Lake Nockamixon, Irene Remnants, Road Arrows, So Long to Roy's, and other Miscellaneous Snapshots

The only advantage to the NJ Turnpike widening project

6 October 2011

Yeesh! I have pictures that are more than a month old that have been sitting here in an unpublished post. Time to clear this crap out.   Just about every photograph is overexposed, but if I take the time to fix them they'll never see the light of day.

*****

1) Lake Nockamixon

The week after Irene, Tom took me, Cheryl, and Jeff (Plain Jim has named him the Derailleur Nailer) on a ride around Lake Nockamixon in Pennsylvania.

We started in Peace Valley Park.

As we left the park, Tom managed to ride through a spider web.  For at least a mile, he trailed a tiny white blob of something that bobbed along about two feet above the ground and three feet behind his wheel.  At the next intersection I tried to pick up the blob; it disintegrated in my fingers.

Later we passed a backyard burn, the likes of which I haven't seen since I was a kid, when nobody cared about air pollution.

Lake Nockamixon reminds me of Spruce Run Reservoir.

We searched for a snack bar and found one by the public pool.  We were two Cannondale Synapses, one Cannondale Six, and a Serotta.

It's not a Tom Hammell ride if we don't have to cross at least one bridge that is closed.  This one went over Haycock Creek.

Tom is researching rides for his next book.  He'd scouted the area.  We were looking for a real rest stop, something with caffeine (for Cheryl, I swear).  "There's a place called 'Oh Wow Cow' near here," Tom said.  With a name like that...

Good coffee, and they even let me use their bathroom.  I have a knack for getting in where others fail.  I must look pretty desperate.  Or harmless.

A ride that's still in draft mode can have its problems.  This one put us on a treacherous gravel road that went on far too long.  At the end I looked at the road name.  This explains everything:

We weren't too far from the end of the ride when we came upon the dam on Tohickon Creek that made Lake Nockamixon possible.  I looked it up later.  It was a WPA project.

Soon after we found a funky church:

PA has its share of goofy road names:

Tom took us through Perkasie, PA.  I'd noticed that we'd been on Market Street for quite some time.  We turned off on Fifth.  The next cross street was Chestnut.

Wait a second.

"Hey, Tom.  I bet the next one will be Walnut."

Sure enough.  You can take the people out of Philly...

We turned, but I could see Spruce Street in the distance.

*****

2) Irene Remnants

Cheryl led a ride a week later.  So many roads near Route 29 along the Delaware River were still closed that we wound up riding to the Wawa on Route 202 north of Flemington instead.

I went to the edge of the parking lot, to a small tree, where I reached up and hung from a branch to stretch my back.  That's when I noticed the farm stand across the highway.

On the way home, at the top of the Sourland Mountain, power lines were still down.  This is Lindbergh Road near Long Hill Road.  I could have reached over and touched these wires, but my hair is frizzy enough already.

*****

3)  Road Arrows

Anyone who cycles in central NJ, especially in the flats around Burlington County, has seen scores of arrows painted on the roads.

There's the PE arrow, ours, for the Princeton Free Wheelers annual event.  There's the Rotary Club's R, the Project Freedom wheelchair, the Pumpkin Patch Pedal pumpkin.  In the hills, the West Jersey Wheelmen have left their mark, and the Tour de Cure has its share there too.

Even after 11 years of riding these roads, some arrows remain a mystery.  Who paints those mysterious A arrows in the flatlands?  What about those right angle arrows?  Once in a while there's a circle with an arrow on it.

Now we can add our Ride for McBride J arrows, both backwards and forwards.

The intersection of Sawmill and Extonville Roads at the southern edge of Hamilton Township has the highest arrow density around.  Here's Plain Jim waiting patiently for me to take a picture of the intersection:

Now, there are arrows and there are arrows.

Allow me to explain. This year's Princeton Event had a rest stop in Millstone Township, Ocean County. Shortly before the Event, volunteers dutifully painted century and metric arrows on Schoolhouse Road. The day of the Event, a Schoolhouse Road resident -- we'll call him a meathead, because that's what Chris Cook called him -- took it upon himself to cover the arrows with black paint. This happens every so often. Chris, as he always does, served as the Event's SAG wagon. When it came to the organizers' attention that these arrows had been blacked out, Chris was dispatched with two cans of paint. He did not, however, have a PE arrow stencil. Not a problem. As we rounded the corner on Millstone that day, 25 miles into our century, we came upon him as he set about to fix the problem.

"I figured that if whoever blacked out those arrows was going to do it again," he later told me, "he'd have a hell of a lot of work to do. By then the Event would be over." Because I didn't get pictures at the time, Chris and I rode over two weeks ago so that I could capture his artwork. Not that I needed to. Those arrows will be on Schoolhouse Road until the end of time.

*****

4) Other Miscellaneous Snapshots

Another Cheryl-led ride took us up the Gulick Road hill near 179.  (There are two Gulicks.  The other is outside of Oldwick.)  I'd never been up it before.

A lone tree asked me to get all artsy and shit.  If I had the patience for messing with my photographs, these would be more art and less shit:

This is the intersection of Schoolhouse and Millstone Roads, facing away from Chris' arrows.

On our way home from the art exhibit, we had to wind our way around roads that were closed because of the NJ Turnpike widening project. The plan is to broaden the highway from two lanes to six in each direction from Exit 6 to 8A. It's a sea of orange mud out there. Every overpass has to be widened as well. Some are being done off to the side. Others are completely closed. Nothing has taught me my way around the flatlands better than having to plan around road closures. Gone are the days when we could just more or less point our bikes in the direction we wanted to go; not that I could ever even do that well. Back when the project was a mere twinkle in the NJTP Authority's eye, I read the Environmental Impact Statement, all thousand or so pages of it. Never did they justify the twelve lanes. Like a sports car going from zero to sixty, the plan went from four to twelve with barely a passing paragraph on what might happen if they stopped at, say, eight lanes, or ten. We enviros knew then that we weren't going to stop the project, but we put up a good fight anyway. So, here Chris and I were, stopped at the one good thing I've found in this whole mess: a port-a-potty. And now, some snapshots of the Garden State as Turnpike drivers see it:

*****

5) So Long to Roy's

I don't know what it is with the Cranbury flatlander crowd, but they all seem to love the Clarksburg Deli.  Cheryl has a different name for it:  "Le Chateau." Chris embellished it to "Le Chateau de Ptomaine."

A couple of miles away, on Millstone Road, not too far from Chris' artwork, is Roy's Deli.  Unlike Clarksburg, this place has clean bathrooms, potable water, and snacks that haven't passed their expiration dates.  Outside are two picnic tables.  Behind the store is a farm field.

Back in the day (I can say that now), Biker Bob used to stop here.  I still remember getting a flat, or dropping my chain, on my 1983 Raleigh Grand Prix,as we pulled into Roy's during my first summer as a Free Wheeler.  I didn't know how to fix anything, so Bob volunteered.  He reached for the bike and, as he moved it, declared, "This thing weighs a TON!"  Well, yeah, Bluestreak was a hefty gal, but she was the first bike I'd paid for with my own money.  $250 brand new, and worth every penny.

Anyway, I digress.

As of September 30, and 15 years of serving the community, Roy's was to be no more.  "We lost our lease," the woman behind the counter told me.  "I have two children.  I don't know what I'm going to do."

A week later I subbed for Larry and led a dozen Free Wheelers to Roy's for our Fall Picnic all-paces ride.

Last Sunday, October 2, we passed by on the Pumpkin Patch Pedal.  It was still early in the morning.  There was one truck in the driveway.  The neon sign in the window said, "open."