After nearly two years of touring, from California to Baja California, from ghost towns to TV trucks, from the Grand Canyon to Key West, and all the little places in between, my newly nicknamed Yamaha FJR, the bike that I traded the Hayabusa away for in California, has finally come home.

The bike’s new name? Rain Cloud Follows – given during the last leg of the ride home, from Tennessee to Rhode Island.

After the spectacular journey that was Scotland, I didn’t really feel up to taking a ton of pictures and writing a long, yawn-inspiring story of the trip. After all, it was only three days, kind of an intermission between epic rides. We got on our bikes on Wednesday in Tennessee, and got off them safe and sound on Saturday evening.

On the way up, we saw some interesting sights.

And interesting signs.

The back roads in West Virginia were as impressive as any I’ve had the pleasure of unraveling thus far. The state pastime in West Virginia seems to be either Street Sign Shooting, or Home Burning.
Since I was just riding and not really taking many pictures, I didn’t get any shots of all the burned homes, but there must have been thirty or forty of them, all torched to the ground. Seems people in West Virgina deal with foreclosure differently than people in New England do.

The biggest laugh of the trip was courtesy of the New River Gorge National Park ranger who advised us to go to an observation point three miles up the road to see the biggest waterfall in West Virginia.

The fact that the observation point was about three thousand miles above the falls probably didn’t help much. The sight was less than impressive. Later that day, Abi held a water bottle over his head, poured water out and said, “Can you guess what I am? No? I’m the second biggest waterfall in West Virginia!”

Like I said, this trip was just an interlude between major rides. You have to make your fun when you can.

Of course, every night it rained,usually starting just as we were stopping, though one day it misted and pissed all over us. The name Rain Cloud Follows came up, and is the perfect name for this bike.

Can’t wait to see what happens when Stormbringer and Rain Cloud Follows head up to Newfoundland in a few weeks.

We meandered through the rest of West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts and finally, my home state, the Kingdom of Rhode Island.

And my favorite place of all. Home.

It’s good to be home, if only for a little while.

Author: frenchy