Riding the Tri-State

July 27th, 2009
Chatham, NJ to New York and Pennsylvania and back

Having left my bike at Enid's house for the weekend I returned on Monday morning and met up with Alan. With him on summer break and me on my trip we both had time and the desire for a good motorcycle ride. The route we hashed out turned out to include a lot of the same roads that I had planned on riding when I went to Hershey so I was very glad we went that way.

We headed north through New Jersey, along the back roads and stopped for lunch just over the border in New York. To go that 90 miles or so took almost three hours due to the slow roads, some minor "detours", and construction breaks (as seen here).



When we stopped we took off our gear to look around for somewhere to eat and saw a place across the street. Instead of leaving our bikes in the gas station parking lot we put our gear back on and rode over. Again, taking our gear off we walked up to the door but it didn't open when we tried. The restaurant was closed! At 3pm too! What the heck is up with that? So we tried the place next door and that was closed too! Finally we saw another cafe down the street and decided to walk over, instead of dealing with our gear again.

This place had typical American fare with hamburgers being a primary feature. They had standard hamburgers as well as a "California" one. Being Californian I figured this would be served with avocado or something like that but I was wrong. Apparently a California burger is served with lettuce, tomato, raw onion and a side of mayonnaise. Isn't that just a normal burger?

On the road again we continued through New York on our way to the back roads of Pennsylvania and I spied this guy guarding a surplus store



We were able to ride some very nice twisty roads that took us through a little state park in PA called The Promised Land. If for nothing else it was fun to see that but the road through the park was nice, bumpy but nice. In the middle of the park is a nice lake that provided great views along the way. One of the views was nice enough to warrant a stop.



Continuing on we were trying to find the best (aka twistiest) roads in the area to take back by searching our GPS units. There was one such road around the east side of the lake so we headed that way. Somehow we ended up where we started without finding the right turnoff so back we went. Once we got to where the GPS told us the road was we understood why we missed it...



Apparently this is a snowmobile trail or something and we weren't able to take it, for better or worse. Alan made the assertion that, had the road closure sign and gate been there he would have taken it. That would have been a bit of fun...

The rest of the ride back was uneventful and mainly highway. We did pass a sign that pointed to "The Land of Make Believe". Too bad we didn't see that until we had passed the exit...

Pictures