Solo Motorcycle Trip to Ohio's Windy Nine | Part 1, Boston to Athens
Back in 2022, my buddy Kevin and I set out on what was supposed to be a 75 day motorcycle trip. Unfortunately, we had to cut that trip a little bit short because of some unforeseen circumstances back home. For me, this meant that I had some unfinished business. And one of the things I didn't get to ride just last year was the Triple Nickle, which is part of the Windy Nine down in southeast Ohio. So to fulfill this unfinished goal, I decided to set out on a nine day solo motorcycle trip from my home near Boston, Massachusetts, out to Athens, Ohio, where I would spend three days riding around the area of the winding nine. The trip from Boston to Athens would take three days.
And along the way, I wasn't just going to jump on the interstate. I planned the route to pick up as many small, curvy, beautiful backroads as I possibly could between Boston and Athens. But of course, the interstate would always be there if I needed it to link to great roads together. And of course, first stop along the way, you got to get a Dunkin. Day, one would find riding some familiar roads through Massachusetts, Connecticut and into New York.
I would ride through the Catskills and end up in Hancock for the night. Thank you Made it out to New York. He stopped at the Martindale Chief Diner. The Catskills is a couple hours that way. The Martindale Chief Diner is one of my favorite stops when heading through the Catskills because they have good, well, diner food. And today I decided to be brave and try the meatloaf.
And of course, they said, You want fries with gravy on it? I said, Yes, of course. After lunch, I rode through the Catskills on 23 A 214, 28 30, and eventually jumping on Highway 17 to make my way into Hancock. If you've never been out this way, you really owe it to yourself to get out of the Catskills and take this ride that winds its way along your Prepacton reservoir and the east branch of the Delaware River. It's an absolutely beautiful ride. All right. Here I am.
End of day one. About 4:30 PM right now. Made it to Hancock, New York. Nice day. No rain. Uh, kind of threatened me a little bit there at the end. Temperature dropped down into the sixties, but other than that, it's been an absolutely great day. But right now, I'm going to take a couple of trips up the stairs, take my stuff in, get cleaned up, relax for the evening.
as I said outside. This is the Hancock House Hotel in Hancock, New York. Nice place here, run by a family. It's about $135 a night, at least for this King bed suite that I have here, which is, again, good price. Not cheap, but not super expensive as well. Very clean here. Said I like the people.
They are very nice. They have ice cream and coffee downstairs for sale. And they have a bar and a restaurant right here on premises. So it's like one stop shopping. So that's why I like to come here.
Also, if you're going to ride the Northeast BDR well, it starts I mean, literally just right down the street from here. So this is a good place to come. They support the BDRs here at the hotel.
So I've been asked many times what I do to keep my bike safe while I'm out traveling. And the answer is just a couple of simple things. One, I try to pick nice hotels that I'm going to stay at, at least hotels that are in safer areas of town. I try to park close to the entrance. There's the entrance of the hotel. We're going to have cameras and things right here.
So that's going to help out. And then I keep the bike covered. And you'll be surprised at how just a simple cover keeps the bike out of sight, out of mind.
People who are walking by are much less likely to try to grab things off of it and so forth. So just those simple things really help to keep the bike safe. And I've never had a problem.
And the entire time that I've been traveling. Not very many of us here today. Now, they did tell me, though, that over the weekend they were filled. There was a wedding in the area.
And so just yesterday morning, they had 32 rooms checking out all at once. So it was busy over the weekend. But here today, on Monday, it's kind of quiet. today I think I'm definitely going to need the middle layer here in the morning, whether I need it all day long, probably not. But this morning it's going to be a bit cool.
Found some coffee. Looks like I'm the only one in the hotel today. He's going to try to do a little better with my eating habits today. Yesterday, I got off my typical program and threw in some fries in there, paid for it at the end of the day.
So today we said no toast, no home fries. Get me some fruit. And that's one thing I found while traveling, is that you need to stick as much as you can to the way that you eat at home. If you go out here and even though there's all kinds of great stuff to try and I love doing that sometimes if you deviate too much, well, it can cause you problems. So I try to stick to a good, healthy diet while I'm out here traveling. Now, my wife usually leaves me all kinds of little love notes in my equipment bags, but she didn't do it this time.
Instead, she left me this. So I guess this is going to be my travel companion. I started off the day on Route 17, but quickly exited to find my way through the secondary and back roads that crisscross the state of Pennsylvania. These roads travel through farm country and small rural towns.
It was a very peaceful day of riding. I stopped for a little break. Uh, got some water? Uh, I don't know where I am. I'm on 706 in Pennsylvania. Nice road, but there's a lot of truck traffic and things out here. It's farm country.
I guess I'm just taking my time, making my way through. Oh, the middle layer had to come off. As I mentioned, I did run into quite a bit of farm traffic and some construction, but it is summertime and that's just part of being on the road. got about 160 miles.
170 may be down for the day 180, 190 left to go. So I'm just outside of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, right now at a Sheetz. So have myself some water, a little bit of jerky.
My wife pack for me and having a great day to roads are absolutely beautiful today and it has warmed up quite a bit. Now it's over 80 today, so it's a little warm right now. Pennsylvania, 87, was a beautiful road coming in to Williamsport here. Hardly any traffic on it at all.
Beautiful scenery, great pavement, So great road to ride. And as I went through the day, I found even more great sections of Back Road to ride and enjoy. If you want to know more about how I found these great roads.
Well, I did a video on planning for this trip to the Windy Nine as well as I did a video on how I packed for this nine day trip. You can check those out in the description of this video. And also they'll be linked at the end. So I've been searching for quite a while for somewhere to stop.
