Our Ride For Sight

The Road to Trenton

I wanted to leave Friday night right after work. Gail and Andrew had taken the day off, so they wanted to leave Friday morning. Caroline felt she would be exhausted after spending a day teaching, or was it controlling, her sweat-hog high school students, so she preferred Saturday morning for the departure time. As expected, everyone got their way but me. Gail and Andrew left around 11 am and rode for barely an hour before stopping for lunch, a lunch that took them a half hour longer to have than they had ridden thus far. I'll let Gail tell you her story about her first major bike trip elsewhere on our web pages.

My tale begins the next day just as the sun was rising. The plan was for Caroline and me to be on the road by 6 am in order to meet up with Gail and Andrew in Centennial Park about 3 or 4 hours later. I guess I should count myself fortunate that the wheels were finally rolling only 30 minutes behind schedule, but in order to make our agreed upon rendezvous, our rest stops would now have to be brief.

We pause at Silver Lake on Hwy 7.

As usual, Caroline took the point and set the pace for our travels. I have found in the past that it was much easier to adjust to her lead, than have her complain about my sudden braking, or tardy signaling, or losing her altogether. So I gave her rein and happily followed, the miles passing by quickly as we rode towards our destination. I must confess that she was doing an excellent job in front of me, and since I did not have to navigate, I was able to lose myself to the steady beat of the venerable v-twin.

It was an excellent ride on a beautiful sun-drenched day. Though we were making good progress, it eventually became obvious that our late start was going to prevent us from arriving on time. We also made a wrong turn at one point thanks to the remarkable lack of signage which would have identified the roads we were on, or the towns that were up ahead. I was totally lost, but that didn't matter. I was not navigating. I trusted that Caroline would find the way, and she didn't let me down.

Sneak peak of the demo rides with Gail on the CityX.

The day before I had advised Gail that we would call her by a certain time to let her know where we were. I asked her to have her cell on standby after 9am . I also asked Caroline to make sure she brought her cell phone so that we could make that call. I suggested that she bring the phone charger too just in case. She assured me it was fully charged and that lugging the charger was totally unnecessary. These words were now about to come back and bite her.

We pulled over into a small community park in Foxboro to make the call to Gail. As I was checking over our bikes, I heard Caroline exclaim in a puzzled voice that the battery low symbol was flashing. Then it stopped and faded from sight. Our emergency life line was now nothing more than a lump of plastic. A mature person wouldn't have said "I told you so", but then I was pissed. There was nothing we could do but get on our bikes and hope that we would find Gail and Andrew waiting for us somewhere conspicuous.