1300 miles and a trash bag

I think in the early days of this list, I recounted my own epic
journey with a CT-90. I bought the CT in the summer of 1981 -- it
was paid for with money from the theft insurance settlement after
some bastard stole my new-with-144-miles 1979 Honda Express II
moped. Well, actually, that settlement paid for the CT90, a pair of
Advent I stereo speakers, two bottles of booze and my July 1981
phone bill. But I digress.

When I bought the CT, some loser had figured it was a 2-stroke,
and filled it with premix. When it smoked his neighbors out of their
houses, he figured the rings were gone and put the bike up for sale.
I paid (I think) $130 for it. Cleaned the premix out in his
driveway... I drained it into a can and I think he used it for his lawn
mower. Put clean gas and plugs in it and drove it home.

Anyway, the next month, I took some time off and decided to go to
Maryland to visit a friend. I was living south of Lansing, Michigan at
the time, in a place called Holt. Just off I-96. From that spot to
Ellicott City, Maryland, Yahoo claims it's 588 miles, but this was
more than 20 years ago and several of the Interstates that exist
now did not exist then, and some of the ones that DID exist, I
couldn't use because of the limited speed of the CT. That 90 was
the only one that had a name... it was The Horse.

I took off in the late afternoon on a Friday in mid July, 1981. I
wandered through southeast Michigan until I got into Ohio, and
picked up US 20 south of Toledo, Ohio. If you've ever been there,
you know that 20 is billiard-table flat for miles and miles around
Norwalk, and in the summer, all the traffic is up on the Turnpike.
On Friday night, everything closed up around dark, so I gassed up
in Toledo and me and The Horse set off across Ohio. We stopped
for dinner at a truckstop near the Turnpike, and when I got out, it
was nearly dark. All full of gas and beef stew and coffee, and
ready to go off into the world.

That bike had fairly worn street/trail treads on it, and it was glass-
smooth on the right pavement, and that long, straight stretch of 20
was the right pavement. I stuck my (thinner then) ass back on the
buddy seat, put my feet on the buddy pegs, laid my chest down on
the driver's seat, cranked it wide open, and the 90 wound up until it
sounded like a Norelco razor. The speedo topped out at 57 miles
an hour, and with me in a tight tuck, it stayed there like it was
glued, for miles and miles and miles. Bellevue. Norwalk. Get off
20 onto Ohio route 18. Brighton. Lorain. Litchfield. Medina,
where there used to be a good diner I got coffee at again.
Montrose, which would figure in this story again later... Akron, and
then down into the low hills of eastern Ohio. I ended up on US,
and slept out overnight in a Roadside Rest that used to be there
near East Liverpool, but isn't anymore. Because there was so
much dew on the ground, I literally just put the bike up on the
center stand, put my pack on the buddy seat, balanced my legs up
on the bars and went to sleep.

In 20 years, I've only one other time known a night on the road like
that one night with one perfectly-tuned CT90. And that was with a
Volvo I don't have any more... on the same stretch of road going
the other way, in 1988.

I woke in the morning and there were cows looking at me. I lit the
CT up, went over into Pennsylvania, and spent the morning fighting
up and down some of the hills on US40 in southwest Pennsylvania.
I lost a lot of respect for the early pioneers, because although
legend had it that US 40 followed the wagon trails into Ohio, it
seemed like every time I saw one particularly tall hill, taller than all
the surrounding hills... the damn road went OVER IT. Not around
it, not near it... over the damn top. The 90 was breathing hard by
the time I got into Washington, PA in midafternoon, having irritated
a lot of local people on 40 behind me as I dragged up the hills in
3rd gear.

I let the 90 rest in Washington, and tried to figure out which of my
maps would be most current for getting through Maryland. US
40/48 was being slowly replaced by what is now I-68 and I-70, but
most of it wasn't done yet. I snaked down through Pennsylvania
into Uniontown, then into Maryland near Strawn, Maryland. The
Honda actually adapted pretty well to the weird rollercoaster that
was (and is) 40/48, but I didn't. See, down in the valleys in western
Maryland, it was fine, but that weekend the weather at higher
altitudes was foggy and wet. Go up the hills, it was raining, go
down in the valleys, you dry out again. All in the span of two or
three minutes, over and over for 70 miles. I eventually stopped at
Frostburg, Maryland and swiped a trash bag at a Hardee's, cut a
headhole in it and put it under my sweater to keep the moisture off
me. I was puzzled why it was so cold and nasty in July. It wasn't
until I moved here in 1994 that I understood that Garrett and
Allegany Counties, Maryland, are another planet and their weather
has nothing to do with reality -- it has snowed there in July.

