Day 18: Wednesday, July 2, 2003

I awoke and looked out the window. It was raining steadily with no sign of letting up. At this point I made a calculation. I had hoped to ride the East Coast all the way to Key West and hang out there for a day or two before riding back to California. But -- two factors -- I was running three or four days behind the schedule I had hoped to keep, in addition to my delayed start, and also the weather reports for the southeastern U.S. were still uniformly gloomy. Rain. Rain. More rain. Some flooding. I decided this was not the year I would finally get to Key West on a motorcycle, even though I was this close and had been dreaming of that trip for a long time.

Petersburg was a pretty drab town; ditto this motel I had checked into -- not the kind of place I would enjoy staying an extra day to wait out the rain. Plus, there was no guarantee the rain would stop. Consequently, I packed up the bike, donned my rain gear, and hit the road.

Instead of Interstate 95 south then I-40 east to Wilmington, NC, where I had hoped to visit my friends David and Anne Lorenz and their family, I took Interstate 85 southwest to Durham, NC, where I picked up I-40 westbound, a road that, with only a few minor diversions, would take me all the way back to California. I figured I would have to make another trip to do the remaining portion of the East Coast in another year, coming across I-40, then heading south to Key West. Alternatively, perhaps I would dispense with the long cross-country ride the next time and look for a place to rent a bike here in North Carolina, then ride to Florida and back from here. That would be a fun trip. But then I would miss visiting people I could see while riding across country too -- a quandary I would need to resolve. There are a few places I visited back in the 1970s along the coast down here -- Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for a hospital pharmacy convention, Charleston to call on customers at the Medical College of South Carolina (now MUSC), Hilton Head Island for a Millipore Laboratory Products Division sales meeting, St. Simons Island, Georgia, where I once had a small sales meeting during a rainy week with my staff from the Bioscience Products Group at Millipore that got pretty wild in the evenings, and several places in Florida including Daytona Beach, West Palm Beach and Boca Raton, Miami Beach and South Beach Miami as well as the St. Petersburg area on the Gulf side of Florida where I had spent time on various business activities. I would enjoy seeing all those places again. Then on the way back from Key West I could go inland and see again Atlanta, GA, Athens, Augusta, where I called on the Medical College of Georgia, and Clemson, SC, a beautiful little classic college town. Definitely I need to make that trip in another year. For now, I decided to see how fast I could leave the rain and get back to California.

I rode in steady rain all day. At Greensboro, NC, rather than staying on I-40 to Winston-Salem, I went southwest on Interstate 85 toward Charlotte. My uncle, James McClellan, lives in Charlotte, and I hoped to find his place and drop in. My other uncle, Calvin, had given me Jim's address and telephone number when I saw him in Denver. Also, I had added Jim's email address to my trip-update list, so chances are he knew I was headed that way. I'm not sure how I would have coordinated a visit to Charlotte had I decided to continue down the coast to Florida, but perhaps I would have spent a day to turn inland here in the interest of seeing my uncle Jim, whom I had not seen for about 30 years. I think the last time I saw Jim was during a visit back to Michigan in the early 1970s when I was a graduate student at Harvard. Or it may even have been as long ago as my wedding in 1967. I can't remember precisely. In any event, since then Jim had divorced and remarried. I had never met his wife Marion. He had retired from his work as a chemist at BASF Corporation, formerly Wyandotte Chemical, in Detroit, and relocated here to Charlotte, NC.

The rain let up as I approached Charlotte. The roads were still a bit damp, but at least it wasn't still falling from the sky. As I came into Charlotte, I stopped for gas, and at the gas station I purchased a detailed street map of the Charlotte area. On that map, I was able to locate my uncle's street on the south side of the city. I rode there on the freeway, I-77 south, in stop-and-go rush hour traffic. While in traffic, I had a chance to ponder the city skyline on my left. The number of modern skyscrapers told me Charlotte was a prosperous white-collar city. When I finally arrived I had trouble finding Jim's townhouse. His address was an even number, but all the numbers I could see were odd. I finally stopped the bike and pulled out my cell phone. Jim answered immediately, and when I explained where I was and the problem I had encountered, he said, "You're in the wrong court. Just go back out the way you came, to the circle, then turn left." I did that, and in a minute or two I was there, and Jim and Marion came out to greet me.

Jim is my mother's oldest brother. Currently 86, I believe. He's a year younger than my father. Jim looks great. Healthy, lively: appears to be enjoying life. His wife Marion is a cutee and also lively and intelligent. Jim worked as a chemist, but also has appreciation for the arts. He plays viola; my understanding is while he lived in Detroit he used to play with the Detroit symphony. My mother's family was very musical. My mother played piano. Jim viola and also violin, I believe. My uncle Calvin played trumpet when he was young. My uncle Don, the middle brother, played Cello. Jim and Don were the most serious musicians and stayed involved with music as they got older. Unfortunately, active participation in musical activities did not get passed along to my generation. Don McClellan is my mother's missing brother. He would be in his late 70s now, or maybe early 80s. I used to run into Don on the University of Michigan campus when I started there as a student in 1962. He was a mechanical engineer doing some work on the ventilation systems for one of the buildings. In the few years after that, several tragedies developed in Don's life. He eventually dropped out from the middle-class life and communicated only sproradically with siblings. From occasional notes, he is believed to be somewhere in Detroit still, perhaps doing missionary work among the poor.

It was a good visit. We talked about everything. I spent the night. Jim and Marion have a comfortable townhome in an area called Old Georgetown.