Day -1: The Needful

May 21, 2019

Sometimes, a thing must be done.  As my friends in India would say, "I'll do the needful and revert".  That sometime was today, one day before the launch of the 2019 Prefrontal Tour, and the needful was getting Snoopy 2 back to Maine to be christened by the only woman on the planet who could.

I departed at 7:15 AM, a bit later than planned, but still at a chilly 52 degrees.  I plotted a course through Whitehall, NY - the landlocked birthplace of the U.S. Navy - then through the stone totems of eastern NY and temperatures colder still.  Destination Sanford, ME - having finished forwarding my mail to Sanford, NC two days prior, and getting back from Sanford, FL yesterday, today would complete the Sanford triumvirate - three Sanfords, in three states, in three days.

Killington, VT saw the temperature plummet by ten degrees in almost as many minutes, but it was no surprise, for a very scientific reason...  You see, a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) is a "useful ionic plasma", a collection of boson particles at near absolute zero degrees, achieved with the careful alignment of lasers, and used to study quantum phenomena.

A similar condition is achieved when Subaru automobiles are in close proximity, and it's usually called a Vermont-Weinstein cluster**** - a "useless traffic phenomena", a collection of slowdown carticles at near absolute zero mph, achieved with a careless misalignment of drivers, and used to frustrate the majority of commuters.

My point is - there were so many slow-moving Subarus in Vermont this morning that they dropped the local temperature by at least ten degrees...  Put another way, a bunch of whales is a "pod", a bunch of ravens is a "murder", and a bunch of Subarus is a "delay".

Once I got out from behind the VT short bus I saw Quechee Gorge, the biggest darned American Flag I've ever seen flying over Camping World, the Norman Rockwell Museum, and a Bar Harbor Bank & Trust in Woodstock, VT of all places.  Then I made good time to Sanford and met up with Mom for a couple of hours.  She loved the bike, commenting on the size, the color, and especially the "you'd better be careful" part a couple of times - but we got a big grin out of her with the Snoopy 2 stickers.  Yeah, we're still the favorite.

The wind was blowing hard all day, but just to be nice Waze decided to route me back on I-95 through Massachusetts, where it got bad enough to blow me clear across my lane a couple of times, and to redirect a semi truck off the northbound lanes and through the swamp in the median, closing a lane and locking southbound traffic for an extra 30 minutes.  Good times.

Overall, it was a good 500+ mile shakedown prep for the Tour, and I needed the seat time.  By the bike's odometer it was 545 miles, but we'll go with the GPS's 520+.  And uh, we'll stick with the GPS's max speed too...

Onward and upward!