Letters From West Virginia

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Last Day

14 December 2016

Dear Forum,

I just thought I'd send you a note with a description of our last travel day on this wonderful trip and a summary of highlights from that week.


First the trek home.
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And it was a bit of a trek, but with a pretty cool little break in the middle.

In 2013, our group ride was to Robbinsville, NC and on our way home, we stopped in Rockville, Indiana to have lunch at The Thirty-six Saloon, conveniently located on US36. It's a biker-themed bar (as opposed to a "biker bar") with a large patio area, live music, and good house-made barbeque. Mike A., quite the barbequist in his own right, enjoyed it enough to ride (or drive) back down to Rockville with Judy on at least one other occasion. As an aside, I also stopped in at The Thirty-Six later in 2013 on my solo ride to Chattanooga to attend my best friend's funeral.

Mike is keen on the saloon's barbeque sauces which, as it happens, are available for purchase. He had mentioned stopping here to buy sauce on more than one occasion throughout the trip-planning process and even a couple of times during the trip itself. It was apparent that he wanted to make a stop there, but he was apprehensive because Rockville is ground-zero for Indiana's Covered Bridge Festival which would be in full glory on the Saturday we would pass through. He said that half of Indiana shows up for this festival and that it may be hard to park, crowded on the streets, and we may not even get in to The Thirty-Six Saloon. Mike began planning our October trip sometime in January, planned all the stops, all the routes, all the special attractions, including meeting up and riding with TheFerret. This is no small feat and all his planning resulted in one of the best trips, motorcycle or otherwise, on which I have ever been. If the man wanted us to weave through crowds in the middle of Indiana so he could get a couple of bottles of barbeque sauce, we were going to make sure we did that for him.

There was a huge construction delay on I-74 and then more traffic going west on US36. If you look at the map you can see that we detoured to IN-236 to try to avoid some of the traffic. 236 was a very pleasant road, by the way, much nicer than the section of US36 that runs parallel to it.

At any rate, we eventually arrived in Rockville, which was at least as crowded as Mike had feared. Vendors of various trinkets and food stuffs lined both sides of Ohio Street (which is what US36 is called through Rockville) and parking was best described as limited. Laura and I found a nice spot on the main drag next to a nice looking Indian (motorcycle, not Native American). The others found spots on a side street behind the saloon.

Note the traffic in the background
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Not only were we lucky enough to get inside Thirty-Six, but a group was leaving as we entered so we were able to grab a seat immediately (thanks to Judy's advance scouting).

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Us
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The food is definitely good and the barbeque sauce is worth transporting home. I recommend a stop at The Thirty-Six Saloon if you're on a ride in the area.

Since I hate me a trip on I-65, we took US41 north along the Illinois/Indiana border all the way into Cedar Lake. Having gassed up near Rockville, Cedar Lake seemed like a great place to fill up again for the last 60 or so miles, most of which would be interstate. In a fortuitous coordination of events, I completed my fueling at the BP in Cedar Lake at exactly 5:00pm and attempted to reset the Trip odometer, but wound up clicking to the main odometer which was reading exactly 26,000 miles.

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The trip on I-294 North was as stressful as it always is. Four, sometimes more, lanes of trucks and cars make it thus, but it was an uneventful 30 miles or so.

I arrived home, after a stop to top off my tank, at 7:19pm. My Trip B was keeping track of the total miles for the trip and it showed 980.6 which of course was actually 1980.6 since it rolled over someplace in West Virginia four or five days earlier.

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I got home in time to catch Justin's concert on webcast while eating a large spicy pork fried rice I picked up at my favorite local carry-out place. A nice little postscript to my 10-day adventure.

Well friends, that's it for now. I will write another note tomorrow to recap some of my highlights of the trip.

Ride on,

MTC