TROUBLE FINDING THE GROOVE

Baie-Comeau to Hegins
Where to where?

Listening along to To Life! from Fiddler on the Roof.

Look it up on YouTube. Turn it right up and stamp around the house and 

stomp on a glass or two. Yeh weird fun huh.

Be Healthy, Be Happy, Long Life!

Holiday season sends me south.

One hundred and twenty bucks...for one person...
...in a dump...for one night. 

It's Wednesday and I'm crossing the mighty Saint Lawrence on the eleven am ferry. I just had my ass saved by some great people at previous the hotel but I'm worried about accommodation from here on in,

...and I'm right.  

After two hours looking through murky windows on the enormous ferry it docks at Matane and I head into New Brunswick. I really should have taken the tip about holiday season and legged it straight for the US border but oh no not Deano. There's a place called Bathurst that I might have a look at (of course!) and how about Nova Scotia.

...and so what do I do...

I scoot along highways 195 and the 132 and the ride is a gem. Beautiful scenery and very light traffic. Then as I approach Bathurst it turns to crap. We're on a highway battling it out with roadworks and holiday traffic. That night I stay at John's Motel (a good bloke) in the last room in town but OK for eighty bucks. The next day the road to Sackville (which is a pretty little place) is even worse with heavy holiday traffic, endless roadworks and boring highway. The good bits are off the highway of course but I have to balance time and getting somewhere. The campground on the GPS turns out to be non existent and I duel it out with the Asian guy running the Motel and loose miserably...one hundred and twenty bucks, the breakfast better be bloody good! I make up my mind to get my monies worth and wash my clothes in the sink and charge up everything in sight.

Hang on, I think I'll have a bath! 
OK I fill up the tub till it starts flowing out the overflow vent and in I go....hmm water's a bit smelly and erm...I can feel a ring of crap halfway up where they haven't cleaned  it since...well who knows when..hmmm plan aborted..or maybe I should make my own ring!
...What about breaky. 
The next morning I pull up a chair at breakfast with an elderly Canadian couple with odd accents. We have a great chat and it seems he is originally from Spain and she is originally from Columbia. They met during English lessons in Toronto forty six years ago and the rest is history. As we talk we get served what I take to be a Vietnamese style breakfast with dumplings, veggies and egg followed up by some sort of huge traditional french muffin thing. Good stuff, almost enough to stop my winging...except for the ring in the bath...and the fact any water on the floor in the bathroom mysteriously disappeared...somewhere...

The murky windows all round on the ferry to Matane kind of killed the view.
A bit like travelling in a plastic bag.

The first bit of New Brunswick was a gem.

OK my kids and people who know me will get a laugh out of this. I decide to get a shot of me sitting by a river having lunch. I set the camera up on a little tripod balanced on my helmet (which is stupid), set the 12 second delay and as I push the button it falls off the helmet...several times.  I get the shits on but finally get it set up and leg it down to the river and go ass over head and almost roll into the river. Now I want to kill something but no I'm gonna persist. The next one has me still getting there and another I'm sitting out of sight...so...finally... this is it...no more! 

Lots of water around here.

Take a good look. That there is blue sky. Rare it seems around here.

My mobile clothes line drys the socks but gives then an exhaust fume tinge. 
Yeh 89 octane man fragrance.

That's it, I'm heading for the border!
It's gonna rain for the next couple of days. A planned lap of Nova Scotia seems a waste in the pouring rain and no accommodation. So that's it, I'm outa here. The next day I hit the interstate and head for Augusta in Maine. I have a pretty good ride although dark clouds threaten all day. I cross into the USA after Woodstock and hit highway 95 in the USA. The border guys are cool with very little paperwork, just raised eyebrows over my plans to ride to South America. As I go to leave it begins to bucket with rain...
...no no I mean 
B U C K E T ! 
I pull on my wet gear and wait and wait but it seems to get heavier. The border protection guy comes out takes a look and says "what, you don't wanna go in to our country now?" Yep funny bastard. I set off into the rain and all the gear seems to work but I'm getting filled in constantly by semis. The rain stops an hour or so before Augusta and of course Mr Optimist says "hey I know, let's camp". So I do.

Welcome to the USA... what you don't wanna go in?

Inertia

Today I’m gonna be inert

Not moving, not worrying

Not thinking, not looking

Not feeling, not going

Just Not

Life’s gonna flow around me today

I’m the stick in the torrent

The stalled car in traffic

The person asleep at the traffic lights

Life's just gonna have to go around

Bumping me, tugging at my arms, 

Ringing me, tempting me,

Cajoling me to join 

But no, not today

Today, I'm inert.

Dean

Previous employers are probably nodding aha!

Camping that works...ish!

I decide to grab a campground before Augusta and try the first one that pops up on the GPS. Green Valley Campground. Hmm, we head way off the main drag and deeper and deeper into who knows where. Finally the English lady on the GPS informs me "your final destination is on the right".  I scoot down a steep hill and stop at the log cabin office, shoot the grumpy lady $32 plus tax (bloody tax) and a patch of lawn is mine. If you've ever seen the movie Dirty Dancing you'll know what we've got here. A lovely park in front of a pristine lake, sixties toilets and showers, bogans occupying one section, older couples in permanent vans with all sorts of weird ornaments in their gardens in another, and families with a godzillion kids who have uplifted everything from home and brought it on holiday staying  near the toilets. It's a stunning location and after I get my ridiculously small tent sorted I get time to wander about and even spend time on the wobbly jetty reflecting on what the hell I'm doing. I even sleep half well but the rain returns and I pack and leave wet in the morning after an exquisite banana and snickers bar breakfast. 

