The ride leader grew up near New Hope and remembers it as a place where, as a high schooler, she and her pals would skip school and go hang out. In the ensuing 30 years, however, it has become a sort of Yuppie getaway ... theme restaurants one after another line the main street, lots of big-ticket antique-like stuff, and junk ... er, collectible ...peddlers. Bottom line, New Hope is what a seaside boardwalk or carny midway might look like if a 30-something middle-manager at a credit card bank had designed it.
Which wouldn't have been all that disappointing if the ride up hadn't been so challenging. It was a hot, humid day and riding a motorcycle through 80 miles of mall traffic is about as much fun as sitting on the stove for an hour. The roads are a brutal combination of cracked pavement and half-finished construction. Above West Chester, for instance, we were reduced to riding on a foot-wide strip of pavement that dropped three inches onto loose gravel. You notice these things on a motorcycle.
The thunderstorm on the way back was interesting only because the ride leader apparently did not notice the three inches of rain that fell in 20 minutes.
The final Mel Brooksian insult came the next day, however, when I noticed I had cracked Nadine's front wheel, probably on that filling-rattling pothole I caught on the way into Valley Forge. Poor Nadine. She has been in the shop since last week. Poor me. It's going to cost a ton of money to get her out, which I hope happens soon because I have a bunch of rides coming up.
New Hope is just another spot on the map. Getting there aboard a motorcycle is what makes it memorable.