Cracks in the Concrete: A Motorcycle Odyssey Through Modern America

What I'm calling leg 1 consisted of a loop of approximately 1650 miles from Cleveland, south to Kentucky, west to St Louis, and back east to Pittsburgh over a span of 10 days. In Pittsburgh, I took a pause of ~48 hours before beginning leg 2 (Pittsburgh to western NC).  Below I'll share the stops and people from Casey, IL back to Pittsburgh and some reflections on the end of the first phase of the odyssey.  After rolling out of Casey, IL, I headed to Indianapolis to meet my friend Joe for lunch at Shapiro's, a Kosher deli on the south side of Indy known for having the best Reuben in Indy. While the Reuben at Shapiro's did not disappoint, Express Deli still owns the title for best Reuben in my book.  After lunch, Joe (an engineering manager) showed me a model of the new F-35 lift fan he's helping to design (relax folks, no government secrets were divulged).  Joe with the prototype F-35 lift fan. This fan allows the F-35 to take off over a much shorter distance, elimi...

As you may be able to tell from the trip stats page , I'm a bit behind on my posts. I started writing this one while camping at Fairview Park in Casey, IL, so I'll cover through that stop in this post, then write a separate one for the rest of leg 1 to keep the length manageable.  I had a scare when I pulled out of the Super 8 lot in Owensboro, KY. My bike started stalling in neutral and sporadically surging in second gear. These were the same issues I had from October through April and I was struck by the realization that I was potentially about to find myself stranded in the middle of nowhere 100+ miles away from the closest mechanic familiar with my model of bike. I was able to keep getting the bike restarted enough times to limp into a gas station, then held my breath after adding a bottle of fuel injector cleaner to the fuel tank. It stalled again the first time I revved the throttle in neutral, but after that, I let it run in neutral for a few minutes in neutral and the i...

Checking in from Mount Vernon, IL where I'm finally seeing blue skies. Why am I stopping in Mount Vernon you ask? Well I heard so much about it from my friend Cali Mike (you'll meet him in a few months) that I just had to see it for myself on the way to St. Louis. That's a story for another post though. Picking back up where I left off:  After leaving Jeffersonville, IN on 5/3, I spent the next day and a half with my cousins (first-cousins-once-removed, second cousins, and third cousins) south of Louisville near Bardstown, the center of Kentucky Bourbon Country. I didn't realize it at the time, but my cousin Cheryl let me know that I had driven across a bridge (from IN to Louisville, over the Ohio River) that my grandfather helped design. Unfortunately I didn't grab a picture of the bridge as the weather was quite crummy, but I do plan to stop at the other bridges across the country that my grandfather helped design and take pictures of them. (Some of) My Fun Kentuc...