Ottawa to Philadelphia

Breakfast, 10:10am, Tim Horton's Coffee bar, York Street, Ottawa. English Toffee cappucino (spilt by me being a donkey- replaced for free because customer service is extraordinary). Then on the road for what turned out to be the biggest ride of the holiday. The miles flew by and I hardly noticed.


11.25am Crossing into USA for the third time this holiday- no real problems.

2pm Lunch. Syracuse, New York State. Dinosaur BBQ restaurant, local speciality Beef sandwich with chilli and fries. Great converstation with a biker couple whose names I never learned and who refused their photo taken!


4pm, heading for Philadelphia. 5.30pm, Scranton , PA.

7.30pm Allentown, PA. Stopped to call Jill in Philly- but phone was out of power. Contigency plan: Find internet machine and look up the number.

9.15pm Philadelphia, PA. No internet cafes. No one has heard of the concept of Backpackers Inn, or student hostels. Everyone I approached for help appeared visably threatened and no one stopped walking to tell me that they were not from round here or couldn't help. I felt like a leper. Was it the bike? Surely the accent, much accentuated for the purposes of assuring the locals of my innocent intent, was not a threat. Anyway it was strange. The only people who weren't apprehensive on approach were the cops- but then they have guns!

I found an internet machine, put in $1 for what seemed like less than a minute and had to race the archaic technology to the email address stored in Hotmail. Parallel scene: Tom Cruise, hacking into the Pentagon computer in Mission: Impossible (except I wasn't hanging upside down). Got the number. Find a phone box (mobile was dead but ran out of credit 10 days ago). Not as easy as it sounds. 5 phone boxes, 3 broken, one mugged me of the coins... phoned Jill- not in. Hooked up with biker guy on VERY loud Yamaha Warrior custom- he gave me change for more phone calls- talked for an hour about bikes and politics. Then phoned Jill and she was in. I then had to find their place, 35 miles out of town. Eventually i made it after getting lost three times despite good directions. Jill and Marvin are really hospitable and thought nothing of fixing me a piece of pizza at 1am.

What a day. over 500 miles, two countries, three states. Three and a half tanks of fuel at a cost of 22.00 GBP.