Featured Image is of my backup iPhone’s back case — including custom logo for Iron Monkey Butt World Tour.
I generally think about my sleeping comfort requirements as goldilocks — not too cold and not too hot — say 72 degrees is fine. Well this morning I woke up in my hotel room in Lexington, Kentucky — and the temperature is a balmy 85 degrees. Thats crazy, why on earth is the room set to 85 degrees? Ok, so let’s go back to the day prior to find out.
The morning started with the typical view of my weather app to check my route from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Lexington, Kentucky – no big deal. Seemed that it was a typical day, 35% chance of rain, which means, likely not. Ok, so off I go. It was grey outside, but nothing to tell me what I was in for, just in a few minutes. I had a 4 1/2 hour ride between cities, again normal. I had rode just about an hour and all of course the worst was going to happen — rain started to drizzle along I-75 at 80 mph speeds on two wheels.
By way of background, there is a massive disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico hitting and flooding the entire Mississippi River because it’s been just dumping on Louisiana, Georgia, Florida and apparently, Tennessee. I had no idea or noticed that this was going to affect my ride. The rain got worse to the point that it was bombing like pellets on the road and my body. It was so bad that I put my blinkers on, slowed down to maybe 20 mph and I was getting concerned.
To make things double trouble, along the rainy explosion, the wind started picking up to the point where my bike was being moved around my lane by that wind, worse, my iPhone held by a purpose made claw on my motorcycle fell off my bike while I was riding due to the high winds and rain. I saw it drop and I could not stop or turn around — the rain was dumping and traffic was tight — bye, bye my favorite iPhone in my favorite iPhone Iron Monkey Butt logo’ed case… I did not panic, but I was seriously upset. Some dude working for the state of Tennessee Department of Transport just inherited a gift. Now what?
So I pulled over a side road off of the highway to get some relief of traffic since I thought I was going to drop my bike. The lightning came right overhead and I was getting scared — I moved my bike probably 4 times along a city gravel parking lot with a steel shed used to store sand for winter — do I hide next to the trees? Do I hide in the side of the road or next to the shed? The boom and light show was all around me. I waited — this is the worst scenario for a biker.
Net of it, I had no phone, and that holds my entire knowledge base. So strange to think that your phone is holding half your own personal lifes’ data. I did not know where I had booked my hotel room for the night on hand, nor my email or anything. I waited in the hard rain totally exposed for an hour and finally the clouds started breaking — enough to get going and just move on in the lighter rain.
I pulled into a gas station cut-off, dumped my bags and found my backup iPhone which I keep for such an emergency. I booted it up and found my hotel. The next 2 hours got better and worse — rain started and stopped along the highway route. Landing at the Fairfield Inn just outside of Lexington, I got to my room, took a shower, changed and ran over to the local Apple store to put in a claim for my loss.
Next and last step, was to dry my soaking pants, gloves and jacket. To do so, I used the ac/heater in my room — I cranked the temperature to 85 degrees and blew the fan at high all night so I could at least make the clothing dry enough to put on the next morning.
I guess the good news is that I really don’t need to do laundry for my pants or jacket — they just went through the washer. Anyway, its all good — this morning the pants and jacket were dry enough — the room was super humid from all the wet clothing — stinking hot — but it worked. Moving on today to my next stop 4 or 5 hours down the road — and its a sunny, hot and beautiful day.
BTW: No pictures on this post — Why? It’s been such a hard day that I did not have a chance to get any shots.