Day 2: Attitude Adjustment

I didn’t wake up this morning feeling much better than the last. Bad tent sleep. Sore back and arms. Very real safety concerns. Please let Cat say “let’s turn around and go home.”

Nope.

Cat the Indefatigable.

She literally got out of the tent air kicking and punching her way into a new day. Regardless of yesterday’s realizations, her optimism can’t be held down. No turning around, far from it, let’s go! Woooo!

I wasn’t convinced, but that’s the beauty of having a partner that doesn’t let you succumb to your own bs.

Coffee on the camp stove, tore the camp site down, and off we went again. I think Siri must have been listening to me bitch about the roads she guided us on yesterday. Today she took us on a route that didn’t even give me a choice but to think that this was a good idea. Maybe the best idea.

We left Frances Slocum State Park in north-central PA and headed north towards Watkins Glen on windy, slow county and state routes through some of the prettiest country I’ve seen in America. It was everything I imagine America to be, but have never seen all in once place.

Rolling mountains, old red barns, hometown baseball fields, Main Streets that haven’t died, American flags on front porches, wild flowers growing, blue skies and cotton ball clouds, creatures scurrying, lemonade stands, no strip malls, Alice Chalmer tractors, Holstein cattle in valley pastures, train tracks, waving kids, dirt roads.

It was like the scene that an old man with a conductor’s cap would painstakingly build in his basement for his model train collection. He would do it to represent a better time in America. An era that’s been lost.

Except it’s still here, in northern Pennsylvania and southern New York.

Now I’m convinced. The roads we were forced to take because our motorcycle prefers 35 to 65 are a gateway to a world I’ve never known. This is the way to travel on land.