While rain makes for great sleep, it was defeating to see everything wet when I opened the motel room door. I’d been making a point of leaving later in the morning so that the nor’easter had time to move, well, north.

Watkins Glen wears its racing history pretty proudly. There are checkered-flag crosswalks downtown, racing memorabilia in the stores and reminders everywhere that one of the most famous racetracks in America sits just outside town. Unfortunately, so was the rain.

I had hoped to spend some time at Watkins Glen State Park. The waterfalls looked spectacular, and with fall starting to show up across New York, it seemed like a great place to photograph. But walking around a gorge in the rain with camera gear didn’t sound particularly appealing and it’s not good for the electronics. That was a bummer, but Watkins Glen International was one of the other reasons I had come here, and the NASCAR guys at the bar the night before told me the track would be open.

I rode up there in the rain.

The guy working the gate took one look at the motorcycle, the California license plate and me standing there in riding gear in the unending drizzle and laughed. He pointed me toward an open grandstand, so I parked the GS and walked in.

I had the place almost completely to myself.

I don’t understand all the ins and outs of NASCAR, but I did grow up hearing about Awesome Bill and Jeff Gordon every now and again. I’ve never really followed it, and I couldn’t tell you much about what I was watching, but there were a couple of cars circulating on the track in the rain. I sat there by myself in this enormous grandstand watching them go around Watkins Glen. It was one of those slightly surreal experiences that would have been impossible to plan. The rain that had ruined the state park was probably part of what made this possible.

For a little while, it was wonderful. I would have stayed longer as they have a “run what you brung” category at 12 and 5 every day. Unfortunately, no motorcycles are allowed on the track.

Eventually I got back on the GS and continued north. The weather settled into what had become a familiar pattern: gray, clouds, drizzle, rain. Rinse and repeat.

The nor’easter I had been trying to route around for days still wasn’t quite done with me. I had gone west through West Virginia and Pittsburgh rather than riding toward Washington, D.C., and that had worked. I had found some good roads, met some interesting people and eventually worked my way back east and north behind the worst of the storm. But the farther north I went, the more it felt like I hadn’t actually escaped anything.

Fall was beginning to show itself. There were yellows and reds mixed into the hillsides, and every once in a while I’d come around a corner and see the Northeast I had imagined when I planned this trip. The problem was the light. Under a heavy gray sky, those same colors went flat. Reds became muddy. Yellows looked brown. Places that probably would have exploded in sunlight looked like they were already past peak.

Maybe this just wasn’t going to be a good fall-color year for me.

There were still good moments. I had arranged lunch with a guy I’d gotten to know through Facebook during the pandemic. We had never met in person, but we were both in somewhat similar places now: layoffs behind us, trying to figure out what comes next and how much of the old definition of work we actually wanted to carry forward.

He was a solid dude. We talked about work, life and whatever the hell this stage of life is supposed to be. He only had time for lunch, but I was glad he made the time. After years of knowing somebody through a screen, there’s something satisfying about finally sitting across a table from them and realizing the person you thought you knew is pretty much the person who showed up.

Then lunch ended and I got back on the motorcycle.

I had reached out to a couple of other Facebook connections further north in the journey. Each was a person I had talked with for years and thought it would be fun to finally meet while I was passing through. Most never responded – ouch.

I kept moving.

My phone did not. My phone hadn’t clicked completely into the mount on the handlebars. I didn’t realize it until I hit a bump and watched it disappear.

Oh fudge, oh fudge, oh fudge!

I quickly got the motorcycle stopped and looked back down the highway. My phone was lying face down on the pavement about four inches from the centerline. Before I could do anything, a tractor-trailer came barreling toward it.

The 18 tires of this monstrosity behind me went by about four inches on the other side.

I’m not sure how my phone managed to occupy approximately the only eight inches of pavement where it could survive that particular encounter, but it did. I’ll take the blessing. The screen was cracked and the camera area was scratched, but considering the alternative, I was calling that a win.

I retrieved it, got back on the bike and kept going. The gray, clouds, drizzle, and rain was unrelenting. This onslaught was beginning to really wear on me.

There was something else changing now too. It was getting dark earlier.

That shouldn’t have been surprising. I was traveling north at the end of September, and autumn takes what autumn takes. But darkness matters differently on a motorcycle. I needed to leave later in the morning because I was waiting for rain to move through. I’d stop for an aggregate hour at places along the way, and suddenly the usable part of the day was disappearing.

I was spending more and more time riding in the dark.

That night, on the road toward Rome, New York, I found myself doing exactly that. My tires were rolling forward into the night, however, the world beyond my headlight had mostly disappeared in the rural night. I was still moving north because moving north was what the plan said I was supposed to do.

Here I was, flying through the darkness at 55 miles an hour, and I came to a painful realization: I wasn’t having fun anymore.

That was hard to admit. This was the first time on a motorcycle that my world wasn’t made better by being on two wheels.

This entire trip had resulted in not knowing exactly what came next. When something didn’t work, I changed the route. When the weather got bad, I went somewhere else. When a hotel failed to deliver, I found another type of accommodation. When I couldn’t find a postcard, I kept looking. I had gotten pretty good at solving whatever problem the road put in front of me.

Somewhere along the way, solving the problems had started becoming the trip.

