On Any Thursday
On Any Thursday
AT LARGE
WELL, YES, VACATIONS ARE PRETTY nice. Sometimes. But sometimes they’re worse than the work you took the vacation to escape. You know the feeling: After all the hassle of planning and scheming and saving money, when it comes time to roll out the bike and head off, it all seems a trifle . . . contrived. And you never quite escape the nagging thought, as you tick off the miles, that each hour spent on vacation is really another hour closer to being back in harness.
I discovered a long time ago that this syndrome is worse on a bike than in a car. It took me awhile to figure out why. Now I think I know.
Motorcycles are escape capsules. Just sitting there in the garage, they’re always ready to pull you out of the doldrums and turn an evening ride into an adventure. This isn’t sales talk; just fact. It’s one reason we all love the things so much. It’s also why, for this purpose, motorcycles are better than boats or airplanes. Unlike those otherwise admirable devices, they’re accessible and ready.
So when you plan and scheme and contrive a motorcycle vacation, the process seems a little weird. Of course you can have fun; of course it can be as wonderful as you hoped. But still . . . still, it’s a lot like an arranged marriage. It can work, but then again, it can also be miserable.
When I stumbled along this line of thinking, I decided to use my bikes for vacations, all right. But not for annual vacations, involving brochures, minutely detailed schedules, motel and campsite reservations and weeks on the road, living out of saddlebags. The kind of vacations I take now happen on Thursdays.
If you’re like me, by Wednesday the week seems endless. The energetic promises of Monday have become the morass of Tuesday’s problems, and Wednesday dawns with the looming gloom of Mount Doom, a tiresome, trudging day aptly nicknamed Humpday. By Wednesday evening, the weekend seems lightyears away and relief from Excedrin headaches nowhere in sight.
That’s when I sneak off on a Thursday. When I need this break (not every week, luckily) I always manage to find some excuse to take off. Doesn’t much matter what it is; I always seem to come up with something. If all else fails, I’ll just take a day of leave, paid or otherwise.
Thursday then beckons like a 24hour liberty to a sailor who’s just spent 10 months at sea. My plan for using the time is never the same, because I never have a plan. I just walk out to the bike, make sure I have the vitals (a rainsuit, a good book, enough money and gas) and go.
If it’s sunny and warm, I usually wind up on a favorite bit of twisty stuff first, headed for the mountains. All this happens on autopilot; I just work the bike, and it takes me somewhere. Anywhere it likes.
If the day is still sunny and warm at lunch, I find myself buying some cheese and apple juice, maybe, and heading for a quiet meadow. I park, pull out the book (last time, it was Whitman’s Leaves of Grass) and soak up the rays, munch, sip and slowly digest the words. Then I fall asleep.
If the day is miserable, I even enjoy that. If it’s raining hard, I suit up, launch into the water and ride from coffee shop to coffee shop, where somebody is always sitting in front of a newspaper with a steaming mug of joe, ready to talk to a crazy motorcyclist out on a day into which not even Englishmen would venture. You meet a lot of nice folks that way, work up a healthy appetite, polish your wet-road skills and drain all that work-angst out of your system.
The afternoon almost always finds me a hundred miles from home, still giving the bike its head. Terrain that looks dull and unexciting from a car, or that even seems pointless while in serious transit on a bike, becomes inviting and interesting on such a Thursday. I stop often. I look at all those historical markers that I usually whistle past on my way to or from Someplace. I pass the time with old geezers at gas stations, gents who always had a Harley until they hit a pig on dark night in Ioway back in ’32. By nightfall, without actually planning it, I’m close to home again, and by suppertime, the bike always seems to park itself in the garage.
There are a lot of bonuses to a Thursday vacation ride. For starters, hardly anybody is on the road. The crowds who make my favorite roads a moving parking lot on the weekend are all at work. And after one of these Thursdays, Friday always seems to be an easy slide, no matter what awful problems have cropped up while I was away on vacation. So for the price of a day’s productivity, I’ve gained a really useful workday—and sometimes the Thursday calm carries over into the next week.
A lot of people love to turn vacations into major administrative events; for them, the anticipation is half the fun, the proper execution the other half. If they do it on a bike, from what I’ve seen, they enjoy it even more. For those folks, Thursdays aren’t even necessary, probably. They keep themselves going with the promise of the one true annual event, rather than a monthly (or, in really heavy going, weekly) mini-vacation.
Everybody’s working life is different. Some people love their work so much that the idea of sacrificing a Thursday is scandalous; some people simply couldn’t get away if they tried, being tied down by contracts or bosses or financial necessity. But for a lot of us—more all the time as we telecommute and flextime our way into the 21 st century—the biggest obstacle to turning a Thursday into a vacation is our own preconceived notion of what Thursday is for.
I understand all that only too well, because I used to have precisely those preconceived notions. Not any more. Now I know that a whole new America lies just on the other side of Wednesday, an America of clear roads and friendly folks on and near them who, on any Thursday, will pass the time with a wandering motorcyclist.
It’s a nice country, that America. You ought to visit it sometime.
—Steven L. Thompson
