Wilmington was cold. It was 30 degrees in the morning, with frost all over the bike. I wanted to skip breakfast and get a few miles under me before eating. Hogback Mountain was at the top of the hill, about five miles down the road, so I could at least get that far before stopping again.

The view from Hogback felt like the Appalachians in the fall. The colors were really starting to pop, and the warm morning light helped them show, which was ironic on the coldest morning of the trip.

Maple syrup is big business here. At Hogback, I got to see it at different stages of production and taste the difference between early- and late-season syrup. The late-season stuff was noticeably darker and richer. I stopped at two samples, since I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day chasing high blood sugar down the road.

I found Vermont and New Hampshire magnets, but only Vermont postcards. The cashier laughed when I asked about New Hampshire.

“You have to go to New Hampshire for New Hampshire postcards.”

Fair enough, although they had New Hampshire magnets. Postcards were elusive and I had to look in every place to find them where I could.

I loved Brattleboro. It reminded me of Hudson, New York, another gem I hadn’t given myself enough time to explore. Crossing into New Hampshire, things changed both obviously and subtly. There was a big Walmart, and the landscape seemed less curated, as though there might be less zoning. I could feel some of that Live Free or Die mentality, although that was my impression from the motorcycle rather than any real understanding of the culture here. I was also surprised by how much open space there was across both Vermont and New Hampshire. Somehow I’d imagined a much more densely populated New England.

I missed the Ashuelot Covered Bridge and had to wander back along a few country roads to find it. This excursion was much better than the state highway I was on. The slower byway dipped into an area of intense color that really delivered.

The bridge was neat to see too, but I’d apparently carried an image of a highly curated, pastoral scene with fall-color trees all around it at peak color. The actual bridge wasn’t a letdown. There’s just a normalcy that often doesn’t make it into travel photographs. I struggle with that difference both as an explorer and a photographer. You see how a photographer framed it, then you get there and find the rest of the scene around it: downed trees, power lines, and the everyday clutter along the highway.

I was also starting to give myself permission to just be. Part of me had been trying to be the best motorcycle rider, travel writer, photographer, adventure seeker and finder of fall color, all at once. I couldn’t optimize for everything, and if I kept trying, I might optimize for nothing. I was on a good road with good color. Was it the best road? I didn’t know. Could I be on a worse road? For sure. But I was here.

I remembered feeling something similar crossing Nevada about 15 years ago. Plenty of people had crossed the United States on a motorcycle, many of them on smaller bikes or in rougher situations. Somehow I was using that to take away from my own journey, until I caught myself. I was crossing the United States on a motorcycle, and that was what mattered right then. Here, I was on a fall-color tour. The fall was what it was. There were things I couldn’t control or chase into being better, and plenty in front of me to enjoy.

At Cathedral of the Pines in Rindge, I wasn’t initially sure what I’d arrived at. It turned out to be a memorial founded after World War II to honor military service and sacrifice. It reminded me of the Living Memorial Sculpture Garden on Highway 97 near Weed, California. I didn’t go into the museum. The place felt reverent and sacred, and as somebody who hadn’t served, I wasn’t sure it was my place to walk in. The hesitation was mine, for sure, but I wanted to honor the space the best I knew how.

In the parking lot, a guy walked up to the GS smiling.

“I wish I could ride one of these, but they’re too high.”

My mind went straight back to Jim in Pennsylvania, just south of Interstate 80. It was a different guy with the same question and almost the same reaction. This one smiled and explained that even if he could get over the bike, his old hips wouldn’t sustain it. He was probably ten years older than Jim.

Age comes for all of us. I’m grateful to be able to take this time, but I’m not really sure what the next chapter of my life looks like—in place, career, or relationships. In some ways, the doors of my life have just been thrown wide open, and I’m not exactly sure how to handle all the space.

Continuing on NH-119, I suddenly hit MA-119. I found my way down into Ashby, Massachusetts, which surprised me; I hadn’t examined the route closely enough to realize I was going that far south. I parked and walked around the town square, finding beautiful old buildings and fall color. A mercantile store on the left looked promising for Massachusetts postcards, but I came up empty-handed. Literally as the wheels started turning again, I saw a postcard stand in the window of an old market across the street. Score!

