The Beauty Around Us

A Weekend’s Ride – Day 3: Family Reunion

By Linda G. on August 20, 2009

This past weekend (August 14-16) we rode more than 600 miles on our motorcycle. During the weekend we visited a museum, we rode around two lakes, and we attended a family reunion. I blogged about the first day and the second day of our ride over the past couple days. I will write about the third day of our ride — Sunday, August 16th — in this blog post.

The third day was the last day of our weekend ride. We had planned to come home the quickest way, via Interstate 86, as shown here.

We planned only one photo stop in Bath, NY, which was only a few miles west of Painted Post, where we had stayed the previous two nights. We stopped in Bath, NY, as planned. We visited the Bath National Cemetery, where I took a couple photographs.

If I had it to do over again, I would NOT ride the motorcycle on the cemetery road. The road through the cemetery is quite steep, which made for a heart-pounding ride (at least for me!). There is parking at the foot of the cemetery. I recommend that you park there and walk through the cemetery!

After visiting Bath National Cemetery, we continued our ride home on Interstate 86. When we reached Cuba, NY, we changed our minds about staying on Interstate 86. The road between Route 219 near Bradford, PA, and Jamestown, NY, is quite bumpy. We decided to avoid that part of Interstate 86 by taking back roads home from Cuba. After making a quick stop at the Cuba Cheese Shoppe, where we sampled a few varieties of cheese and Bob purchased a package of cookies, we rode to Portville, NY, via Route 305.

In Portville, we once again changed our minds about our route home. We decided to go home via Crooked Creek State Park, near Ford City, PA, in order to attend my family reunion. We programmed Crooked Creek Lake into the GPS and continued on our way. We arrived at the reunion around 2:45PM. We got a bite to eat, sharing the cookies that Bob had bought in Cuba, and visited with family members.

We left the reunion around 4:15PM. We returned home around 7:15PM, almost 7 hours later (and a LOT more miles) than anticipated! I am happy that we made it to my family reunion. It was good to visit with my brother and his family, my aunts, uncles and cousins. However, it was a long, an almost unbearable hot day. We were very happy when we arrived home. We went as far as we would care to in one day’s travel! Speaking of a hot day, the entire weekend weather in fact was sunny, hot and dry. Given that our summer to date has been cool and wet, it was a welcome change. However, when it is hot as it was this past weekend and you are riding a motorcycle, you cannot find relief from the heat by turning on the air conditioning! As I wrote earlier, the heat was almost unbearable.

We rode approximately 340 miles from Painted Post, NY, to our home in Warren, PA. We traveled 685 miles from Friday at 1:00PM to Sunday at 7:15PM. Someone once told me that when you ride a Nomad the rides only get longer!  Click here for a map of Sunday’s route.