Day 1 - Home to Oriskany, NY

Larkin and I met up at 9am at a Starbucks in Woodbridge to enjoy a caffeinated beverage before heading out. He'd gotten just a few hours the night before due to multiple calls after midnight at work, and opted to leave later so he could log a solid nap after he got off.

Left town at about 10am with our sights set on a BBQ place on the border of Maryland and PA. That turned out to be mostly incident free, except that my fuel gauge decided to act up and was saying I wasn't completely full (and only had 118mi left when my range is well over 200). This has to be relate to the "running out of gas" incident from a few weeks ago when it indicated there were 30 mi left on the tank. It somehow reset itself (weird Beemers) and away we went. It would continue to act up the rest of the day. We had lunch at Chubby's in MD, to make it our first stop on our Smoke Chasing Grand Tour (we need to take a pic with a BBQ or Smoke place in each state).

The next issue would be heavy traffic in the middle of PA on 81 (we were just trying to get there, hence the slab). Immediately after passing an exit, traffic came to a halt that would last and last. It was 6 miles until the next exit, and while we were tempted to take the shoulder to avoid burning our clutches, these were angry drivers too, and we didn't want a PA ticket. So we sat. And sat. And move 50ft and sat. By the time we got off the interstate (Larkin was on one bar of eight on his fuel indicator) the two lanes were merging into one and it appeared to move just past the exit. So we fueled up, and jumped back on in now productive traffic.

This whole time we're seeing peaks of blue sky and incredibly angry black clouds. But the worst we get is some really wet roads in places (road spray). So we got pretty darn lucky in that regard.

The final bullet was my low beam headlight going out about 2 hours from our destination for the evening. which meant I had to ride with my high beam behind Larkin. We made to the hotel by 8:30, so it was dark, but mostly just waning light. We'll have to snoop out a headlight tomorrow.

At our final destination (a once happening Days Inn in Oriskany, NY) we met a couple on the final days of an eight day adventure on a R1200RT. We talked for hours over beer and food and they gave us some great tips for our travels through the rest of New England (like Vermont doesn't maintain their roads...). Tomorrow will be the Adirondacks, and then settle down near Mt Washington which will be our Sunday adventure. Can't wait! Goodnight!! :)