I left this morning not knowing where I would ride other than eventually I needed to be at Lowe’s to buy a tube of silicone caulking for the bathroom. It’s always something with a house. I decided to take a long loop to the north that would take me through some quiet places with a minimum of traffic. After a stop for fuel I rode along Spring Creek just to see the water. This is one of Pennsylvania’s great trout streams and during trout season you will be lucky to find a place to stand. Being a loner I never understood the attraction of opening day either for trout or deer. Just a huge madhouse.

I stopped to look around at the water and rocks and sort of got lost for a while.

The quiet is magnified by the earplugs I wear and when I stand looking at the water my thoughts get loud. I wear the plugs to save my hearing but I definitely like the way they cut be off from the noise and make it easier to pay attention to thoughts.

Riding out of the valley and into the farmland above the creek I was struck by all the open land we still have. One big farm has been sold off and is now the beginning of an industrial park, something we have a lot of in Pennsylvania.

I’m not sure how successful they are but the local business leaders seem to think they are the answer to every economic woe. As I look out at the empty farmhouse I can’t help but wonder how much land has to surrender itself to development before we’re done. Big business, big houses, big stores. Growth is the Holy Grail. You don’t have to ride far to see that the world is in a cycle of constant change.

Snow fences are emerging in preparation for the blowing wind and snow that sweeps across this area.

The skies seem to get darker every day as a reminder to prepare for winter.

I saw another old farm off in the distance and decided to cut across a field to have a look.

No “No Trespassing” signs and being Sunday all good farmers and landowners would either be in church or in front of the tube so I felt a good dose of trespassing was in order. The scooter just looks so tiny in the wide-open spaces of Pennsylvania. I can’t imagine what it would be like in the West and Midwest. Someday.

All that was left of the farm was a silo.

The house was torn down and I suspect a developer has bought up this land as well to turn it into something great, another retirement community, some condominium cells, or perhaps another shopping plaza. There just aren’t enough places yet to dump money. I rode away towards Lowe’s and the tub and tile caulk and realized that everything is part of a cycle. The farms would give way to something else and that would give way to something else. Nothing is permanent if you’re patient enough. I grew up on Neville Island in the Ohio River south of Pittsburgh. Almost the entire island was taken up by shipyards, steel fabrication companies, blast furnaces, coke ovens, tank farms, trucking companies, and chemical plants. A bustling industrial beacon employing tens of thousands of people. In a few short years in the early 1980’s all of that vanished. Steel disappeared and the landscape changed again.
I stopped at the old Lowe’s building to take this picture.

They were in business at this location for about 10 years or so. Now they have built a new facility and abandoned this site. It won’t disappear as fast or easily as a farm but it will eventually give way. I hate to see the best landscapes surrender to development but money talks and walks. Too bad it doesn’t think.

After a week of fighting a cold I finally got back out on the road again. I did manage a short ride to work yesterday but this morning I was able to venture out for a few hours to ride and see the world. I’m still not one hundred percent healthy and because of it I felt the 38° F temperature more than usual. That aside I enjoyed being out in the world and feeling the connection to the landscape that riding offers me. The world is slowly surrendering to the coming of winter with gray skies and bare trees. Snow is forecast for tomorrow.

I had some chores to catch up on so my ride had several planned destinations. Gary Charpentier has been posting on Rush Hour Rambling about a diner in St. Paul. I remembered a ghostly diner parked out behind the garage of the auto mechanic we use and I thought I just had to take a closer look.

The shiny metal is in pretty good shape for someone who wants to take the plunge to open a classic dinner. The inside needs work but the basic structures are in place. Anyone thinking of a diner business? This may be your lucky day.

From there I rode to a local orchard for a fresh Red Delicious apple. I’m always amazed at how good an apple is when it’s fresh. From there on to the local Vespa dealer to check out a moving sale they were having. I knew there wouldn’t be anything I wanted but I have to look anyway. I only have two things on my want list—a small MotoFizz seat bag and a pair of snowmobile mittens. What happened to me? My list used to be pretty long. I guess I’m getting more content in my growing years.

I did have to make a stop at O.W. Houts to pick up some special hangers for a seven foot long photo construction piece I made.

