Pennsylvania's hills still scare me. I know it's stupid; I've been in the hills by the river dozens of times now. I never really know where I am, though, much less where I'm going, so I tend to hang back and spin in a low gear.
Today was one more step towards not thinking like that anymore. I even recognized a few roads and had a sense of where we were once or twice.
After the rest stop we crossed over to the Jersey side. Knowing where I was, and having a good dose of Homestead's Ringing Rocks Roast in me, did a lot to calm the nerves and speed me up.
We started off with seven people: Tom and Thom, Michael, Ron, Jim, Blake (*), and me.
It was a foggy morning, but by the time we got started it seemed to have dissipated. It was hard to tell. Most of the time that we were in Pennsylvania we were under trees. I'd left my camera at home, having forgotten to charge the battery. Maybe I would have stopped for more pictures had I brought it with me. There were a few run-down barns that would have made for good shots, and the pink and white wildflowers against the green understory in nearly every forest we passed might have come out well in the uniform light.
I took a few pictures with my cell phone at the Homestead General Store.
On the bridge over the Delaware River between
As we snaked out of the valley on the New Jersey side, the fog got thicker. Visibility was fine, as long as we stopped every now and then to clean off our glasses. My helmet was dripping. It was one of those icky-sticky days.
Up on the ridge was where two of our number peeled off to go directly home (one was fighting a virus). That means they missed going downhill on Federal Twist.
My speed record for that road is 50 mph. I did that the first time I descended, not knowing any better, on Kermit. Since then I've made judicious use of the brakes, keeping my speed in the low- to mid-forties. There's one Free Wheeler who hit 56 on this road. Today I was more of a wimp than usual. First, I've never been down this road on Miss Piggy and I don't know how she handles at such high speed; second, the mist made me cautious; third, I wasn't trying to beat my all-time high speed. Not so for the rest of the group. Although some of them hit the brakes too, Tom got 45.1 mph. Blake made it to 44.6. Ron and Jim were close behind. Me, I topped out at 42.5.
Back at Bull's Island, we saw our first shadows of the day.
(* A few miles from the end, Jim confessed that he couldn't remember Blake's name. When I told him, he said, "I knew it began with a B," and rattled off a few. We settled on Beauregard. Blake said, "Close enough.")
1 comment:
Sounded like a wonderful ride. So you hit the following three historic covered bridges: Loux, Frankenfield, and Erwinna. The picture you took of the river was on the bridge between Upper Black Eddy and Milford. Uhlerstown is across the creek from Frenchtown. It's where another historic covered bridge is. :)
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