As I went east, I could see the enormous road cuts they were
making for what would eventually be I-68, but I couldn't easily go
through them (in spite of the fact I had a CT90) mostly because
some of them weren't done and ended in fifty-foot cliffs. I went up
the hard way, and by late the second day, ended up in Ellicott
City, Maryland, not far from where I now work. As it turned out, the
people I figured I'd go see were on vacation. "In Ohio," their
neighbor said.

I stayed that night in Patapsco Valley State Park, just outside
Baltimore. It had been damp all week and I ended up scrounging
kindling by looking underneath all the other picnic tables, took a
little gas from the Honda's tank and soon had a nice fire, and slept
under a table that night with the Honda reflecting the flames.

In the morning, I started up to go down to Winchester, Virginia, to
visit some other friends. Partway there, down Virginia route 7, I
found the Honda misfiring and pretty quickly figured out the battery
wasn't charging -- those of you who read this list will figure that I
either boiled the battery dry (which wasn't the case) or blew the
rectifier (which was). I got down to Winchester around 2 in the
afternoon and found the only Radio Shack in town... they had no
rectifier that would suit the Honda, but they did have a nice 6-volt
wall adapter for a video game. I bought it, hacked the ends off the
wire, and had a nice trickle charger to charge the Honda.

After partying the evening away with my friends, I slept the night
out next to the Honda in the end zone of the football field at
Shenandoah College (now, pompously, Shenandoah "University")
and in the morning took off north to head back to Michigan. I found
that as long as I didn't run the headlight, a one-hour charge on the
CT's battery would run the ignition for about three hours, so I
staggered northwest, going 90 or 100 miles, then stopping to
charge, then running some more. At night, I found my range was
severely limited, but it was well-suited to the spacing of rest areas
on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Yes, I actually ran the Turnpike with
a discharging CT, at night, in the summer. In the rain, yet.

I finally ran out of juice at the wrong place, near the Allegheny
Tunnel, which is east of Pittsburgh and at the top of a long uphill.
Your CT uses more ignition current uphill than downhill, and hauling
up the long grade at somewhere around the Turnpike minimum of
40mph sapped the battery. I didn't want to lose the last chance at
a charge, so I stopped in the median just before the tunnel, pulled
up to the tunnel service entrance, a big garage door, which was
open, and drove in and parked. The tunnel maintenance guys were
inside, eating dinner, and playing cards, and barely looked up when
I pulled the smoking yellow Honda in and stopped it in the garage.

"Mind if I plug this in to charge it?" I asked. They must have figure
the thing was electric-powered or something, but didn't seem much
surprised in any other way. One of the guys pointed out an outlet.
I plugged the thing in, and laid down on a bench and went to sleep.

I woke up about five hours later, and while I had a nice charge, the
battery didn't, and so I took off at dawn, not knowing how far the
Honda might go. It turned out that I made it up to the northwest
side of Pittsburgh, to where I got off the Turnpike and back onto the
more comfortable and safer local roads. The Honda started to
cack out from lack of electrons again, and I ended up playing tag
all afternoon from one electric outlet to another, getting a fifteen-
minute burst here, ten minutes there. By dark, I had made it to (I
told you it would turn up again) Montrose, Ohio, just west of Akron.
It was getting pretty dark and I knew the headlight would eat up
the battery fast, so I stopped at a gas station and asked if I could
plug in. They had no problem with it, but as they were closing,
they mentioned that I might want to plug into the outside outlet at
the end of the building.

"The mens room is open all night, and by the way, if you wanna
sleep, you can go in one of the cars over there."

Sure enough, I found a very nice roost in the front seat of a 1968
Olds. I unloaded my stuff, went down the hill to a Bob Evans and
got something to eat, and then went back up, checked the Honda
and went to sleep. Nobody bothered me all night. The Honda took
a pretty good charge by 8:00am, and, saying thanks to the
morning guy who came in (the night guy had left him a note saying,
"there's a biker in the Olds, leave him be") I took off back across
Ohio. The CT was running solid again, although into a headwind,
and by the time dark rolled around again, I was less than five miles
from home and I pulled into the driveway in the dark, no headlight,
and the speedo lights barely visible. Matter of fact, the brakelight
killed the engine when I pulled up. I plugged it in for the night.

Five days, 1,300 miles, one tough-ass Honda. And one trash bag.

Turtle


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Last updated: 12/08/2001