Three Cylinders, Two Frozen Nuts, and One Last Cigarette

[PackMule]

I can pick you up at the airport, and I'll have a bike waiting for you when we get to my house, said Prubert. (Yes, I have a friend named Prubert. He's huge, in Japan)


This is the jetsetting reality of my fly-n-ride lifestyle. (Okay, okay. In reality, this is only my second fly-n-ride, the first being my Cali trip last year)


After we head up to Duluth, we can go around the north side of Lake Superior. It's a beautiful ride.


Sounds good to me. Combine the pleasure of a ride with a bit of business. What could be better?

Living in New England warps one's perspective a bit, though, with regard to time and distance. I mean here, driving through 3 states could take as little as 15 minutes. So I didn't see anything potentially wrong with flying into Chicago (I had a free ticket on Southwest) when our ultimate destination for the day was Duluth.

And then there's the weather thing...

But what better way to inject a little ADVenture into a street ride than by adding a bit of solid-state precipitation to the time crunch deadline of a business meet...?

[ZZR_Ron]

Your doing the north of Superior NOW?

This is gonna be good....

[PackMule]

Tickets booked (did I mention my free ticket had expired, and I had to shell out cash, anyway?), I sent my gear out to Prubert via FedEx. We were going to be on a tight time budget on Friday, and I wanted to travel without checking any luggage. Imagine the consequences if my gear were lost in the vortex of the baggage handling system. And I didn't think it would have been prudent to take my gear as carryon -- Excuse me, sir, could you explain why you're wearing a vest full of wires? Heated, you say? Please step right this way to our "special" screening booth...

I didn't really need my stuff the week before the trip, anyway, because we were on a family vacation to Colorado. Although I was pining for an adventure bike, we had a kickass time hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park, and PackBaby (literally) was a trooper -- putting in 8 or 9 miles a day.










What was it I said about my jetsetting lifestyle? Really, I do work for a living.

[dugmar]

Originally Posted by PackMule

Living in New England warps one's perspective a bit, though, with regard to time and distance. I mean here, driving through 3 states could take as little as 15 minutes.

Yep. I live in Mass and I can be in Maine in 22 minutes, and I have to drive through NH to get there.

[Gadget Boy]

Looks like you're having all the fun, while I slave here minding the office...

[ktmnate]

[DantesDame]

[bitterjoe]

Cool. A sled report.

Originally Posted by PackMule

[Zen Slug]

[PackMule]

Originally Posted by Gadget Boy

Looks like you're having all the fun, while I slave here minding the office...

The sacrifices of being the boss-man... (Bet you didn't even notice that I was gone...)

[PackMule]

So, in typical PackMule style, midnight the morning of departure came and went, without me having my stuff packed (aside from what I had already sent to Pru). I had all good intentions of getting ready and heading to bed early, since Friday was going to be a long day in the plane/car/saddle, but CamelMoe had different plans and wandered over with a bunch of beer just after the baby went to bed. So we sat down, and I showed him the ins and outs of ADVRIDER and got his account registered.


Thankfully, the beer eventually ran out ,and CamelMoe sauntered back next door and I got back to packing. My head hit the pillow somewhere around 2am, just 2 1/2 short hours before CamelMoe wandered back over to bring me to the airport. What a guy.


One great thing about flying out of Manchester, NH is that you don't have to deal with the clusterf*ck that is Logan, in Boston. The other great thing is that you can be standing in the security line 30 minutes after leaving my house, which is a godsend because this is what my stuff looked like at 5am (the time we were appointed to leave, and only 1.5 hrs before the plane was supposed to take off).




So, maybe I hadn't "packed" so much the night before, as "piled". But I'm a pile-organizer (just ask Mrs. Packmule, much to her chagrin). Anyway, we eventually got to Manchester, where I proceded to wait my turn in the security corral (liquids under 3oz in their own containers now, children). Once cleared, I walked literally right on to the plane, as the "A" group was boarding. Man, this trip was coming together! I called Pru and told him we were on schedule -- he was just leaving Milwaukee and would meet me at Midway, in Chicago, in just about the same amount of time it would take to fly there from New Hampshire. (Remember what I said about living in New England and the interstate distance perspective...)

To mix transportation euphamisms, though, this is where the train started to come off the tracks. We pushed back from the gate on time, but I noticed that the pilot was taxi-ing quite slowly. Too slowly.



When we got to the end of the taxiway, we pulled off into a siding and the engines grew silent. Folks, we've got some bad news from the flightdeck -- we're on an airtraffic delay out of Chicago. They're expecting about 30 minutes, so we're just going to shut her down and save a little bit of gas until we get the word to go. Luv ya.



I watched as flight after flight passed us and took off. And the sun came up.



We ended up taking off just about 40 minutes late, and the pilot informed us that there'd be a 130 knot headwind, so we shouldn't expect to make up any time in the air. Oh well, things were out of my hands at that point, so no sense getting bent out of shape about it. In any case, the delay meant that we were rewarded with the dawn's early light catching the fall foliage perfectly. The hills were ablaze as we powered into the sky.



That's Mount Monadnock, down there.






My eyelids finally won the struggle against my fascination with the world below, and I snapped back to consciousness to find a cup of cold coffee on my tray table and a markedly different landscape scrolling past the plexiglass.

[Questor]

You Jet-seter.
(Sitting in front of the wing no less.)



Q~

[ramon]

[Prubert]

...just come down and git me in Chicago....grumble, grumble.....

[PackMule]

Now I'm not a nervous flyer, but the descent into Chicago had me cinching the seatbelt down as snug as I could make it. For whatever good that would do my 9mo old daughter, back home, when we augered into the ground. The plane was pitching and yawing as if it were a model being flown around the house in the hands of a small child; the flags visible on the buildings below looked as though they'd been painted on sheets of starched plywood.


Our pilot put us down carrier landing style -- waiting til things were more or less straightened out, then smashing us to the deck before we got bent out of shape again. But they say that any landing you can walk away from is a good one, and I've got no reason to disagree on this occasion.


Prubert was waiting on the other side of the security checkpoint, and as I made my way past the huge line, I made a mental note that I'd have to allot a bit more time for the queue on the return flight than I had in Manchester on the way out. We piled into the cage, and set out into the melee that is the morning commute in Chicago.




I've always found it amazing what a transportation hub the Chicago area is. From the air, the size of the rail yards and numbers of lines running into and out of the city is staggering. Trains are cool.



Following surface streets north was an education of sorts for this white boy from New Hampshah. Poverty in our area is of the rural variety, which is somehow less glaring than its urban counterpart. Perhaps it is because it is simply less compressed; or less intertwined with drug dependancy; or maybe I'm just accustomed to it, and do what most people do when they're presented with something distasteful yet familiar, which is ignore it. Whatever the reason, I couldn't tear my thoughts and gaze away from the scene surrounding us.

The orange signs say CrackHeads, go away.