The report from September

Nearly the end of September and I feel like I haven't done much this month. Until I look at the photos.

Due to a problem with my new truck, coupled with a 34 hour reset, I ended up spending four nights and three days in Augusta Georgia. Nice town, with an unpaved bike trail alongside the canal that put the town on the map.

I took a boat trip on the canal that explained the history of the area. Having lived in an old mill town in New England, it was interesting to visit the primary southern city to which most of the fabric mills in New England eventually moved. Also very interesting to me as a Yankee, Augusta was the center of the confederacy's industrial base.

This one canal, promoted and developed by the son of the town's mayor, way back in the 1850s, made it the ideal spot for the production of gun powder for the confederacy in the 1860s, among other things necessary for the war effort. Strangely, Sherman's march through the south entirely avoided Augusta. Hmmm.

While in Augusta, I happened upon an auction of stuff for the benefit of a newborn with heart troubles who's mother is the member of a local roller derby team. One of the items on auction was this "sword" (more like a long dagger), of exquisite design (and sharp as hell). I would have priced it at $200 or more, but the highest bid was only $10. So my $20 bid ended up winning. Since the last thing I need on the truck is a sixteen inch long dagger, I made a deal with the pub hosting the event: They keep the dagger on the wall of the pub until the next charity auction at which they must auction it off with the understanding that the buyer must again give it back to the pub to put back on the wall. Rinse and repeat. I told enough people about the deal that I trust the pub will honor my deal. I'll be very interested to come back in a few years and see how much money that dagger has raised.

I don't remember exactly where this was, somewhere in peach country, but a water tower shaped as a peach certainly caught my attention.

I picked up a trailer in Ticonderoga New York and after driving sixty miles along a road that should not have trucks on it, I spent the night in a rest area only to find in the morning that this is what two of the tires on the trailer looked like. Fortunately I was able to get them replaced within a few miles of the rest area. Yes, those are the steel belts showing through on the tire.

My typical day of food, sitting on the passenger seat.

I spent a week in the Bethlehem/Allentown PA region making local deliveries for C+S Wholesale Grocers to primarily A&P and Stop and Shop grocery stores in eastern PA and northern NJ. Fortunately, I had to do a 34 hour reset so I parked in Allentown.

Cute town. Very working class with a huge chunk of the population living in downtown Allentown. This tree-lined street was a bit unusual. Most of the town looks like 8th avenue in the 40s and 50s in Manhattan . I got to bike down the old mule path along the canal paralleling the Lehigh river to Bethlehem.

Bethlehem, once the capital of steel production in the US, has fortunately kept the old steel mills relatively intact but converted them into a civic center which was hosting a blues festival while I was there. Riding down the bike path on the north side of the river, the blues from the south side was like a siren's song for me.

Seen in a highway rest stop in Indiana.

One morning northwest of Lafayette Indiana in a region filled with wind turbines (though, knowing something about wind turbines, I wonder who would have been willing to endure a longer than 20 year ROI on these babies. There simply is not enough wind in Indiana to make these things cost-effective.)

I made a delivery to a grocery store on the south side of Chicago which had this sign on the wall. Go make something happen. I like that.

I'm now doing an unintentional 34 hour reset in the town of "State College" (believe it or not) Pennsylvania. I'm very glad I parked here last night instead of the truckstop 28 miles in the other direction from my drop-off point last night. Very cute town and home of Penn State. I got to do my laundry and bombed around campus on the bike, riding like a wild man and scaring the kids. LOL