Green Valley Campground. I wonder if anybody put Baby in the corner here?

Seriously beautiful lakes abound through here. But after 
the first dozen or so....

I really need a bigger tent. I'm sure there's nothing about a man
 and the size of his tent though.

I'm humbled by a great spirit.

My cousin Jennifer's husband Norm emailed me to tell me he had a cousin in New Hampshire who was a bike guy and had ridden to Alaska and all over the US. He gave me his address and phone number and as it kinda seemed on the way I decided to head in that direction and maybe give him a bell if I got close. I made the decision to try to take back roads through Maine instead of the interstate and set off thinking I'd 

be there around lunch or a bit after.

Wrong again!

Eight hours for about three hundred K's. Erghh.  Don't get me wrong, its a beautiful place. But sooo many people, traffic and small towns all with 25 mph zones, almost all joined together.  I hardly got into fifth all day. Lots of lakes and pretty towns...but...it was super frustrating and tiring. I was amazed at how densely populated such a beautiful area was. When I finally got to Colin's house he greeted me from the top window of his two storey house and told me to let myself in and come up. Norm had warned me he didn't get out much so in I went. Turns out Colin has a disease related to Marfans syndrome which causes heart problems and  severe debilitation. He is not a well man but, well you know, despite having died a couple of times and now being severely debilitated, 

he still kicks ass with spirit that humbles me to the core. 

My arrival had caused him to cancel plans with family and friends just so he would be here when I arrived. He has a motto of not turning travellers away. Jeez I felt small... Back in the seventies he took off overseas from country Gippsland and drove a kombi van round Europe. From there he engaged in numerous adventures including riding up to Alaska and back on a Kawasaki 440. He also crisscrossed the USA on a Triumph T140, bought one of the first Harley Softails and rode that all over including shipping it back to Australia for a while. He showed me a collection of photos from the seventies, eighties and nineties of serious bike riding and partying. What great time pieces...whole groups of people in flared pants...men with droopy moustaches...women in double denim and perms...life without today's cotton wool safety restraints. I love the fact there are so many people out there with so many great stories, and this is one of them.  Colin's lovely wife Lauren cooked up a great dinner that night (squash, pasta and meatballs yum) and I sincerely thank them for looking after me and apologise for cleaning up the last meatball.

Col

He lingers upstairs immobile

the chair and telly his close mates

struggles to get out much anymore

  great memories help gettin through the days

He might be ridin the Alcan highway

Chuggin beers down in Daytona 

He's back beggin gas money for the kombi 

And jumpin the kick lever turnin the Harley over

The Triumph's probably run out of spark again

Somewhere between New Hampshire and LA

Yeh Cols been there and done all that

Grabbed life and lived every day.

Dean

Back into the tent.

After breakfast  I set off early determined to beat the holiday traffic. I have a great ride across Vermont on highway 11 rising and falling over mountain ranges and finally hit the interstate to Scranton and Harrisburg. I had plans to maybe cut through New York but as I'm learning the hard way cutting about from place to place is not like Australia so I give it a miss. Around four o'clockish I book into 'Camp A While' campground in Hegins Pennsylvania. It's pretty basic with the usual mix of bogans and oldies again but for 26 bucks I'm in. It has the largest most luxurious office I've seen and the most basic campground...hmm good business.

'Camp A While' campground Pennsylvania

`

Is that a lump in the ground or a tent? Ah OK let's keep the small tent
jokes coming.

Wonder if they have bears here? Might have to lock up the baked beans.

OK I love hot showers. You could write a book just on the different ways people have figured just to get it from the pipe to the nozzle, i.e turn the bloody thing on! With this one you hit the button at the top which lasts about twenty seconds till the water stops. During this time you twiddle the two red knobs to adjust temperature, which changes as the water heats up. When you've got the mongrel up and running you just have to hit the top knob every twenty seconds...genius! 

 This is dinner. The brand of the baked beans is Bush's. Now that's a
dog food brand in Australia...and it tasted pretty good...maybe the
dogs are onto something...why is my ass wagging?

Listening along to Tomorrow by Silverchair
Love that nineties angsty sound. Released 1995...bloody 22 years ago!

Reality Check No.4

I'm doing it a bit tough. For some reason this part of the trip isn't grabbing me. It's rained most days, and forecast is it'll rain till I leave the USA. It's forcing me into spending more on accommodation and giving the budget a bit of a hiding. Chasing food and accommodation on your own is hard work.  I'm talking to a few people and it's amazing how the US mirrors Australia or vice versa. People are a bit lost. Jobs are hard to get, manufacturing has long gone out the window. People are unsure of the future at the moment. Several people I've spoken to are genuinely nervous about war. Think about it, when was the last time in Australia you spoke to someone genuinely worried about coming under attack from another country. Hmm.

War is not something I've ever had to contemplate seriously...here it's real and people aren't as gungho about it as maybe Australians would imagine Americans to be...

...which is good...

Next Blog
I head down through the Virginian Parkways and hopefully ride the Dragon's Tail before heading towards Florida.