Day 1 – 9/2/2016
SE Mass to Biddeford, ME
~159 miles

With September here and the end of the Americana Grand Tour just around the corner at the end of the month, it was time to ride up to Maine to capture the bonus locations in that state. With the furthest bonus being Quoddy Head Lighthouse up at the tippity top of Maine’s rugged coastline (easternmost point in the continental US), it needed to be a multi-day trip (to enjoy some back roads) and Labor Day weekend seemed the perfect opportunity. Char and I have been wanting to get up to see Quoddy Head for a long time now (pre-motorcycle days) and what better way than to ride, throwing in as many BONE roads (Best of New England) as possible along the way?

I planned the four day route out in advance, using the bonus locations as the skeleton and filling in the legs with BONE roads where it made sense and fit into a day’s ride time/mileage. This is what I came up with:

Dog boarding was arranged and the weather forecast was looking great for most of the weekend, though Tropical Storm Hermine was threatening to dowse southern New England a bit on Sunday into Monday. The previous weekend, Char had a tip-over on her bike in a gravel parking lot, bruising her ribs (we think) and causing her no small amount of discomfort even moving around or breathing deep. We were unsure if she’d make the trip until Thursday morning when she made her decision to come, to hell with the pain! We had waited too long, the weather was too nice, and she just really wanted to get back up to Maine, a place we both love to visit. What a gal! I don’t think I would have chosen to make the trip with a similar injury. Needless to say, she kept to a rigorous regimen of three Advil every four hours for the duration of our trip!

The plan was to leave immediately after work on Friday, so we packed everything the night before and had it all situated on my ST1300 by Friday morning. I had noticed a couple drops of oil on the garage floor after the recent track day, and changed the oil earlier in the week, during my lunch break. For some reason I can’t fathom now – perhaps being rushed to get back to work, I didn’t change the oil filter, though it was due and was most likely the source of the seepage I’d noticed. However, after wiping everything down and completing the fluid change, no more drops, so I guess I just let it go. (this is more of that foreshadowing stuff I drop into my tales, btw)

I was allowed to leave work 2 hours early to start enjoying the weekend…nice! We were kickstand-up about 25 minutes after my arrival at home, which is some kind of record for us. Char gritted her teeth and mounted behind me, tentatively ready for the adventure to come. One of my primary goals for the weekend aside from capturing bonuses and riding BONE roads, was to avoid holiday traffic on an Interstate in any way shape or form. This meant definitely avoiding the Friday rush up I95 into NH and Maine. We zipped up I495 in some heavy (but moving) traffic and cut onto local roads in Westford MA. Picked our way across southern NH to Kingston for this shot of the Rockingham County Courthouse, our first bonus stop of the trip:

I was concerned with getting our final two bonus photos for the day before sundown, so we held off on dinner and continued our “long cut” towards the coast and hit Portsmouth NH just after the city had been emptied of rush hour traffic (I presume). Found the Wyland whaling wall mural I was targeting:

Then we paid a visit to the USS Albacore, a land-locked submarine-turned-museum in a nice veterans park close to the bay. This was a specific Americana bonus and a very cool site, though they were closed, and we stretched our legs walking around the entire vessel, after getting the requisite bonus photos. I mean, how often do you get to look at an ENTIRE submarine? We’d like to go back sometime and tour the inside of the sub. I’ve been inside the one in Battleship Cove when I was a kid and remember it being REALLY cramped, even as a kid. Can’t imagine putting to sea for weeks in one as a grown man.

After completing our little walk, we checked Waze and confirmed that I95 was still a hot mess at the moment…time to find some grub while waiting out the traffic a bit. Pulled out Yelp on the phone and hemmed and hawed about where to try, no longer in a hurry to get to our waiting hotel room in Biddeford. Char mentioned “When Pigs Fly Pizzeria” in Kittery and bingo! I’d had them on my list of “restaurants to try” for a while after hearing positive reviews, so we had our destination. With the Route 1 bypass bridge being under construction in Portsmouth, we did some creative routing to lead the GPS where WE wanted it to take us (if that makes any sense), north on Rte 1. As night fell, we found the place and enjoyed some salad and tasty Neapolitan style wood-fired pizza. Great lemonade too, served in Ball canning jars.

As we paid the check, the waitress told us they had some extra bread from their bakery available for free at the front door and to ask for it as we went out. We scored a nice loaf of sundried tomato basil that would come in handy later in the weekend. By the time we finished dinner and found our way back to I95 a bit further north, traffic was moving along nicely and we made the final highway stretch up to Biddeford in no time. Checked in to our reserved room at America’s Best Value motel, very sparse but recently updated and clean.