were two big sporting events to catch that day (Pats & Sox!), and rather than spend the day watching them up there and then have to fight traffic on the way home, I opted to hammer the highways again and watch them from the comfort of home. So I packed the bike, did a sweep to make sure everything was cleaned up and tidy, and rolled (regretfully) towards home and back towards reality.

But I still have time - the snow hasn’t come yet and the temps aren’t that cold. There’s still time to make it up there again for another visit to
NH and the beautiful scenery therein.


That would have been the end of the weekend there…but a buddy of mine from the gym had told me about some trick-riders that had been tearing up one of the dead-end streets near his house recently. Apparently they’ve been gathering on Sunday afternoons/evenings and practicing their stuff. So I figured what the hell, I’ll take a ride over and see if they’re there. They were, and it was awesome! There were many spectators, and about 5 guys on sport bikes doing all kinds of sick sh*t on their rides. Standing burnies, drifting burnies, wheelies, fronties, no hands, feet over the bars while burning, etc. etc. etc. I took some clips with the digital camera, let’s see if I can load one to give you an idea…

Here’s another one…

Here’s the guy doing the jump-n-go the right way (according to them); the front tire never hits the ground. Frikkin’ insane!

The crowd was cool with a couple of strangers showing up and taking pics/vids of them. Some of the riders belong to a group called Barely Legal Stunters (http://www.barelylegalstunters.com/home/home.htm). They said they’ll be back to the same place in following weeks, so you know I’ll have to try and get some more good clips!

Ok, that’ll do it for this post. I still have to do the write-up on my trip out to Olean last weekend – I’m hoping to have that posted by the end of this week. For now…

Ride Hard, Take Chances.