I picked up some rations for lunch and asked for a couple of postcards at checkout. The cards were behind the counter, which seemed odd. Maybe not many people bought them. Maybe too many people stole them. I explained how hard they’d been to find, what I was doing and why I was doing it. The cashier smiled and wished me well on the journey.

The route brought me back into New Hampshire on NH-101. My two-lane road became a two-lane limited-access road, which initially seemed foolishly overbuilt, but those exits were a lot easier to get through than complicated intersections and red lights would have been. Two lanes became four, and eventually it was all-out freeway.

I’m learning to let go of the idea that freeways are bad. Traveling this kind of distance, I have to make good time somewhere. Freeways are as much a partner in this journey as any other road. I just have to pick the right slab at the right moment. I’m getting better as I go, resisting the desire to just “get home” and “see everything.” Balance is key.

On each postcard, I’m using one of the Postal Service’s Appalachian Trail stamps, with a different stamp for every state the trail passes through. That meant I needed to get to Maine. Maine also had a place in my family’s stories. My dad was a sailor, and so was my best friend’s dad growing up, who sailed these waters before moving south. The two of them were close and sailed together, and Maine always seemed to come up when they talked. At some level, damn it, I just needed to get there. I was trading some curves and some trees for the chance to put my boots in the Atlantic off the coast of Maine.

But first, I still needed a New Hampshire postcard.

Most people I asked kept sending me to Portsmouth. The problem was that I didn’t really know what state anything was in. Massachusetts? New Hampshire? Maine? These are details Californians need to study, because states here are like counties there.

In Portsmouth, NH, I walked into a gift shop and met an older man working the register, maybe in his mid-sixties. He asked where I was from. When I said California, I could see the smile in his eyes.

“Oh, I used to live in San Rafael.”

Family, business and opportunity had brought him to New Hampshire to work with his brother. He’d found a partner here, and a few years later his brother moved to Florida. He laughed that one of them got to be warm forever while the other was still in the cold, as life brought children and grandchildren here. I could hear both pleasure and tension as he talked. Some of the same decisions were coming my way. Life happens whether you make decisions or not.

Fortunately, he also had New Hampshire postcards. I picked one with the Old Man of the Mountain on it, the same profile that’s on the state’s road signs. Score!

As I was packing the bike, he came outside and flagged me down.

“Hey, you need a picture in the town of Portsmouth?”

“Of course!”

Getting into Maine was more meaningful than I’d expected. I thought I’d missed the welcome center, so I found my way in the long way and came through the back. At the counter, I asked about the welcome sign. The person in front of me looked confused. So did the person beside him. Finally, a woman farther down the counter knew what I meant and explained where it was to the others. She then took me outside to photograph it.

She laughed on our way out with a big smile. Some of them had worked there for years without ever coming through the front entrance and seeing the sign.

We are all creatures of habit.

I headed farther north to Long Sands Beach in York. Wandering up the coast had seemed so simple in my mind. Instead, I’d detoured to the other side of the Appalachians, retreated to New Jersey and come back north before finally getting here. Seeing the Atlantic off the coast of Maine hit harder than I’d expected.

I walked down to the waterline and put my boots in the ocean. I wanted to touch the water. I wanted to make it clear that I was here, some 2,500 miles of wandering from south Georgia.

Back in Virginia, I’d written about my fraternity brothers who left Springer Mountain for Katahdin and stopped in Damascus. I’d set out to do my own two-wheeled version of the Appalachian Trail, on my own and in my own way. I started in Savannah rather than Springer and reached York rather than Katahdin. Either way, I was here.

A buddy had told me he wasn’t sure he could do this kind of long-distance solo travel because it seemed really hard. I’d told him I simply saw it as riding my motorcycle. I hop on it, put gas in it, go and get off at the end of the day. What I hadn’t really accounted for was everything else that goes into it: route planning, being far from home, finding community and dealing with its absence, and all the logistics of just making stuff happen. It adds up over time. It isn’t a Bay Area day ride repeated over and over, and I think that’s what he was poking at. Standing on that beach, I could finally feel the sum of the parts and taste their success.

