Labor Day Ride

Monday we were back in the saddle again, but we decided after the long ride on Sunday to make a shorter day of it.

We decided to go back to Culpeper to check on our friends again and from there go to Fredericksburg to check on Katie and the new house. 

It started off as a cool morning, so we put on our jackets and gloves.  We wore T-shirts underneath because it was supposed to warm up again.  I reminded myself to look for my fingerless gloves when I got home. 

Culpeper by way of Vint Hill and Nokesville is a nice ride down some country roads.  I enjoy going through the little towns and wondering how they got their names.  One of the towns we went through was Catlett.  Just exactly what is a Catlett?  Is it a small cat?  Not a kitten, but a miniature cat?  I know - wierd stuff goes through my head at 65 mph on the back of a bike.  Doesn't anyone else wonder stuff like that?

Then there's another place called Summer Duck.  As opposed to Winter Duck?  I don't think we went through Summer Duck.  We just passed the sign that points the way to get there.  I'll have to talk to Karl about actually going there.

The last one is Brandy Station.  All kinds of ideas come to mind for that one.  Is that were everyone went for a tot after a long ride on the train?  Are we talking about a girl named Brandy or the drink?  I kind of want to do some research on some of these towns.  Find out their origins and why they were named so.  There are story ideas in there.

That brings us to Culpeper.  That has a nice Southern genteel ring to it.  Sounds like a Civil War General.  There are quite a few battlefields within about a 50 mile radius.  Chancellorville, Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania Courthouse and Wilderness come to mind.  There is also a Civil War era cemetery in Culpeper.  I think it's a national cemetery.

We arrived at our friends' house and once again everything looked just as it was when we saw it on Friday.  No one home.  The same small package was on the front porch and the spiderwebs in the doorway were undisturbed.  We concluded that our friends must be out of town for the holiday weekend.  This time we had brought a small notebook and a pen to keep in the saddlebag, so we wrote a note and slipped it in the mail slot in the front door.

As we said to ourselves when planning to ride to Culpeper, if they aren't home, then the worst thing is we had a nice ride.  It's more about the ride than the destination anyway.  But still, we hadn't seen our friends in a few years - busy-ness on both our parts. 

After a break and a stretch, we put it back on the road and rode out toward Wilderness and the Spotsylvania Courthouse Battlefields toward Katie's. 

The nice part about the route we took is it goes through both Wilderness and Spotsylvania Courthouse battlefields.  It was a nice scenic drive.

No matter where we went, we saw many other bikers on the roal all weekend long.  Bikers, by and large tend to be an amiable lot.  They always acknowledge one another when passing on the road.  The folks who ride crotch rockets tend to wave less but I think that;'s because it's easier for them to lose their balance.  I draw this conclusion because I watched someone lose his balance and almost drop his bike after takiung his hand off the hanldebars to wave.  I'd like to give the rest of the the benefit of the doubt and not conclude that they're stuck up. 

We ended up passing the apartment complex where Katie used to live - I recognized it even though we came at it from the other direction.  I congratulated myself because I am usually directionally clallenged.  Sometimes I can't find my way out of a paper bag.  My GPS is my best friend when I'm driving.

We got to Katie's and I was ready for a break.  Of course, it looked like all of her moving boxes exploded, but hey - she had just moved two days earlier.  Whose place doesn't look like that right after they move?  It was actually starting to come together. 

After a short break, we left Katie to her boxes and put it on the road to go home.  We came up Route 1, accross the "Bridge of Death" over the Rappahannok River, through Stafford and past Quantico.  We decided to take the more winding route of Joplin Road once we got to Triangle, and that's a nice drivve through Prince William Forest National Park.

We were home in time for lunch.

All in all, my first weekend on the bike, I think I did pretty well.  Oh, and we went over the first thousand miles on the odometer.  Not bad for Karl's three weeks of riding on the weekends.  Time for Baby's first check-up and maintenance.