The Beginning of the End

I wake up pretty early considering I didn’t get to bed until three AM the previous night. After breakfast and some reading, Grandma and I go to the local bowling alley because she got a league match. I bowl a couple quick game alone while she is warming up with her team. My first game is miserable, an eighty-four or something like that, one of my worst scores ever. My next game is much better, a one thirty-three, which is one of my highest scores ever. I’m not the world’s best bowler. Grandma is not doing her best either, when I go over to watch, but she picks it up after the first game just like me. I go over to shoot pool after awhile and play my right hand against my left. My right is undefeated. After bowling we head back and relax and read. Later on, my cousin Meghan, who lives with my grandma, shows up. That evening we play cards and I come in a solid last place, but I consider it a warm-up because I haven’t played for awhile. The next day I help Grandma with yard work - trimming a bunch of trees and shrubs and bushes in the backyard with a dilapidated low-power electric hedge trimmer, and cleaning out dirt and leaves from the gutters. I end up getting the electric cord to the trimmer caught in the teeth and accidentally sever it, but it’s not a huge deal because the cord can be replaced by any extension cord. That night we all go out to dinner with my aunt and then play another round of cards which I once again thoroughly lose. Last night was my warm up, so I just don’t have an excuse for this.
The next morning I hang around until Grandma’s a friend picks her up to go play bridge and I am off. I supposedly have directions out of Cleveland but once I get out of Grandma’s neighborhood, and make the first couple steps successfully, I go straight where I should have gone right, and just try and make my way, thinking I couldn’t be too far out of the way. It turns out that I am too far out of the way. I eventually get on the road I want to be on, except it’s way behind where I would have gotten on had I not screwed up the directions. I guess that I wasted a good forty-five minutes or an hour driving through the Cleveland ghetto, trying to get on a road where I can actually move. I finally get on 422 which will bring me about halfway through Pennsylvania towards Philadelphia. At first it is not much better than the crowded ghettos I just wasted a bunch of time driving through, but east of New Castle, it clears out and there are a lot of pretty stretches. At one point, as I am driving down a shady stretch of road, something comes at me from my right and nails my handlebars near my brake fluid reservoir. It was in my periphery so I can’t say for sure it was a bird that just accidentally killed itself with my motorcycle, but after thinking for a second how clumps of leaves, if somehow a bunch of leaves got clumped together in a tree, don’t fall laterally, I realize that it must have been a bird. I figured at some point on this trip, I might have a run-in with a bird. A friend of mine said he had a bird run into his chest on a bike once. At least it didn’t hit me in the head. I imagine a bird of good enough size could really knock my skull around, and who knows if I would veer off into a car or a ditch or tree or what. I guess that’s just a risk one assumes on a motorcycle. I am on 422 until I get to 219 which brings me south to 56, which brings me southeast to US 30. This road will bring me all the way into Philadelphia, and it looks like it would be a nice calm ride, but I don’t know how long it will take, or if I have enough time to get there tonight, which I would like to do, rather than leave a measly two or three hour drive for tomorrow. I am right by I-76, and I cringe as I think it might be a more expeditious choice to jump on the interstate for the rest of the way. Dusk is falling and it is almost six. I ask a couple people in a convenience store how long it would take to get to Philly and they give me an answer of six hours, which I know is completely ridiculous. I call up Adam and have him Google it, and it’s a three and a half hour ride which I can deal with. Then I think, hell with it, I’ll take 30 all the way there, and start to head out on 30 before I reconsider yet again and find my way to the interstate, which is also a turnpike, meaning I will have to pay a hefty toll by the time I get off in Conshohocken, just outside of Philly. I soon realize I am going to have to contend with a lot of tractor trailers on this ride, which has it’s plusses and minuses. On the plus side, a trucker is a professional driver and more likely to notice a motorcyclist than your average schmuck in a car despite the larger size of his ride and larger blind spots. They are just better drivers because that is their job. On the negative side, trucks can blow you around when they pass, and their sheer mass just makes you think of the many many bad interactions one could have with them. Plus, when you’re behind one, it ruins the view. There is actually some pretty land that 76 goes through, but night soon falls and now I am just driving to make time and get off this road, the very antithesis of how I liked to ride out in the west and south, but this is the northeast and I know quiet easy back roads that go for any amount of distance are now few and far between and I submit to the fact that most of my driving from here on up with probably be on roads I do not really want to be on. 76 goes through a couple huge tunnels which is always fun on a motorcycle. On a motorcycle, I like watching the sickly orange-yellow light that you find in all tunnels quickly roll off the chrome of the headlight towards me and split off at the handlebars and then shoot off to both sides while there is some that makes it to the chrome console on my gas tank and follows the curves and contours there. Each bulb I drive under sends its light over my bike and I like to take my eyes off the road for a second and watch it go, even though it is just as much fun to see it in your lower periphery. After I go through a couple tunnels I am back on the dark, loud interstate and have to stop for gas. I check my voicemail for directions to Adam’s and get back on the road. To make the drive even more pleasant, I start to hear and feel a couple raindrops on my helmet that are the harbingers to the further rain that is about to soak me. I manage to get under a bridge before I get soaked and change into my rain suit as eighteen wheelers are flying by me in the night. I continue on the highway, glad that I am headed in just a straight line so there is less chance of me sliding out in a turn and dying a wet, cold death. The rain picks up and lets down and gets pretty heavy at one point, but I continue on, just going slow and steady. By the time I am almost to Adam’s exit, it has stopped and it looks like the sky has cleared up for the night so I repack the suit when I stop for gas and double check the directions. He is three thirty-two off of 76, but the signs on the turnpike say the next exit is three twenty-six, and then something above three thirty-two, so I ask a woman in line at the gas station I am at, and it turns out that she is going right by the Conshohocken exit and says I should follow her. I get off the turnpike behind her and pay my ten dollar toll before I realize that the exits continue off the highway, that the sign that confused me is only for turnpike exits and even though I am off the turnpike, I am still on 76. I see the Conshohocken exit and manage to find Adam’s road pretty easy considering the exit system was giving me a hard time. I drive up it once, keeping an eye out for his bright yellow car, but miss it, and have to call him to find his house. It’s been a long day, and maybe the first of more to come on crappy northeastern interstates.