Philadelphia…

I spend a total of three nights in Philadelphia, the longest than at any place, and certainly much longer than I had expected. Here is how it came about.

I left New Jersey early Monday morning. Felicia and Justin needed to leave for Maine and I didn’t have a place to spend the night. I guess I could have gotten a motel, but there had been a really bad thunderstorm the previous night – bad enough that they were thinking of classifying it as a tornado – and more rains were predicted for the next day. My enthusiasm for braving a new city in this dismal weatherI waned considerably. Seeing that Philadelphia was a mere 80 miles away, I decided to ride down to see my friend Janie.

while I have mostly been on freeways after getting off of the coast of Maine, the ride down the New Jersey turnpike towards Philly was a horror unto itself. Before I left, Felicia had mentioned that the section of highway for cars and trucks was sometimes less crowded than the one for cars only. This stuck in my mind and when they hghway forked two ways, I got onto the section for trucks.

I’m not sure if it was less crowded than the cars only section, but I do know that this highway is a Bad. Idea. for motorcyclists. I spend the entire time trying not to breathe the noxious fumes the trucks belched out and trying to overtake the various trucks and semis. I can honestly say that not in all my life have I seen so many semis on the road at the same time, nor passed so many in the space of an hour. Passing one semi going 70mph is harrowing in itself, doing it repeatedly got very tiresome very quickly, and I was relieved when the highways merged again.

The rest of the ride was fairly uneventful, except for the One. Asshole. Truck. who passed me at 75mph and I could see him trying to weave through traffic in the distance. He got stuck in some traffic eventually and I was able to pass him on the left. I was just getting off at my exit when he passed me again, even though he wasn’t getting off, as if just to prove a point. I pondered flipping him off, but considering that I was only as big as one of his tires, it didn’t seem like a good idea.

I made it to Drexel Hill before noon and spend the afernoon talking to Janie and getting caught up. I think we were meeting after almost 2 years and there was so much to talk about. I adored her two dogs who were delightful and well behaved.

She took me for a drive around the city but for some reason I was completely exhausted. It could have been just the stress of being in so many cities, riding on just interstates for most of the previous week, or just the terrible heat and humidity. My right eye also felt very irritable and I couldn’t stop rubbing it. I got some eye drops for it which helped a lot. It was all I could do to eat something and go to bed that night.

The next day, I spend most of the morning in bed sleeping in, then went to do some touristy things later afternoon. (Strike the Liberty Bell off the list).

While we were walking around, Janie suggested that I take the Bolt Bus up to NYC the next day. I was really regretting not being able to see the city after I had come so close, so this suggestion was quite appealing.

As I noted in other blog posts, I did just that and I’m glad I got the chance to see New York.

First impressions…

The bus reached New York at 8:36AM practically on schedule, which amazes me. I tried to sleep but was unable to. In the last half hour I started chatting with the boy sitting next to me, who looked amazingly like Anthony right down to his long, curly hair, facial structure and height. :P He said that he might very well be related because he was adopted and his origins were mysterious and they suspected that he might well have Japanese origins.

He was reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and not liking it very much. :P We talked a little bit about literature and have to say that he has to be the most erudite 17 year old I’ve met. The kind of person I wish the world was full of. Ah well.

I got off the bus and went to the Tick Tock diner to get breafast. The place was overwhelmingly full for this time of day. It is cheerful and bustling and people are talking earnestly around their diner coffees. A couple of policemen are sitting in the booth next to mine.

It’s a little like being in a movie. I’m glad I came to New York.

Taking the bus to NYC…

I know that I need to add updates for the past few days and I will try to do so as soon as I can. I am currently camped put in Philadelphia for slightly longer than I had planned. I saw a lot of the city yesterday. It’s mostly a lot of historical monuments and artifacts like the Liberty Bell. The architecture is very colonial and reminded me of the buildings in London.

Today I am taking the Bolt Bus north to NYC to spend some time in the city. I had felt really bad about leaving New York without actually getting to see anything besides the State of Liberty (combination of bad weather, being really exhausted and not having a place to sleep). Janie suggested that I take the bus which takes 2 hours up and back and go see the city.

I had t wake up at the absurdly early hour of 5:30 to catch the 6:30 bus and here I am. They predict rain so I don’t know how the day will pan out. I am just hoping to walk through Central Park, the Metropolitan, maybe Chelsea and Greenwich Village and generally just get a feel for the city.

Now I will try to get some sleep.

Getting to Montreal…

The ride to Montreal was short and uneventful. I officer at the border crossing asked me a lot of questions about my visas (US and Canadian), seemed satisfied with the answers and let me pass.

Here is where a minor annoyance came up. My GPS seemed to be routing me through scores of little backroads, which normally would have been pleasant, but I just wanted to get the most direct route to Montreal. The route appeared to be almost 40 miles, but I was certain that Montreal was only 20 miles away. What was worse, the road was narrow with no shoulders and the only place to stop was people’s driveways, which I didn’t like doing, so I couldn’t stop to futz with the GPS for a long while. I finally hit a long red light, where I checked the settings and found that I had set “Interstate highways” as an obstacle to avoid. Problem solved! I unchecked the box and was immediately routed to the closest freeway and was in Montreal in a little over ten miles.

