It's raining, man...Alleluia!

Before we left, a lot of people asked us the same question: “And when it rains, what are you going to do to? Are you still going to ride?”. Our answer was inevitably the same:”Of course we will ride on rainy days. And besides, we have really good riding gear, totally waterproof from head to toes. We will be just fine.”Today, we got to test whether this last statement was indeed true. As we left Western Maryland, it was raining. Not much, just enough to refresh you a little. And then, it rained harder and to spice it up, there was very dense fog on the mountains: you could hardly see anything. We had to ride with our hazard lights on. But so far so good, we were dry and warm.
As we approached Pittsburgh, the sky suddenly became totally black and lightening came down the sky. Now, we haven't signed up for that so we decided to stop for dinner, to let the storm pass. As we were enjoying our food, the sky became darker and darker and someone said “This is a tornado forming. I have seen it before!” We had not signed up for that either so after and attempt to leave, we gave up and decided to seek shelter in a Walgreen's, where Caroline caught up on the latest people gossips (yes, Brad Pitt had a secret hookup with Jennifer! How could Angie not know...).

And the verdict is:
We ended up riding in pretty strong rain and storm for about an hour and a half before making it late at night to Akron, OH where we stayed with Chad's cousins, Dave and Jan. A pretty scary ride, especially when Chad was passed by a truck, which splashed and soaked him in water. As far as the gear goes, the jacket and bags were impressive: not a single drop of water came through. However, the pants gave up on us after 40 minutes of strong rain and so did the over gloves. Thank God, it was not cold! The good news about today is that we arrived safely at destination, even if a couple of hours later than we expected, and we got to test our gear and motorcycle in extremely bad weather conditions. The fact that we made it safely and without too much suffering made our day.

Today, we just relaxed before hitting the road and enjoyed a nice lunch with Dave and his daughter Julie at a cool motorcycle hang out, Quaker Steak and Lube.