Day 13: Friday, June 27, 2003

This morning I left Bob and Linda's house early and fought my way through rush-hour traffic on Routes 128 and 93 into Cambridge where I had breakfast with Nancy Hopkins, a fellow graduate student at Harvard in the early 1970s. Nancy is now and has been for years a professor at MIT, and told me she has recently assumed some administrative responsibilities.

After breakfast, I rode out to visit former business associates at Rainin Instrument Company in Woburn, Massachusetts. On the way I stopped to check and send emails at Starbucks in Winchester, a town where my wife taught high school English and where we lived for several years while I was a graduate student and then working for Millipore. It seems strange to visit places that were once familiar, but from which one has been remote for over twenty years.

I spent an hour or so at Rainin, then set out to ride to New York City, where I planned to visit my son Justin on Saturday. On my way out of the Boston area I stopped in Newton, Massachusetts, to pay a visit to other friends, Diane Callan and Max Cangiano. Once I remembered how to find their house, however, I found nobody home, so left a note and then headed west on the Massachusetts Turnpike. I had actually seen Diane just about three weeks earlier during her visit to California. I would have liked to have seen her husband Max, but at least missing them was not a total fiasco.

I rode the Mass Pike to Sturbridge, then southwest on Interstate 84 through Hartford, Connecticutt. On the west end of Connecticutt, I turned south on I-684 and followed that and then I-95 twoward Long Island. I was not fond of the idea of riding into New York City traffic, even in Brooklyn where my son lives. So according to plan, I rode onto Long Island and then east to Huntington, a fairly remote suburb, where I found a motel room -- the most expensive of my trip -- and planned to ride the Long Island Railroad on Saturday morning into Brooklyn to visit Justin.

On the approach to the Whitestone Bridge leading to Long Island, my bike bounced through a recessed sewer grate in the center of my lane on one of the freeway ramps, the front suspension bottoming with a bang. The hole came up so fast and unexpectedly I didn't have time to swerve to avoid it. This was just one of several occasions on this trip that a pavement irregularity caused the front suspension of the K1200 LT to bottom. Later, riding across the bridge, I noticed that both the left and right fairing-mounted rearview mirrors on my bike were out of whack, not aimed properly. Fortunately, I have also installed a set of BMW cruiser mirrors, which I prefer to use for rear vision. There was heavy traffic and nowhere to stop until I reached the Long Island Expressway, where I was finally able to pull out at a rest stop. Both the left and right mirror mounts had popped out of their spring retainers. The mirrors were hanging by the cable ties that I had wisely installed on the advice of a website devoted to the BMW K1200 models. If I had not installed the cable ties, I would have lost both mirrors on the freeway and had to replace them at a cost I have been told would be in the vicinity of two hundred dollars each. I inspected the suspension and front wheel carefully. There did not appear to be any other damage from the jolt. The spring clip mirror retainers on the BMW K1200 LT series is in my opinion an unforgivable design flaw -- but just one among several that I have encountered in the two years since I acquired this bike. Like the others, I have found ways to compensate for BMW's lack of foresight -- fortunately, in this instance, in advance of encountering the serious problem. I clipped each mirror back onto the bike with a quick stroke from the base of my hand and continued east on the expressway.