I found parking outside the hostel – taking a good few minutes to decipher the French No Parking signs – and went in. Checkin time wasn’t until another hour and they asked me to come back later. I chained up my gear to my bike but there was no way to leave my boots so I was forced to wear them. I walked a couple of blocks north to St. Catherine St., the main downtown street. It was hot, very hot and I felt overdressed in my long sleeve moisture wicking base shirt, pants and riding boots. I found a place to eat at – yet another creperie – where I was able to use the first of my Canadian currency.

After lunch, I went in search of a battery charger on St. Catherine St. I found a universal charger for the whopping price of CDN $56. :( I could have found one for half as much online, but that is a luxury I cannot afford right now seeing as my battery has been steadily depleting. I call this Phileas Fogg way of travelling — throwing money at obstacles to make them go away. Let’s hope I won’t have to take recourse to it too many times on this journey.

Missions accomplished and time to check in. I was handed two sheets and a card key. Thankfully I got the lower bunk bed. The bathroom looked clean and overall the place was bustling and cheerful and well-maintained, like most Hostelling International locations. I took a much needed shower and felt human again.

Then spent some time on the computers in the basement to upload the first batch of photos. After this, I set out to explore Vieux Montreal. It was a 15-20 minute walk up to there and I got to see some part of the old city. It was pretty crowded and tourists were everywhere, as can be expected it such a city. In that respect, it reminded me a lot of Vancouver, BC. More thoughts on Montreal in a later post.

I stopped for dinner in the Quartier Chinois under the misguided assumption that I would find genuine Chinese food there. To my horror, all the food I tried at the buffet was either luke warm or inedible and the chocolate eclair I tried for dessert had just been taken out of the freezer. Yuk.

Headed back to the hostel and ended up chatting with two cute boys. I might go see the city with them tomorrow. Montreal really does seem like the kind of place you should be in with someone else. That’s a feeling I don’t get very often.

Camping and Canadians…

I haven’t camped at very many state parks – or at all really – but I did think that the camp sites at the Cumberland Bay State Park were huge. It helped that the spot to my left was open and the lake was right in front of me.

An RV with an awning was parked to my right. One of the occupants came over to introduce himself after I smiled and nodded at him. His name was Serge and he was there with his wife Ghislan. It turned out that they were from Montreal and they drove down there every summer. They stayed for two weeks at a time, which was the maximum amount of time you could stay at that State Park, then go back home to Montreal for a week before returning again. They did this four times for the entire summer. I was a little surprised that they would come to the exact same spot if they had the freedom to move or go anywhere they pleased, but they appeared to like it a lot. I could see why – it was quiet and calm compared to Montreal.

Serge and Ghilsan were both French Quebecois. Serge’s English was pretty good while Ghilsan was a little slower – although not as slow as when I tried to talk to them in French. When I spoke to them, I had the same feeling as I had while I was in Beijing the year before. People made such an attempt to talk in English even if it wasn’t their native language, to the extent that they would whip out their phones and use the Chinese to English translation to communicate and make themselves understood. I felt guilty about not making enough of an effort to speak in French. I did try but they spoke too fast and I was only able to understand every other word. Likewise my French appeared to be very different from Quebecois French especially with the pronunciations of certain words. So we settled for communicating in a mix of English and French, each of us speaking very slowly. They seemed pleased that I even made the effort so I was glad I tried. Their accented English and the very French expressions sounded really delightful. :) I especially smiled when he told me about a nephew who
had ridden from Vancouver to Labrador on his B.M. double-vey. :)

I talked to them for a little bit before I went on my ride, and spent an hour with them around the fire they had built later at night. We toasted marshmallows and talked about our respective lives. I asked them how they had met and Serge told me that Ghislan lived in Joliet – a little north of Montreal – and they lived above a restaurant that he was at. “I saw her standing in the window and I knew she was the one.” They had been 17 then and were married in three years and still together almost 40 years later.

They were very curious to hear all about my family and details about my life. In their turn, they told me about their own lives and their children and grandchildren. It struck me that the reticence around volunteering personal information and inquiring about others’ lives was a quality that was very American and people of other nationalities do not have such inhibitions. In fact, I rather think that it is their way of being friendly and expressing goodwill.

This thought stayed in my mind the next morning when I was on my way out and saying my goodbyes. They introduced me to their friend Andre who was camped in another lot and had dropped by to say hello. Andre had worked as a photographer for a leading Canadian newspaper in another life and was also retired now. When he heard that I was going to Montreal that day, he gave me his card and told me to camp in his backyard next to the pool. “There’s nobody at home, but you can just push the main gate open and go in!”

While I have met many kind, helpful people on the roads in America, I could not readily imagine anyone being kindhearted enough to trust a complete stranger with their property while they weren’t even around. I politely declined his offer, saying that I was going to stay at a hostel close to Vieux Montreal. I did take his card though, and gave him mine. As I rode out of the campground, I thought that if most people in Quebec would be as kindhearted and generous as these worthy folks, I should possibly consider changing my route to ride through more of the region instead of heading directly back into the US from Montreal.