A long, long ride home

Just because it's a holiday Monday, doesn't mean your day is going to be lazy and hazy.

We rose and shone pretty early because Lauren and Harris had people to meet. Out we went, the four of us, heading east to Montreal West. There's just a touch of odd travel dis-symmetry there, seeing as we left from the West Island, and Montreal West is indeed east of the West Island. I like that. It must confound the tourists, like too many other things about Montreal.

Susan and I meandered on foot to a breakfast joint, while Lauren and Harris set off a few doors down to make their appointment.

From there we went back west, all the way off the island and out to Vaudreuil to spend some time with Gino and Gabriella, before shoving off bound well and truly west for Toronto. Gabriella and Gino spoiled us with more food than we could in good conscience consume.

At around 2:30 it was high time for me to get rolling. To be honest, I was not exactly looking forward to the ride to our new home on the Honda Shadow VT 750 (the bike Sonja calls Black Betty, and that I have nicknamed Thunderbird).

I expected the main culprit to be the windshield. It's a mid-height screen and it's just too damn low for me. It was downright terrible last summer and was only made marginally tolerable by adding an aftermarket deflector that was supposed to work miracles. The problem is really uncomfortable turbulence that tosses my head around like an avocado pit in a blender. OK, that's an exaggeration, but really, it's not a lot of fun. The discomfort did indeed begin there, but, as we shall see, spread elsewhere.

Karen was paying attention to my ramblings and mentioned in a comment that Susan and I would be welcome to drop by and say hello as we passed through Kingston. We exchanged some e-mail and arranged to meet at one of the Tim Horton's coffee shops in Kingston. We had tentatively settled on about 4:15. It's roughly two-and-a-half hours of highway travel from Montreal to Kingston. When you shove off thirty minutes late, 5:00 p.m. is the best you can hope for. When the traffic hits a series of walls on the Quebec side of the provincial border, all bets are off.

I told Karen I would call from Brockville and give her my estimated time of arrival as predicted by Garmin, the road wizard. The techno-verdict was ETA 5:30 by the time I called. Karen cheerfully agreed to meet me, as if I wasn't even running as late as Alice's white rabbit.

As I pulled in at the Tim Horton's I scanned the lot for Karen's V-Star. 'Hah! I got here first' I thought. Not so fast Speedy Gonzales! Karen emerged from a mid-sized SUV to greet me.

It turns out her Star developed a case of the sniffles and was busy leaking hydro-carbons.

We sat, drank coffee and chatted, while-ing away some time and catching each other up to speed. It was great to see Karen. If I'm not mistaken the last time I saw Karen she was leaving our home in Beaconsfield headed back home to Kingston. There's something special about getting together with fellow bloggers. It never fails to strike a chord.

Much as I would have liked to stick around, I had a long ride to go, and I had heard hushed whispers about the legendary traffic issues on the 401 at the tail end of a long holiday weekend.

Oh my dear, oh dear. Had I only known, I would have hit the road at six a.m.

The two points where traffic slowed to a crawl in Quebec were caused by construction and not so much by volume. Still, a crawl, is a crawl, is a crawl. I chalked it up to good practice managing the Shadow and its manual transmission at low speeds. Clearly beneficial. Another plus: at forty kilometers an hour, the windshield turbulence wasn't batting my head around like a cartoon Kangaroo with a punching bag.

After saying goodbye to Karen, I enjoyed some smooth sailing. I stopped in Napanee to gas up, doing the mental calculus that it might be my last fuel stop. And it might have been too.

And then the 401 began having fits of slowness, then fits of extreme slowness, followed by convulsive full-on stoppages. As far as the eye could see, up hill and down dale, an endless lava-like stream of tail and brake lights. I was somewhere in the western outskirts of Belleville. Lauren called. They had stopped for dinner in Belleville. I told her I had decided to press on, and that they should expect delays. The Google Maps version of the 401 was scarlet red on my iPhone's screen.

Now's as good a time as any to talk about my bum.

Let's just say that full stops on the 401, as anomalous, and normally unwelcome, as they may be, were a blessed relief. I stood, balancing the bike, trying to encourage the blood in my nether regions to go back to its former habit of circulating. As one might expect of all decent workmanlike torture, the standing breaks were never long enough. As a device designed to inflict pain, the Honda Shadow, with its seemingly large and welcoming saddle, is an unlikely candidate. But as with time-honored Chinese torture, it starts out pleasant enough (what's the occasional drop of water?), but, given enough time (as my daughter Lauren is fond of saying), one's posterior begins to dread the sit as much as it fairly gasps in relief at the stand.

And that's how an otherwise pleasant five hundred kilometer jaunt became exquisitely uncomfortable.

At 10:15 p.m., way too long after leaving Montreal at 2:30,  I rolled into the underground garage, stopped in the vacant parking stall next to Susan's parking spot, and hit the kill switch. I rose gingerly to my feet, my rear end in exactly the same shape as a stock Honda Shadow saddle, and with the strangest feelings radiating along every neural butt-pathway, as the oppressed neurons alternately cheered their new-found freedom, and rowdily cursed the oppressor.  In my defense, during the ride, I tried, valiantly I thought, to alter my posture. With the feet-forward cruiser sitting position, all I could manage was to force my ass backwards until it butted (pardon the pun) up against the pillion saddle. I must have looked ridiculous, and I wouldn't have minded leers and jeers from fellow motorists one bit, but it just wasn't a sustainable position for any kind of relief. If I had to tour on that bike I'd be shopping for an Air Hawk, and maybe a sheepskin, plus some of those bead things, a goose down pillow, some Gold Bond powder, some Spanx, and...

All of which to say I have new-found respect for Sonja's... courage, stoicism, and good posture. I'm sure my experience has much more to do with my couch-potato cushy ways, than with any real shortcoming inherent in the vehicle's ergonomics. Sonja will surely chime in and set the record straight.

I fired up the app I call 'find my spouse' on the iPhone. Susan was in Oshawa, headed my way, about thirty minutes out, by Apple's reckoning. By the time Susan, Lauren and Harris showed up, I was finally able to walk upright without making strange monkey faces.