Motorcycle Musings

So anyone who knows me knows how much I dislike my 'home state' of Connecticut.

For more reasons than I care to expend my energy on right now.

Anyone who knows me also knows that I'm an avid motorcyclist.  How do these two relate, you may ask?  Well, I learned to ride when I lived in New Mexico.  This means that my first experiences on a motorcycle occurred in what is essentially god's country for motorcyclists.  Three hundred days of sunshine a year; long stretches of road through vast, wide open spaces, breathtaking landscapes that inspired the phrase, "purple mountains majesty"; 75 mph speed limit and no cars (or cops) around for miles and miles and miles ...

Yeah.  I got spoiled.

Compare this to Connecticut, on the other hand:  Long, bitter winters; summers so humid it's impossible to function outside in shorts and a tank top, let alone covered in gear; rain for weeks on end; congested, vicious, suicidal highway driving ...

In other words, the suckiest of motorcycling conditions.

But this past summer, I had a moment on my bike that surprised me.  I was riding one of the less-traveled state roads, curving past farms and meadows, really enjoying the ride, when it hit me - this is something you don't get in the great wide open.  Winding down country roads under a canopy of trees, passing fields and pastures along the way.

Fried dough, steamed cheeseburgers, and quaint back roads.  This state may not have much else to offer, but I can admit that it does at least have that.