Friday morning, I woke early and showered. I called the number of the car service that I got from the motel desk again. Yesterday they had disappointed me with a 45 minute wait time, perhaps this time would be better. I needed to be at the airport at 6:30, but I was the next exit down the interstate from the airport, so it shouldn't take long to get there. I called and was told that a car could come get me around 8:00. Fail. Fail fail fail and his cousin fail. I went back to the desk and said that the car company was useless and explained that I needed to be at the airport in 30 minutes. The guy at the desk told me not to worry and called a different company that he knew. The car was there in 4 minutes. Sure, the driver didn't really talk much and just played right wing hate talk radio, but I wasn't in his car for very long.
I got to the airport, got on my plane and flew to Boston. As I was walking through the baggage claim towards the exit, I saw, for the first time in 2 months, Emily. Yay! I like to pretend I have a girlfriend, I talk about her quite a bit, but this was hard evidence that she existed as more than just a voice over the phone. She was also picking up another wedding guest that was coming in on a flight about 10 minutes behind mine.
Of the couple getting married, her family is mostly in Massachusetts, he is Bahamian. There were a couple times when I wondered why I was flying to Boston and not Nassau for this wedding, but I wasn't asked to plan it. When I am asked to help plan weddings, I always suggest the location in the Caribbean over the one in New England, but that's just a personal bias.
It was a lovely ceremony, held outside in a garden, and the food was even reasonably good for wedding reception food. I got to spend much of the weekend talking about cycling, so that was good. But there was the voice in the back of my head that said that if I hadn't stopped for three days for the wedding, I could be back in Brooklyn by Wednesday.
On Sunday, Emily had to get back to New York and I had to get back to Canton. Sadly, the order of this happening wasn't how I would have preferred it, so I ended up at the airport a good 4 hours before the flight. I sat at a bar where I could plug in my laptop and watched the red sox game as I worked on the journal some more. There may have been a hot dog covered in mac and cheese involved.
When I got back into Canton, it was just about sunset on July 4th. I could see fireworks from at least four different displays. I went to the cars queued up outside and tried to get one to take me to the storage space around the backside of the airport so I could retrieve Penny and ride back to the motel. I was informed that it was a $20 minimum to leave the airport. I argued that they would drop me off and be back before the luggage from the rest of my flight got off the plane. They didn't move on the $20, and I'm not willing to pay a car $20 to take me about two and a half miles, so I walked it.
On the walk, I could see over a dozen different sets of fireworks going off on various horizons. One thing I also noticed, fireworks freak out the fireflies. They were flying higher and blinking more rapidly than any other group of fireflies I had seen in the last few weeks. I made it back to Penny and was glad to see her. I popped on the pannier I was using as my carry on, and switched on my lights. Reunited at last. I know it had only been three days, but getting back to my bike, I knew that the only real obstacle now between me and getting home was the state of Pennsylvania. Sure, it's the most difficult state to traverse east of the Mississippi between the length and the mountains, but I was going to be home soon.
On the short ride back to the motel, a passenger in an SUV rolled down the window and yelled out at me 'Get a car!'. I called back 'Why?', but they took off without giving me an answer. Really, I'd like to have a discussion about this, because I have a pretty strong view. But they weren't looking for a discussion, they were just some jerks in an SUV.
Days 64-66, Canton, OH - (Boston, MA) - Canton OH
3.7 miles in 17:23 for a total of 3869.3 in 292:17:38 and a high speed of 27.1
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