Convenience store, anything. And there's just been nothing. Which is great. I mean, it's beautiful roads out here, but there's nowhere to stop. Finally found this little place so I could pull over, have a nature break and grab some water. So I have no idea what this is.
Some car pulled up back in there. There may be some homes and somewhere in there. I don't know, but. Yeah. Anyway, about 70 miles left to go. Been a great day.
Just amazed in roads today. But you have to be paying attention because it's been like 9 hours of curves. Now of course, riding curves for we motorcyclists is a lot of fun. We actually seek them out. We love those twisty roads. But you do need to make sure that you know what you're doing and also that you're paying attention, at least if you want to go at a reasonably quick pace.
For me. I want to have fun, but I also want to make sure that I come back in one piece because I want to keep doing this over and over again. So I usually stick within 5 to 10 miles an hour of the speed limit.
That way, the cops usually leave me alone and it's quick enough to put a smile on my face. Oh, I see. I thought you needed help. Oh, no. no. no. Thank you for checking though. Hey Cardo, music off... I see a lot hit on the road a lot That was very interesting.
I thought that woman needed some help, but in reality, she was just protecting that beautiful Eastern diamondback rattlesnake. All right. Here I am. I'm in Dubois, Pennsylvania, now.
Yes, I'm trying to pronounce that right. Not Dubois (French). Dew-boys (American), but I'm here. I got scolded, no...
He was very nice about it, actually, but I got corrected. But anyway, I'm here and staying at the best Western here. Kind of a strange little place, but the rooms are extremely nice. It's like they just redid them recently and got the park underneath a front awning, which is always a plus.
And now I'm walking over to a restaurant over here called the Hitching Post. Sounds interesting. So we'll try some of the local fare here rather than a chain restaurant. But today was an amazing day of riding. Took about eight or 9 hours to get here. And it just it was just curvy back roads the entire way here.
It was really, really nice. I've put the cameras away for the last 67 miles or so. And I went on this little road, got I can't even remember the name of it. Now I'm going to have to look it up.
But I was like, Wycroft Run Road? Something like that? But I'll find out the real name. And it was just an amazing little forest road and just really, really beautiful. And the great thing about it, since I didn't record it, is it's all mine. I don't have to share it with anybody.
So it was just really, really a nice day of riding, so. All right. Having a great time. So let's go see what this restaurant is about.
So not bad. I had a dozen wings. Couldn't come in in there because, well, they had music going in the background, and I'll get flagged for it. But they were pretty good. I definitely come back here again.
Monday is Wing night $9.95 for a dozen wings. I do need to get some veggies in my diet, though. So I'm going to sit down and I'm going to do my computer work that is transferring my files off of my SD cards and putting them on my backup drive. But I want to talk to you about a little lesson today. Right. So I knew that I was running out of toothpaste when I left home, and I knew I would have to pick something up.
But what I forgot to do was to put my toothbrush in my personal care bag. I used it in the morning before I left, and I just forgot to put it back in the bag. So I had to go to the Rite Aid up the street from the hotel here and pick up a toothbrush and a new tube of toothpaste.
But it just goes to show you. You don't need to bring everything. You can get stuff on the road. On day three, I would continue my search for those great back roads and I would be successful finding many of them along the path from Dubois, Pennsylvania, to Athens, Ohio. It's only about 50 miles in for the day right now, but the coffee was working its way through me, so I had to make a quick little pit stop. But so far then, nice roads going through a lot of small towns so far today.
But the sky is...clear. A little few clouds, but temperatures are great. So getting really lucky. You got no rain on this trip so far. Well, keep my fingers crossed. So I made it to Ohio.
I've got on and on another 120 miles to go to make it to Athens. So I'll be there about probably round five, 530. By the time all is said and done, which is about perfect timing to get in. So just having a little water filled up with gas so I don't have to worry about it again. And then we'll finish off the day and we'll be in Athens, Ohio.
Crossing into West Virginia for a short stint. I jumped on Fork Ridge Road, which turned out to be a tight technical road. Again, going through the local farm country. It was an amazing ride. You did, however, need to be on your guard because there were trucks, tractors and even deer on this road.
And then finally, as I was heading into Athens, well, the sky decided to open up. It started raining, the roads got wet, but that's okay because I was on a really great road. That is Ohio.
550 again, as it wound its way through the farms, through the communities and into Athens, where I'd be staying for the next few days. All right, so here I am. I made it to Athens, Ohio.
Really great day of riding today. It's an interesting day as well. Interesting because just went over all kinds of different roads, had some really great sections of secondary roads, you know, big kind of lazy curves in it. And then got off into some back country roads. Just absolutely amazing. Several of them.
I'm going to have to go back and look at the names because I don't remember them all as I'm doing this right now, but definitely will tell you about those. And I had another rain free day except for about the last hour, an hour and a half as I was coming into Athens here, it started raining a little bit, not heavy, but just enough to get the roads all nice and wet and make me slow down a little bit, which is probably a good thing because I was getting tired by then anyway. So all in all, another great day of riding 353 miles, something like that today. And now I'm just relaxing in my little Airbnb that I got here. This is called the PA pa pad and it's very nice. I'll I'll show you some images here.
Three big windows, really nice and airy. It's a downstairs apartment. But again, it's really, really nice. So I think I'm going to enjoy it here a whole lot. So tomorrow my plan is to get out and ride the Triple.
Nickle head up all the way to Zanesville and then ride back. So we'll see how it goes. See how the weather is going to be.
I'm hoping that things stay nice and sunny while I'm here, but if not, then we'll deal with it. We'll do it anyway. All right. So I guess that's it for now. I'm going to enjoy this nice cup of coffee I have here. And then just sit down and relax for the evening. Leaving Athens.
I took 550, 555, 792, 377 and Route 60 all the way to Zanesville, Ohio.
2023-07-08 00:54
