Sunrise over Thompson County Park, 2 October 2011
29 October 2011
It's 11:43 a.m., I'm drinking coffee, it's snowing, the heater we had installed yesterday stopped working in the wee hours of the morning, we're waiting for the repairman, and I still haven't gotten to the gym. Perfect excuse for blogging.
12:10, the heater's been fixed, and snow is sticking to the street. Looks like a home workout sometime today.
But first:
Joe, Plain Jim, and I rode together on this year's Pumpkin Patch Pedal century. It was cold enough that, unlike previous years, I kept my arm warmers and leggings on.
I generally don't take pictures during centuries. We don't want to stop between food breaks.
Mist rose over the lake before we headed out.
Plain Jim, the latest and greatest addition to the Hill Slugs posse, is a lot of fun to ride with. Stronger than we are, he never grows impatient. Instead, I hear "On your left!" as he hurtles himself up each hill, always waiting for the rest of us at the top. He also has a bell on his handlebars, which is mighty useful on big rides like this one.
I could use something like this on my commuter bike as I ride across campus. For the road, I'd need an air horn (more on bicycle commuting in a later post.)
Somewhere between the first rest stop (Plumsted, again, three organized rides this year) and the second (the Burger King somewhere in the Pines), the best thing happened: Matt and Heike blew past us. I'm so happy to see him riding again (more on that later, too).
The third rest stop, at Clayton Park, is always the most done-up. I'm fond of anything with googly-eyes, even if they're just Styrofoam balls with pipe-cleaner legs.
I had some post-production fun with these guys:
Right. Anyway, Matt let me take a picture of him (I've only managed this once before):
When I'm on a century, I always hit a wall around 70 miles. Over the years I've learned how to get past it, make it shorter, and distract myself ("Pedal, pedal, pedal," as Matt says; eat something at 65 miles, hungry or not; and look at the scenery.) This year it was the sky that did the distracting. All day the clouds hung gray and heavy just in the distance. It never did rain, but it did keep us motivated.
It's much better in person, with polarized sunglasses.
As for the ride itself, it was the easiest I've had it on the PPP in years. Last year, Mike B. and I ended up battling a fierce headwind on our own. Two years ago, I was jetlagged and nauseated for the second 40 miles. This year there wasn't much wind. Our pace was slower than it has been, but we've been slow all year. Our usual engines haven't been riding much, and I think Big Joe had a lot to do with getting a good group together. My plan for early spring is to recruit and return our crew. Jim, Mighty Mike, Steve K. and Steve B., I'm looking at you.
Now, one of the best things about the Pumpkin Patch Pedal is the long-sleeve t-shirt we get for doing the ride. My favorite designs have been the thin-line drawings of cyclists and ghouls. Others have featured wheels and pumpkins in clever combinations.
This year's, however, was, well, you decide. Jim's reaction is one of the milder ones. I've taken great joy in showing innocent people a photograph of the shirt and watching their mouths form a perfect o.
Put it this way: In the morning, as I was getting my bike ready for the ride, a woman near me in the parking lot said, "It looks like a man giving birth to a pumpkin!"
I took a look and told her, "Let's hope that's all he's doing."
Kudos to Plain Jim for noticing that the bottom spokes are missing. Here's his reaction to the design; you can read his PPP blog entry here:
For a while I couldn't decide if the shirt was the best thing or the worst thing about this year's ride. It took a few days, but I figured out that the shirt is getting more mileage than anything else.
A week later I led a hilly metric from Hillsborough to Clinton and Oldwick. I hadn't been up there all year, which is just wrong.
We're not having a good fall (did I mention it's snowing?). The leaves have gone from green to off without much in between. Still, the view from Fox Hill Road north of Oldwick did not disappoint.
My camera still overexposes. I've been too lazy to fix the problem and all of the pictures.
Horse butt across the street from the valley view:
Every year since I started riding, I've been asked, "Are you doing Covered Bridges?" Every year I've said, with no regret, "Nope. I'll be in Boston." Every year I go up there to visit my college roommate and go to an annual bead show with her. This year, though, the Covered Bridges ride date was moved to a week earlier. I had no excuse.
It's the Central Bucks bicycle club that hosts this ride. PA's hills are relentless. I've always been afraid. Now that I have Miss Piggy and a handful of years with only minimal hill fear, I figured I could handle it.
The ride starts in a park across the river from Frenchtown, a 45-minute drive when there's no traffic. I was guided into the park, into a thick fog, onto a field. I couldn't see more than a few yards in any direction, let alone anyone I knew. I scrambled in the morning chill to get my gear together and started walking in the direction that everyone else was walking. There seemed to be hundreds and hundreds of people. The ride hadn't even started yet and I was already in a bad mood.
A row of trees faded into view. I tried to memorize the pattern so that I'd be able to find my way back to the car. "I'm not doing this again," I thought.
Fog and trees:
It was just by dumb luck that I found Joe and Jim. Joe had with him a neighbor, Dave, who proved to be quite entertaining, and quite the trooper, having just spent six months recovering from a serious lung infection.
Early in the ride we found ourselves on a descent overlooking a ridge. Someone flew past me calling out, "Yeeeee-HAAAAAAAAAA!" On our way up the next hill, I found him and said, "That was brilliant. I'm going to put it in my blog." He laughed.
At the first rest stop he said, "You're not going to blog about me sucking wind on that next hill, are you?" I said something like, "I didn't see that."
Jack H. found us then. "I'll ride with you," he said. If by "with you" he meant for five minutes before disappearing off the front, then yeah, he rode "with" us. We didn't see him again.
Soon after, we came to a covered bridge with wooden slats laid in the same direction as the road. This is bad news for cyclists: Unless we can line ourselves up with a slat, in the sudden darkness of a covered bridge, we can easily find that one of our wheels has lodged between slats, throwing us over and our bike into the repair shop. At the entrance to this bridge, though, the bike club had the presence of mind to station two sentries who commanded us to dismount. Off to one side was Yee-Ha, with a serious dent in his rear rim. I heard him say into his phone, "I'm finished."
My memory becomes muddled after that. Climb, descend, climb, descend. We had a big one that stands out, though. It was called High Point Road. As we re-grouped at the top, Jim pointed behind me and I turned around.
What struck me was the layer of brown haze over what looked like a city. Where the hell were we, and what were we looking at?
More hills, more valleys, streams, bridges, maybe we're near Perkasie?, another rest stop. Everything was starting to look the same.
When we came upon this strange little place, it seemed perfectly believable that none of us was really awake anyway. "This reminds me of the book, 'The Secret Garden,' for some reason," I said. Someone else agreed. There must have been a picture on the front cover.
Perhaps this is a better interpretation of how I was seeing things at that point:
It wasn't because I ate this funky mushroom in my front yard. I didn't. Honest.
OK, that wraps up another episode of blogging. The snow has changed to rain and I still have not worked out. But now there's a cat on my lap. I'm stuck here.
By the way, I think we were looking at the outskirts of Bethlehem, PA.
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