On the road to the gulf coast

It is noon on Tuesday and I am on my way to the gulf of Mexico. I am driving through Pennsylvania on interstate 81. Green fields on rolling hills. Light blue sky filled with bright white clouds. Concrete roads and jersey barriers. Big rigs hauling tandem trailers. Road construction everywhere. Narrow, shifting lanes. Just 6 more hours to my first night stop. I'm looking forward to see my daughter, my sister in law and brother in law.

Note: this blog entry was dictated by using Vlingo on my BlackBerry Bold. I did not text while driving!

Exhausting

Mmmmm. I love the smell of motorcycle exhaust: an oily, metallic fragrance with a top note of something purely motorcycle in nature. It always reminds me of when I worked for Rockingham Security as a job in college. One weekend I had to stand guard in a Harley shop because the owners were in receivership or something. Every now and then I'd go from the showroom to the shop and start one of the hogs up, just to hear it roar. It was then I came to really know that distinct smell of an idling and revved motorcycle engine.

I'd been driving motorcycles since I was 14 or so but had never warmed up a bike's engine indoors and so missed that smell. Or perhaps it was just that my little Suzuki 250 and Kawasaki 500 just didn't have the digestive system to produce the smell. Certainly my big V-Twin Honda cruiser does it.