Meals provide frequent excuses to ride. A 30 mile ride to breakfast just the most recent of many. Like private pilots flying to a distant airport cafe for a cheeseburger, the relative cost of breakfast at the end of a ride is unimportant.
This morning my friend Paul Ruby and I combed our hair and rolled out our respective two-wheeled contraptions for a leisurely jaunt. Paul parked his Piaggio Fly 150 in favor of his 2008 Ducati Hypermotard — 1200cc of air cooled power, 97 horsepower available at the twist of the throttle — necessary to keep up with the Vespa.
Fog shrouded most of Tussey Mountain but cleared at the summit leaving a fine view of nothing but white. Another rider was programming his GPS for a ride north to the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon but Paul and I were going the other direction to Huntingdon.
Paul D. Ruby, motorcycle and scooter rider, engineer, eBay entrepreneur, photographer, poet, adventurer, friend — just a few of the identifiers I can attribute at the moment. When we ride, he always seems to pull coffee out of his hat, like the cute little thermos he had this morning.
The route to Huntingdon is familiar; I’ve ridden it many times. Traveling the countryside I have a birds-eye picture in my head of where we are and where the surrounding geographic features and towns should be. Passing an unfamiliar road that seemed to lead up towards a mountain we usually have to ride around I pulled off the road, consulted my mental birds-eye view, and made a U-turn to take a new route.
Sometimes detours and explorations are disappointing diversions but this morning we were rewarded with the wonderfully winding path through a quiet forest. A short stop to wander around had me working with the camera while Paul inspected the condition of a recent chain swap he did.
About the time I made this exposure my stomach reminded me that it was time for breakfast. The goal — the Standing Stone Coffee Company Cafe which I hoped was growing closer rather than farther away with this exploration. As luck would have it we emerged in a few miles to a familiar place that would take us right into Huntingdon.
The Standing Stone Coffee Company Cafe in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania is a wonderful gem of a cafe that I’ve somehow missed for years. Unfortunately hunger and running into an old friend inside distracted me from making pictures so now I have a reason to return. Suffice to say that the food was excellent, the environment superb, and I’ll be back. Another 30 mile breakfast is in my future.
While a lot of people think of a Vespa scooter as “small” it’s apparent in this photo that the scooter has a physical size that’s relatively equal to the 1200cc Ducati Hypermotard albeit 75 or so horsepower less.
Breakfast over and chores beckoning led us home from here. One more mountain to cross and then on through the valley. A fine way to start the day.