The adventure begins!

In principle, this trip should be easy. Get onto 95 and head south until I come to it—the Kennedy Space Center. I had a week (launch is scheduled for Saturday the 11th). So the plan was to do a side trip to Key West and some job hunting while I waited for Saturday to roll around.

I got the oil changed, ordered and installed a new air filter, and had a knowledgeable friend go over the bike with me. Then I spent about half a day getting things organized and packing it all onto the bike. At 2:30 Sunday I was ready. Turned out I had no reason to hang around, so I left. You can see a couple pictures on my dear sweet wife's Facebook page. I think you can find them here. Val and her buddy, who happened to turn uup about then (and took the photos) headed for a nearby fancy restaurant within minutes of my departure. That's on her Facebook page, too. Mourning my absence, I guess.

Sunday night found me at a rest stop somewhere in North Carolina. Most of the ride had been about as pleasant as riding the slab gets, except for miles of stop-and-go traffic between DC and Richmond. (Why is that stretch always bad?) When I pulled into the rest stop, I saw a storage shed several yards down a sand/gravel driveway, so I turned in there and parked next to two huge dumpsters. The crickets were so loud you had to raise your voice to be heard, and the mosquitoes were as thick as in the north woods. Remind me to tell you my mosquito joke sometime. Here I realized the consequences of poor planning. I'm okay sleeping on a hard surface, and I was looking forward to the interior of my helmet as a pillow, and the ballistic padding in the back of my jacket as a mattress, but I discovered that the mosquitoes had no trouble sucking my blood through my jacket. No bug spray, you see. The ground cloth didn't help, and I ended up choosing the excessive warmth of the rain suit over donating blood to the denizens of North Carolina's woods. Good thing, too, because it rained for a while during the wee hours. Speaking of wee hours, I was awakened at 5:30 by the garbage truck backing down to empty the two dumpsters. Good thing I parked the bike to the side instead of in front of them.

I freshened up and hit the road. More later, with pictures.