Hitting the wall

After a long and tiring day yesterday we awoke to a cloudy day. We didn't have a particularly restful night and were still tired. We packed our bags, and as I went to swing the very heavy top box up on the back of the bike it fell open. As everything spilled out I dropped to the ground to try and catch things as best I could. The only thing that broke was a wine glass but, in dropping down to the ground with the box, I managed to scratch the lid quite badly. The bag had to be totally repacked.. (We are carrying so much, the bags have to be packed very methodically and scientifically.) It really wasn't a good start to the day...

By the time we were ready to leave it had started drizzling. Wanda dressed in wet weather gear. I didn't want to because it was going to be a hot day, but the rain was getting heavier, not lighter.


Our GPS was giving me ambiguous instructions and we went down the wrong road a few times, only to have to make a u-turn and head back.

We travelled about 3 miles down the road before the rain stopped, and we began slowly broiling in the plastic bags we call wet weather gear. We stopped and took off that layer on a stone bench in the middle of a busy town. A few pairs of curious eyes looked at us through office windows.We continued to cook as the temperature climbed into the eighties and the humidity felt like it was 100%.

We travelled to the port of Stonington, where we ended up going around in circles. We had set the town as a via point on the GPS, but if you don't actually go to the exact spot that the GPS identifies as being "the town", it will keep trying endlessly to make you return..

A few miles north of Stonington we reached Mystic and a little bit further, Old Mystic. Here the big attraction is the Old Mystic Seaport, where they have a great collection of old boats and ships, and a museum set up as an 18th century sea town with various buildings housing different trades associated with ships and chandlery.

We spent half the day there. It was an interesting place, but with all the heat and humidity we were feeling very uncomfortable in our motorcyle clothing and got to the point where we decided it was just too uncomfortable to keep going.

Riding north we tried to follw a scenic route, but were too exhausted to care if we were on the right road. Besides, every road in this part of Connecticut is scenic. There was no motel where we thought we would stop for the night, so we got the GPS to find the nearest one. This was way beyond our budget, so we started telephoning other motels in the vicinity. We found one a few miles up the road and eventually reached it via the interstate not hwever before being led astray, off onto a ramp, under the underpass and back onto the same interstate where we couldn't get off for another mile or two to turn around.

We eventually returned to where the motel was supposed to be, and found it several hundred yards away,  off a small side road that ran close to the ramp for the interstate. We checked in around 3:30 pm, stripped off our protective gear and crashed. We really felt we had hit a wall and could not go on.