Day 16: Monday, June 30, 2003

I was headed toward Maryland where, if time permitted, I planned to stop and say hello to my clients at Grace Vydac, W.R. Grace & Co. headquarters in Columbia, MD. Wanting to avoid the congestion and traffic of Interstate 95 through Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware, I first went northwest to Norristown, PA, where I stopped for coffee at a Starbucks and did emails. Then I followed US 30 westward to Coatesville, where I turned south and eventually connected to US Highway 1 headed toward Baltimore.

Approaching Baltimore I decided to be brave and rode a short distance on the beltway, then down I-95 south through the harbor tunnel. I remembered the traffic on this route from the 1970s when this area was part of my sales territory for Millipore Corporation. Although the road has been improved somewhat, the traffic was every bit as bad as I remembered. Emerging from that, I followed my nose a bit going south from Baltimore and finally found Columbia. The Columbia I remembered from 25 years before seemed a much simpler place. I wandered for quite a while looking for any sign of W.R. Grace & Co., without success. I thought surely with an address on "Grace Drive," named in its own honor, W.R. Grace would be fairly easy to find. It was not. Finally, I found Borders and stopped for coffee at the cafe. Logging onto the internet, I went to Mapquest.com and got directions to Grace Drive. By the time I rode over there and found Grace's headquarters, it was close to 5 PM. Not wanting to impose on my clients at quitting time, I decided to move on south.

I rode down US 29, the nearest north-south route, and found another Starbucks right near the Washington beltway where I stopped for a while, drank an iced coffee for respite from the heat, and checked emails. I remembered that my old friends Larry and Barbara Plating with whom I had renewed contact after 30 years via the internet a few months earlier lived in Stafford, VA, and I decided to try to find their place and drop in. I looked up their address on Mapquest.com, but the online maps seemed to be confused about the location of Stafford and the precise routing to their home. I got to chatting with another motorcycle rider on a sportbike who had stopped for coffee. He was not familiar with Stafford, but told me he lived just around the corner and if I followed him to his place, he would have a map there and we could look it up. I did that, and we found Stafford south of Washington near Interstate 95 and US Highway 1, although the map was lacking details about the local roads. Then, braving rush-hour traffic, I got on the Capital Beltway and headed west and south around Washington, DC, then south on I-95 into Virginia. I left the freeway and found US Highway 1 in Stafford, which turned out to be a much larger place geographically than I had anticipated -- very rural with lots of country roads along which are located contemporary residential areas. There is some sort of numbering system for the rural routes in this area which I thought must have an order to it, but one that I could not discover. My friends' address was on a street accessible from one of these numbered roads. I knew that much from Mapquest. But wandering for a while looking for that particular numbered road did not pan out. Finally I saw a police cruiser and stopped to ask the officers for directions. They seemed to know where I needed to go, but gave me the directions in a way that made me think the distance would be just four or five miles or so from where we were. Not so! I persisted, and the directions were perfect. I must have ridden 25 or 30 miles, still in Stafford, before I found Barb and Larry's place. I guess people's sensitivity to distances in this rural area of Virginia is just lower than in the crowded San Francisco Bay area.

The distance thing was also apparent when I found Barb and Larry's house. It's a beautiful large house with a long black-top drive up from the road, and it sits on a lot that is probably five acres or so of landscaped lawn. Although this is a developed area with lots of new houses, they are all spaced far apart. Clearly land in Stafford is not at the premium we are accustomed to in Calfornia where new homes of this size are built in large clusters with 20 feet between.

Barbara's sister Nancy answered my ring at the front door. Nancy just happened to be visiting. Barbara was surprised to see me, but invited me in and we talked for quite a while. Larry was out taking a class and arrived after about half an hour. We had a good visit. Barbara made us a bite to eat. Barbara was a friend of my wife Pam in college. Barb and Larry were in the wedding party when we got married in December, 1966, and Pam and I stood up for their wedding around the same time. After college, Barbara and Larry moved to the DC area where Larry took a job working for the government. It was the VietNam era, and there were differences in political philosophy that I think created a distance that was more than geographical. Consequently Pam and I lost touch with Barb and Larry sometime in the 1970s and have had no contact with them since them. On a whim, I did a name search on the internet a few months ago and turned up a message from Larry in an online discussion group. I emailed him and he emailed back, eventually providing address and contact information, which led to our reaquaintance. It was great fun seeing them after all these years, and I hope we have a chance to get together again sometime.

Barbara and Larry's son John was also visiting with his wife and family. The last time I saw John, he was probably about two years old. No room left in the house for me, so after a good visit I got directions for the best route back to Highway 1 in Stafford where there was a cluster of hotels and I found a room for the night. Riding after dark through this area of Virginia reminded me of one reason I like California. Bugs! By the time I got to the hotels, my bike was covered with bug glup and required extensive cleaning the next morning. Relatively speaking, there are no bugs in California.