Vermont, Green Mountain National Forest

Trip Length: 3 days
Route: day 1 / day 2 / day 3
Mileage total: 620
Road type: tarmac, dirt road
Best twisties: The Mohawk Trail 1, Mohawk Trail 2, Molly Stark Trail, The Greylock Mountain
Off-road: dirt roads, easy to ride: Forest Rd 71, Seasonal Forestry Rd
Bikes: Honda CRF230M, Yamaha VStar650

July 17th-19th

A thousand mile trip—Adirondacks

Route: day 1 / day 2 / day 3 / day 4
Mileage total: 1128
Road type: tarmac, dirt
Best twisties: Sacandanga Lake
Off-road: dirt & gravel roads: Independence River
Bikes: Honda CRF230M, Yamaha VStar650

July 2nd-5th

Connecticut off-road

Trip Length: 2 days
Route: day 1 / day 2
Mileage total: 260
Road type: tarmack, dirt
Off-road: Macedonia Brook State Park to Lime Rock
Bikes: Honda CRF230M, Vespa GTS 300 Super

June 19th-20th.
We planned to get out only for one day. Connecticut however—especially the off-road part—turned out to be so beautiful that we had to stay and wake up the next morning to these roads again.

One of the best discoveries of this trip was a route back to NYC—no traffic, forests and lakes, and all that running perfectly parallel to highway 684 or quite scenic but busy Saw Mill Parkway. See the route here.

Backroads in NY, and the show that wasn’t

Trip Length: 1 day
Route: here
Mileage total: 220
Road type: tarmack, dirt
Off-road: Sunken Mile Road
Bikes: Honda CRF230M, Yamaha VStar 650

June 13th.
Leisurely Sunday ride with a sprinkling of rain, with a goal of getting to the Rhinebeck National Grand Meet.
I recommend getting lost around Peekskill—half residential roads among the forests make for a great ride. We accidentaly discovered Sunken Mile Road—a forest dirt road running along a stream, half flooded by the ponds.
We had so much fun there that by the time we got to Rhinebeck the show got rained out—yes I missed it!!! And the rest of afternoon was spent playing checkers at a Cracker Barrel. Still, an excellent day:).

The Ducati coloring book

So simple, so much fun!
From www.duccutters.com, via Bike Exif

Download here.

Vintage Motorcycles—this is where I get my fix:

The outstanding ones—in their own words:

Bike Exif
“This site offers a dose of the coolest motorcycles, six days a week. That means new and classic cafe racers, customs, vintage motorbikes, retro track weapons and style icons. I’m passionate about design, photography and classic motorcycles, and Bike EXIF is a way to combine all three—and connect with other people who share the same interests.”

Motorsport Retro
“(…) is an online publication celebrating classic motorsport. It’s about the classic machines, events, design, riders and drivers of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. (…) Everything on the site is here because we love it. We are all infected by the motorsport disease. Petrol runs in our blood. We love the sounds, the smell, the speed. We share a passion for those special motorsport moments, the glorious hand built cars and bikes and the gutsy riders and drivers that defined a  heady period in motorsport history.”

The Vintagent
—I especially like this note about the site:
“The world of Motorcycles has all the ingredients of a good, enriching drama; heroic deeds, political intrigue, design brilliance, cut-throat business practices, quirky characters, national tensions, cultural biases,eros and thanatos.
When diving into the murk of motorcycle history, we find unexpected riches…everything which makes this life interesting, and worth living.
Motorcycles per se are just metal; it is individuals who animate them, and inhabit the stories within this site. We provide meaning to the metal, and in telling the story of Motorcycling, we tell the story of our world.”

Open Road

This fragment of the Walt Whitman poem “The Song of the Open Road” opens the movie “Horatio’s Drive. America’s First Road Trip”—a great movie and a great story.

Song of the Open Road

1
AFOOT and light-hearted, I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune—I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900.