Monday October 1, 2007
In a New York State of mind

These trips get to be more and more fun as I get further and further away from home. They have progressively gotten longer and longer in both time and mileage. My initial intentions were to visit O'Tooles Harley Davidson in Wurtzburg, NY. Well me being me, I misread their hours and they are closed on Mondays. WTF?!?!

I took a lot of pictures today so I will break them down with info between the photos.

I needed somewhere to adjust my head gear and drain my bladder so the welcome center in Matamoras provided a great place to do it all.

I used to be a fan of the show American Chopper. The whole old man yelling at the kid thing wore on me after a while and although the bikes are neat to look at I prefer a practical set of wheels. You won't be jumping on their creations at 8am in the morning and spinning 300 miles in a day on a regular basis. Their stuff is artwork to be admired. Which I will admit after seeing them up close and in person I can say they are neat. They are pricey too. The three in the show room with price tags ranged from $21k to $52k. I did meet some people from France who were fans of the show and visiting. Pretty amazing how far their appeal has gone.

Since the weather appeared to be threatening I was trying to high tail it home as soon as I could. I left the Orange County Chopper store a little after 12:30pm. I used the interstate to get back into Pennsylvania in part to save time. The other reason was because the bridge between Matamoras and Port Jervis on US-209 is hideous for bikes. It is an open grate bridge which tells bicyclists to dismount. It was the hairiest 300 feet of my entire trip. The interstate had a scenic overlook at an elevation of 1200 feet. Those of you who visit a lot know I will stop just about anywhere to try and get a cool pic of the bike.

I had recently seen an article on Yahoo News about the "10 Coolest small towns in the U.S.A." It mentioned the town of Milford, Pennsylvania which is located above the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area near the New York and New Jersey border. It is also mentioned in another one of those Pennsylvania tourism television advertisements.

I stopped and had lunch at the Dimmick Inn right in the middle of town. I saw it on my way up and the place looked interesting. Older brick building with a second floor porch wrapped around. I had a crab cake sandwich on an english muffin and onion rings. The only downer was the sacrilege of running out of lager. The waitress being helpful brought my Yuengling Light. I wonder if she was telling me something?

After eating I took a walk around town. A lot of old victorian houses. Milford is the county seat of Pike County so all of the typical county offices are located in town. The building that has a sign stating it is the court house is only housing office and the actual court stuff is in another building according to a guy who was walking on the street.

People in this town are very friendly and almost always say hello. I actually had somewhat of a conversation with a guy waiting on the corner and he said he just moved there from Iowa City. He said he thought that town was the closest thing to the town of Pleasantville as he could have imagined. I will definitely be going back there again next summer. I may need to convince a few of my cycling friends to come along.

Just stopping to look for nice places to shoot pictures of the bike so I stopped at a couple spots inside the Delaware Water Gap Recreation Area. The first few were at the Dingman Falls visotrs center and the others are at a boat launch. Hopefully even you can figure it out.

Made a quick stop at Schoch's Harley Davidson in Stroudsburg. What would a 300+ mile trip on the bike be without a shirt?

These are the ones most of you are probably looking for. I was coming back from my fun ride and passed Geryville Pike on RT-663 and notice some smoke wafting over the Borough of Pennsburg. Might be a job? I seem to have missed most of the fun and excitement of the afternoon as it was 5 o'clock. Field Comm 1 was setup; Station 41 was boiling burgers and Dan Cuellar was standing there too. As I told a few of you there, "Sometimes you miss big ones". After my relaxing ride I could have cared less. Which is why when the fire cop from Quakertown was being an asshole (to everyone else, not me) I just laughed and went to 65's station.

Plus I got another police department for the police car page. Have you check it out recently?