In my Shorts and No Where to Go

It’s Friday night and I am not sure I want to ride tomorrow, however I have this driving and compelling destiny thing called the National Park Tour. It is only mid July and I feel like the summer is quickly coming to an end and the riding season is all most over. Maybe it is my age, where I feel like I don’t have enough time to do all the things I want to do. Funny thing is I don’t know what those things are, but I am sure they will come to me. I am sitting at my computer and check http://www.noaa.com/. The weather people indicate it is going to be a spectacular riding day and Sunday calls for rain and storms. OK OK we will plan a trip for tomorrow. I have gotten pretty good at planning using MapSource and calculating arrival time at each WP to insure I have enough time to get to all the spots I have selected. Maybe I should go into logistics forecasting. To accomplish this planning I built an Excel spreadsheet and export (read cut and paste) the data in from MS. I manipulate the miles and times between each location to get an overall perspective on the day. Tomorrow’s journey will take me to New York to visit some mansions and figure the trip will be around 375 miles for the day. Not long, but not too short either. This exercise is good because I have the big 5000 coming up in August. It will be interesting to see if my planning skills are executable and accurate. First leg is out the MA pike. I have ridden almost all roads west and want to go some miles under my tires. In Westfield I hang a right off the MA pike and another right to head for the back roads of MA into NY. First WP is Martin Van Buren’s home in Kinderhook, onto Timothy Cole's Home in Catskill, lunch with the Vanderbilts and finally a discussion on contemporary politics with the Roosevelt’s. New York will give me another state, bringing my total to 19 states. The plan is set, see you tomorrow.