I had ridden six of the previous eight days in rain. The days were getting shorter. The light was getting worse. The fall color I had ridden across many states hoping to photograph was there, but I wasn’t getting the conditions to really see it. Plans I had been counting on were disappearing, and I was beginning to wonder how many more days I wanted to spend grinding through weather hoping that eventually the trip I had imagined would materialize.

The weather was dark. The roads were dark. The days were getting dark earlier.

And somewhere in there, so was I.

By the time I reached Rome, I finally understood where the villain on this trip was showing up.

The villain was the dark in all its forms.

There was also a practical problem coming at me from farther north. The forecast was starting to combine wet weather with temperatures in the 30s and low 40s.

I can ride in rain. I can ride in cold. I have good gear, including heated gear and a motorcycle designed to handle lousy weather. But cold and wet together are different, and at some point this stops being a question of whether I’m tough enough to tolerate being uncomfortable.

One of the things you have to understand on a motorcycle is just how fragile you are.

A car lets you seal yourself away from most of the unpleasant things happening outside. Turn up the heat, turn on the wipers and keep going. On a motorcycle, you live through all of it in high-resolution detail. The rain eventually finds the weak spot in your gear. The cold works on you mile after mile. The wind is always there, and there isn’t a warm cabin waiting if something stops working.

Heated gear helps enormously, but it has to keep working. Waterproof gear has to stay waterproof. I have to stay warm and dry enough to continue making good decisions. Hypothermia in cold, wet conditions is a real risk, and alone on a motorcycle isn’t where I want to discover that one piece of my system wasn’t as reliable as I thought.

Wet in the high 30s or low 40s simply wasn’t something I was willing to sign up for. That hurt because I knew what was sitting just beyond Syracuse.

The Adirondacks: the mountains and the inspiration begetting the chair type I’d fallen in love with 30 years ago.

I had a loop planned through them before continuing toward Vermont, and it wasn’t some arbitrary line on a map that I could easily replace with another road. The Adirondacks are truly awesome motorcycle country. I wanted those roads. I wanted the fall color. I wanted to stop every ten miles with the camera because the next lake or mountain or tree looked better than the last one.

Vermont had become more than another state on the route too. It was one of the things I had been riding toward: fall color, photography, a chance to stop moving for a while, and a version of the trip that felt less like grinding out miles in the rain. As I got closer, though, that version of the trip started to unravel. The weather wasn’t improving, the timing wasn’t lining up, and pieces of the plan I had been counting on took other turns.

This one hurt.

The Adirondacks and Vermont weren’t the only reasons I had kept going north, but somewhere along the way they had become the payoff in my head. Keep moving. Get through another wet day. Chase the fall color.

Now I wasn’t sure exactly why I was headed north and what I’d planned to accomplish when I got there. Every trip has its thing to optimize for: roads, scenery, people, new geographies, twisties, weather. If I was honest with myself, I wasn’t sure what I was optimizing for. I felt like I was failing.

I was lonely.

That was another thing I finally had to admit in Rome. I had met some wonderful people on this trip. Bruno had spent half an hour talking tractors with somebody who obviously wasn’t buying one. Dani had given me exactly the conversation I needed in Morgantown. The housekeeping guy in Pittsburgh had simply wanted to talk about our rides. Jim had climbed onto my GS in Pennsylvania and discovered that maybe the motorcycle he thought was too tall for him wasn’t.

Even the NASCAR guys in Watkins Glen had given me a perfectly decent evening in a world I barely understood.

But all of those interactions eventually ended, and I got back on the motorcycle alone.

I talked it through with R in Rome. Part of that conversation was grieving the possibility that Vermont just wasn’t going to happen. Neither were the Adirondack roads I had been looking forward to. I had come all this way, through some pretty miserable weather, and now I was contemplating turning south when the things I had been chasing were almost within reach.

The weather and my soul weren’t cooperating.

Meanwhile, I was still doing what I needed to do. My phone was broken, so I had already put an appointment at the Apple Store in Syracuse on the books for the next morning. Phone breaks, find Apple Store, make appointment, adjust route.

Syracuse gave me something to do next.

But after talking with R, I started wondering whether I needed to stop figuring out how to keep the itinerary alive and figure out what I needed. There were Apple Stores elsewhere. I didn’t have to keep riding north just because I had made an appointment in Syracuse. The phone could get fixed in any major metropolitan area. The Adirondacks weren’t going anywhere. Neither was Vermont.

I had people in New Jersey. When I reached out, the answer was wonderfully uncomplicated.

“We are old and boring. Just show up and know you’re always welcome.”

That sounded pretty damn good.

Going south didn’t necessarily mean I was giving up on the Adirondacks or Vermont. I could go to New Jersey, spend some time with people I knew, deal with the phone, get off the bike for a few days, watch the weather and see what happened. If the nor’easter finally got out of the way and the forecast opened up, I could always turn north again.

But I also had to accept that I might not.

I might not get the Adirondack loop. I might not get Vermont. I might not get the explosion of fall color next to the unique covered bridge I had pictured when I started heading north. I might have ridden thousands of miles, gotten almost close enough to touch the thing I wanted and then turned away from it.

That was hard.

Wet roads in the high 30s don’t become safer because I had ridden a long way to reach them. Another day alone didn’t become more fun because it fit the original itinerary. And the miles I had already ridden weren’t a reason to keep forcing a trip that, somewhere on a dark road outside Rome, I had finally admitted I wasn’t enjoying.

I could figure out where the road went after New Jersey. For now, I needed to prioritize me over miles.