Houts is one of those old, small town department stores that are fast going the way of the dinosaur. It’s sad to see their parking lot so empty on a Saturday afternoon and knowing that Wal-Mart and Lowe’s are jammed. Houts has the best hardware store anywhere around, a lumber yard that offers custom milling, a grocery store and meat department that you can find some pretty exotic stuff. Furniture, dry goods, garden supplys. I remember when it was the place to shop. The employees are adults who have made careers as sales people and many have been there for decades. I can’t help but think their days are numbered.

I only had one more stop on my ride. Sneezing, sniffling, coughing, I made my way towards home to stop at Eddie Agostinelli’s Market and Deli.

This local Italian place has great bread, sandwiches, pasta, cookies and more. Kim loves their lamb sandwiches and I had some pepperoni bread today.

By the time I got home I felt the cold sneaking back and needed to lie down and rest. Snow may fly tomorrow but I’m ready to go.

There it is surfacing right in front of you, the real passion in my life – chocolate. And don’t think I’m writing this now because I’ve been sick all week and the Vespa has stood alone in the garage for the past few days and I don’t have anything better to write about. Or that I am so bored by being sick and not able to ride that I’m just out of my mind. That’s merely coincidence. Hale and hearty and riding hundreds of miles a day I would not let this event pass unnoticed or fail to share with you the arrival of the Harbor Candy Shop holiday catalog. Just looking at it I want chocolate so bad now that I am almost willing to drag my sick and sorry body into the truck and driving to the grocery store to have some woefully inadequate chocolate in hopes of quieting the hunger within. And Harbor Candy bears great responsibility for this desire.

You need a little background to make sense of this story. Add I should preface these comments to let you know this is an unsolicited and unpaid endorsement. Kim and I usually travel to Maine in the late fall and again in early spring to spend a week or so relaxing on the Atlantic coast, walking the beaches, climbing the rocky shoreline, and dissolving away any tether or link to our life in central Pennsylvania. We always stay at the Beachmere Inn (a real gem too) in Ogunquit and visit the Harbor Candy Shop everyday. Did I say everyday? Yes, it’s true. And around the holiday’s I buy candy from their online store or over the phone. A pound for a friend, a pound for me. One year I bought pounds and pounds of candy for gifts. The box was so big that it seemed like 25 pounds though it was probably more like nine. I have sampled chocolate from all over the world and Harbor Candy is as good as any I have tasted. But wait, there’s more.

Their sandwich pralines are simply the best chocolate candy anywhere at any price. I have seen other companies try their hand at these but no one, and I mean no one comes close to the rich, smooth flavor of these cubic delights. I can barely stand it knowing that 600 miles separates me from one of these right now.

If you like chocolate, do yourself a big favor and order a pound of the sandwich pralines. Sure, they have a lot of other candies and they are fantastic too, but the sandwich pralines are in a class by themselves. Just look at that image of the chocolate. Go to their Web site, buy, eat. If that store was closer it would be a riding destination.

Here is the direct link to sandwich pralines.

It doesn’t get any better in the chocolate world than this.
Hell, it doesn’t get any better in life!

I’ve been asked several times what I use to take the pictures you see in Scooter in the Sticks and as I thought about it the subject grew more complicated. I use a variety of cameras for different projects and reasons. I’ve been home sick with a nasty cold, not riding, not sleeping well, so I thought I would attack this topic. If I seem to wander in my thinking just blame the Sudafed Severe Cold. And before I forget, I would be interested to know how and if you work photography into your riding routine.

First off, the majority of the pictures in Scooter in the Sticks are made with a beat up old Canon S50. This excellent little camera has been near the trashcan several times but keeps coming back to life. It has been dropped, rained on, immersed, and generally abused by most standards. And it still works fine.

I keep the camera in the left side pocket of my riding jacket—now the First Gear Kilimanjaro IV. I like to be able to get to it quickly without having to unlock the seat of the scooter. I have had a few concerns about riding with it in my pocket, not so much for the camera but for me should I crash and have that thing poking at my innards.

I have a 512MB memory card in the S50 and keep the image settings at JPEG LARGE FINE. The resulting files are about 2MB in size. I shoot exclusively on the MANUAL setting. Every now and then I will switch to RAW if I think the image is something I may want to print someday but so far that hasn’t happened. The only thing that might even be considered a negative is that if it is cold the battery loses power fast. I’m sure if I kept it under the seat heated nicely by the engine the battery would always have power.

