Day 10 - 3/14/14 Emporia, VA to Home

Temp is 23 at just past 8 AM departure. Suns out. Heres a pic of the bikes prior to leaving the hotel.

As we start our bikes to leave the hotel I feel simething on my left floorboard. My brand new heel shifter fell off again! I throw it in the tourpak and Harley will deal with it. I think it needs the shaft into the tranny replaced. Thats what extended warantees are for! We gas up and head up 95. For some reason my XM radio says I need to update radio. Of course I have the traffic & weather options that don't work either. Couldn't figure out what was happening. About 10 miles up Mark says to pull over as he thinks he forgot to plug in his pants & socks. Sure enough he plugs them in and warth returns. We stop for gas just prior to Washington and have coffee. Temps are about 30 but the sun is gone. We get north of Washington on 395 and we hit a backup due to an accident. We lose about 1\2 hr in stop-n-go traffic. We stop for lunch a little after 2 on the Jersey pike about 120 miles from the GW bridge. We leave aboyt 2:40 knowing we're probably dead into Friday rush hour! We need to chose GW or Tappan Zee and my XM is dead so we use 880am and hear the GW, Cross Bronx & 95 into CT are ugly so we go Tappan Zee. My gps was set GW and when it recalculated it was 66 miles longer! I later found out it was taking me up 87 instead of 287 so it should of been about 38 miles longer. Amazing traffic is heavy but moving well. We get over the Tappan Zee and go for the Merritt as the radio says 95 North up to exit 14 is bad. About 5 miles into CT the Merritt is backed up. We spent the next hour maybe going 10 miles and pull into a rest/gas area. We gas up and decide to have a coffee and hang out as traffic is going no where fast. Mark needs about 5 more miles to get to route 8 exit. We check things out on our phone and see that Tom & I can take an exit a couple hundred yards up the has a side road that will take us across to 95 in Stratford. A little after 7 the traffic is finally starting to move so we say our good byes and take off. Mark up the Merritt, Tom & I cut to 95. 95 traffic was heavy but moving along. Tom broke off at exit 73 and I continued on and got home at 8:45! It was a long 613 mile day. The overall trip was 3597 miles. All the bikes ran fairly well with no major issues.