I’ve been focusing a lot on my father, but my mother is one for lighthouses. I made my way to Nubble Lighthouse to take a photo for her. This was also the point where the trip changed direction. I wasn’t going farther north or farther east. Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick weren’t going to happen. Weather and time made it clear that I needed to head south, even if the fall color wasn’t fully ready. There were still adventures ahead, but I was on the downhill side of the slope toward home.

Providence was next, and Wednesday commute traffic was in full force two states down the road, so I bought myself some time with an early dinner at Fox’s Lobster House in York.

Chowder is a thing here, and I get it everywhere I can. They don’t do bread bowls here, though. Apparently New England feels chowder needs a bowl, not a carbohydrate, and my diabetes agrees with New England about chowder even if my taste buds don’t. It warmed my soul, too. Soups, stews and chili are foods I’m learning work really well for warming my chilly body at the end of a cold day.

I was behind on postcards, so I wrote a few while I sat there. The one to Dad was about standing at the ocean at the north end of the Appalachian Trail, about his love of sailing and mine of motorcycling. My dad was a sailor. I’m a motorcyclist. We each lean into the wind.

The waitress noticed.

“I’m not here to be in your business, but I think it’s neat that you’re writing postcards. The world doesn’t do that much anymore.”

“It’s okay to be in my business,” I told her. “I’d love to share it.”

I talked about the journey, my father and why Maine mattered. She didn’t quite tear up, but I could see her become emotional. She shared some of her own family story. Her mother was local, and her brother was trying to be involved from Spain. I understood her more than she might have realized.

We both paused in that space where life is hard and confusing and disorienting, and we’re not exactly sure how to do certain things as it shifts out from under us. It was one of the most tender and profound moments of the trip. Even now, I tear up a bit writing about it. Sometimes in its sweetness, life is painfully hard.

I left Maine around six, with 140 miles between Providence and me. It was already nearly dark. Turning south and seeing Boston on the signs felt strange. Boston had always been this place way up north, and here I was, farther north than it.

The darkness felt different. I felt full. The time on the Maine coast had been reassuring and invigorating. The sky went through red, yellow, blue, steel and purple before the night finally pushed any evidence of the day out of it.

The ride down 95 was work. I’d done my best to dodge tolls in Maine, then caught one in New Hampshire and hoped my E-ZPass worked. By nightfall, I was heading into Massachusetts and a series of construction zones. Paving in progress is particularly rough on a motorcycle. The step between an old lane and a freshly paved one can catch the front tire as you cross it, and that may not end well.

I was all the way left when I realized the left lanes were heading toward 93 into Boston. To stay on 95 toward Providence, I needed to get five lanes over on a freeway under construction.

Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no. How am I going to do this?

Bridges. I needed to find the sections without that paving step and make my lane changes there. At the first bridge, I moved right. At the second, I moved right again. At the third, I moved right again, and at the fourth, I moved right one last time. Phew. I was still on 95 South toward Providence.

Somewhere along the freeway, I needed a restroom. A food sign promised a McDonald’s at the next exit. What it didn’t mention was a complicated set of flyovers, three miles down a hill, two very long lights and a Hyundai Ioniq 6 nearly running me off the road. At the restaurant, the restrooms were locked. I wrestled with the “helpful” automated ordering system to buy a drink, becoming a customer. I then asked the cashier how to get into the restroom. Relief finally came. Then I realized I’d ordered a Coke instead of a Diet Coke, and the fountain was behind the counter, so I couldn’t even drink the thing I’d bought. Ugh. I left.

Providence required its own freeway gymnastics, with hard turns over bridges. I finally admitted I didn’t know the city, slowed down, gave myself some margin and stayed right for when my exit jumped out.

As I pulled into the parking lot and saw my buddy, who’d moved here from California, I felt much the same as I had pulling into the driveway in New Jersey.

I was with good people again.