I also keep a very small collapsible tripod under the seat for the occasional self-portrait or long exposure. It’s about ten inches long and flat and takes up almost no room. And you can put a pretty big camera on the thing.

So there is the easy stuff. If I decide I am in serious mode I may pack along the Nikon D200 with an 18-55 and 80-200 zoom lens. This gear is in a soft case bungee corded to the rear rack. And I have thought more than once about what would happen to that stuff should I crash. It is worth as much as the scooter. I have put it under the seat at times but I worry about vibration and heat. The D200 is an excellent camera and the additional range of focal lengths can afford different kinds of images. I usually have a 2GB card in the camera and shoot RAW files. I use RawShooter on a PC or BibblePro on a MAC to do the RAW conversion to TIFF files that I work on in Photoshop.

I have only been shooting digital images in any consistent way since I started the blog. And with the D200 for a few months. Until then all my work was on film and in black & white. I shot Kodak Tri-X in all formats for years and processed and printed in a small darkroom I built in the basement. I am currently in crisis concerning photography and am not sure what my next step is.

For the past ten plus years I have been working on two projects — photographing my wife Kim and photographing the landscape I experience on a regular basis. I still sort of do the later though the damn Vespa keeps wanting in the pictures. I still photograph Kim but not as obsessively as I did. Both projects, Kim series and Landscape series, were a result of questions I had about myself and I have largely answered them. I have new questions that photography does not seem to address for me. And the relative ease of digital photography and printing makes me wonder if I should not shed myself of all my chemical based equipment. Hence, a crisis.

If you want to see some of the results of that work click HERE.

Right now I still have my Leica M6 which I carried everywhere and ran hundreds and hundreds of rolls of film through, and a seldom used Mamiya 7 medium format camera that replaced the 8×10 view camera that I had used for years. I used the view camera primarily for landscape work but since I couldn’t transport it with the Vespa I ditched it.

The 8×10 camera was big and heavy with the camera and tripod with a lens a bit over 40 pounds. Add film holders, film, dark cloth, meter and geez that’s a lot of weight.

Basically my interests shifted, my focus changed, and the tools I need changed. But I am clinging to things that should best be let go.

Bottom line: I am following an interest in writing, riding and photography. I don’t know where it is going and don’t really care right now. What is important is that I step forward and work. From consistent work something always emerges.

We are past the prime colors of autumn in Central Pennsylvania. Most leaves are on the ground but the landscape still radiates a warm glow before surrendering to the monochrome of winter. Saturday morning was clear with temperatures in the forties when I decided to ride through the hills and valleys solely to witness the sun illuminate what was left of this season.

The day was perfect and the roads seemed smoother than normal. Even the gravel mountain roads had been worn almost bare through another season of use making it easy to navigate on the Vespa. I stopped at the Bear Meadows Natural Area to look at the boreal bog. It was quiet and empty.

The location is a 890-acre National Natural Landmark surrounded by the ridges and upper slopes of the Alleghenies. From there I traveled over the gap and down into the Colyer Lake area.

One bright color I noticed that was more pronounced this year was the blaze of yellow-POSTED signs on trees along the road. I remember a time when you seldom saw such loud indications of private property. The world has changed I suppose either because of legal liability, selfishness, or a rise in terrible actions by those who would trespass. Whatever the reason I felt unwelcome riding along that road with the signs screaming at me.

When I got back to US Route 322, a road that traffic normally flies by at 60 MPH, I found bumper-to-bumper traffic traveling at 15 MPH. Car after car heading to the Penn State Football game at Beaver Stadium just 15 miles to the West. After two miles of the traffic I turned off onto a farm lane to cut across the valley towards home.

The corn is ready to be chopped and the agricultural landscape has its own autumn glow.

I arrived home just before a weather front covered the sky with a new grayness that brought with it rain that is forecast to last all week. This ride in the sun will help during the wet commutes to come this week.

And the rare self-portrait to provide evidence that I am actually enjoying myself, have a helmet, and do wear protective gear even though I am “just riding a scooter”.