A little closer to being caught up...

Catching up on last Thursday’s events…

Thursday we were up (6am!) and on the road early (leaving Olean, heading for a Mass overnighter, then Concord, NH on Friday night).

We had some excellent breakfast served up by T.C., then it was time to roll. The skies sprinkled on us a few times, but we finally broke through into warmer, nicer weather and enjoyed dry skies for the rest of the day.

There were 8 bikes and one van in our cara…van. (Get it? Van? Cara-van? Bah hah hah, I’m here all week, folks.) Anyway, we ambled along the highways and byways, even managing to bump into Bolivar Bob, Sharon and family, who were going to be camping with us up in Maine. They were going to straight-shoot it and meet us up there, so we (temporarily) parted ways again.

We took our exit onto Rte 20 and wound our way out of New York and into Mass. We stayed on 20 for a while, eventually arriving in Great Barrington. Daylight was running thin so we found a hotel with a nice welcoming VACANCY sign, and a big empty parking lot. Ahhh, home! Not so fast, though…when we went to the office, they took one look at the motley crew that is us, and said they were full-up. *Sigh* Ok, here we go once again; no vacancy for road weary bikers. So we kept rolling, eventually finding a place that would accept us. Nice layout, right on the main drag. Sweet! But there was another surprise in store for us; once we’d paid for the rooms, we were informed that we weren’t staying in the rooms we’d seen. Instead, we had to ride down to a back building, down a hill and far out of sight of the main drag. I guess bikers don’t exactly scream ‘come on in’ to passers by. So we blasted down to the out-of-sight building…only to be told that our 'rooms' were in the back, of this back building. In fact, our 'rooms' were nothing more than makeshift shanties, erected (!!) for the recently departed migrant workers that had been collecting the harvests. Damn. Apparently Great Barrington has no love for us knuckle-dragging two-wheelers. A guy could get a complex this way.

So we said screw it. F 'em all. Treat us like outcasts, we’ll act like outcasts. We set up a card table in the middle of the back (back) parking lot, drank beer and whiskey, shot our pistolas into the air, and molested any wilderness animals that came along. This continued until the wee hours of the morning, when the establishment finally relented and agreed to let us sleep inside.

(I will say that despite all the hassle, they did have the most comfortable beds I’ve slept in, in ages.)

Ok, that was Thursday. Sorry for doing this piece-meal, but I just got home from work and it’s been a long, long week. I’ll get more posts up, and more pics, over the weekend.

Ride Hard, Take Chances