There is nothing like a little praise to keep me writing. **************

It was the last day, the last hour, of my motorcycle trip. I had left I-80 and was driving on a series of secondary roads that would take me across the big marsh near Vallejo, past the international speedway at Sears Point and then along the Petaluma River, home. It had been three and a half weeks since I had left Petaluma for a meandering cross-country tour of more than 8,000 miles. It was a sunny day, a welcome change since the last six thousand miles had been an unbroken string of rain and overcast days pucuated by windstorms, thunderstorms, and even a snowstorm. It was a nice enough day that I was even wearing the sunglasses I'd bought in a truck stop in Ohio. There hadn't been enough sun to bother digging them out of my pack since I'd bought them. All in all, it was a fine day for traveling on a motorcycle. I was lost in such thoughts as well as thinking of the comforts of home that were now less than forty miles away.

"Are you going to the Redwood Run?"

I was so lost in my own reverie that I hadn't noticed the two big brand new Harleys pull up next to me at the stop light. "You going to the Redwood Run?", one of them asked again. He asked with a kind of pride because he knew that he and his friends were heading for what is an annual motorcycle gathering about a hundred and fifty miles north of San Francisco. Thousands of bikes from Northern and Central California come together here for a weekend. He and his friend on a matching Harleys, each with a passenger wearing matching leathers, had strapped their tents and sleeping bags to the racks on their bikes. Clearly they were looking forward to a good time. Their bikes were new and they looked as though they only had a few thousand miles on them.

"No, I'm on my way to Petaluma?"

"Why Petaluma?"

Our conversation continued in fits and starts as we moved one-by-one through the Vallejo traffic lights.

I explained that I lived in Petaluma and had been traveling.

"How long you been on the road?"

"Three and a half weeks."

"Whew", one of the girls said, "Where've you been?"

I was proud of my accomplishment and now here were some motorcyclists asking me about my trip. They would appreciate what a really long trip meant. In a way it would be a fitting end for my trip. I told them, "8,000 miles - Tennessee, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire Vermont, Massachusetts". That list seemed long enough and so I stopped. I was happy to be sharing this abbreviated version of my last twenty-five days with some fellow bikers but their reaction was a lot different than I had expected.

The two men driving the bikes looked as though someone had suddenly deflated them. They each mumbled something and, as soon as the light changed, they left me, traveling fifteen or twenty miles an hour faster than the fifty-five mile an hour speed limit. By the time I reached Mare Island, they were already out of sight.

For a little while, I felt badly. The two couples were starting out on a three hour trip to the Redwood Run and were feeling the excitement of hitting The Road. Then they came across me and my trip so overshadowed theirs that they felt they had to get away from me as soon as possible to recapture their own excitement.

I was sorry I hadn't been a little more sensitive to their feelings but soon that was forgotten as I drove into Petlauma, turned into my street, waved to some neighbors and pulled into the garage. Bess, my Rottweiler threw herself through the dog door when she heard the bikes's quiet exhaust and Elfi, my Bavarian wife, made it across the driveway and into the garage before I could shut off the BMW. My trip was over, I was home.

Sourdough