Bloomsbury by Helmet Cam

10 June 2012

Today I helped Larry lead his traditional Bloomsbury Boogie route.  As usual, Jim has beat me to the blogging.  While he was writing, I was uploading today's helmet camera videos to YouTube, so I had an excuse.  Sort of.  I also went out to dinner.

I've got 20 videos up on YouTube now, 13 of them from today's ride.  I'm not sure how to direct you guys there, though, because when I search for "perpetualheawinds" nothing comes up.  Try this link instead if you want to bore yourself with all 20.  The upload apparently happened in random order, even though the files are named by the date and order in which they were taken.

Anyway, enough of that.  Here is a selection of the best of what we saw today.

This is our descent on Quakertown Road, from Quakertown into Pittstown.  Towards the end I turn my head to capture a sign on a building that reads, "Do not enter.  This is not an exit," and I show the stairs at the other end of the do not entrance.

We got onto 519 north in Everittstown.  This road is hard rollers no matter where one is or which way one is facing.  I think we were on an easy stretch here.

Larry's plan was to have me, and whoever would follow, take what he called "Cardiac Hill" into Bloomsbury.  The town is in a valley, just below Route 78, with the Musconetcong on its northwest side.  Every path into Bloomsbury is down.  I couldn't figure out how Larry was going to have me climb into town.

We would both start on Sweet Hollow in Little York, he said.  He'd take the left at Myler and we'd continue up Sweet Hollow.  At the top, he said, at 579, there would be a steep hill for us to get over.

I'd been there before.  njbikemap showed a descent.  mapmyride and ridewithgps both showed descents.  After something like 20 minutes on the phone last night, the best I could do was to get him to agree that he'd believe me when our two groups would meet again at the rest stop in Bloomsbury.

At the bottom of Sweet Hollow Road was a "road closed" sign.  Y'all know me well enough by now to know that I tend to ignore those signs, and this was no exception.  We began to wonder just how far up the closure would be.  Either we'd all have to take Myler, we'd all have to stay on Sweet Hollow, or we'd all have to turn around and take Goritz, which none of us had been on before, which would be close to 600 feet of climbing, and which would put us farther south on 579.

Lucky for us, the road was blocked only by heavy equipment, and we wiggled through.

Here's some footage of Sweet Hollow after the roadblock:

When we did split, five riders went with me and three with Larry.  We think they had the tougher climb.  Sweet Hollow is a gentle ascent; we agreed that it's work, but it's not as much work as Myler is.

At the intersection of 579, I looked to the right, in the direction we would not be turning.  I was looking at what was probably Larry's Cardiac Hill.  We were above it.  Had we been turned around at the construction site, we'd all have had to climb it.

Instead, this is what we got.  As they say in basketball, "nothing but net."  At about 4:30 into the video, you can see what is probably Easton and Phillipsburg on the other side of the river valley.

After that, it was off to the Delaware River.  I recorded our walk across the Riegelsville bridge.

Here's a bit of the PA side:

After a rest stop at the Homestead General Store in Upper Black Eddy (the crowd there rivals the Sergeantsville General Store), it was back to NJ for the ascent on Stamets, mostly in the shade.

Cows.

The road goes up, then down again, and veers off to the left.  We were turning right.

Below is a video of what happens when a rider gets hyped up about going downhill and the ride leader calls out the turn a bit too late.

Sean managed to get his attention in time.  Here he is, back in the group, on the last section of Galmeier.

You know when you wring something out, and you do that one last squeeze to get those last few drops out?  Well, at the very end I put two hills in.  Between the hills, though, was another big drop, this time into Flemington.  It wasn't as pretty, but there is a good view of the hills in the distance.

So, the helmet camera seemed to do a good job this time.  It didn't squash my head, didn't run out of power, and didn't run out of memory.  It still takes forever to upload the videos, but now I don't have to break them into pieces.

In that vein, here is the entire Lindbergh descent from May 28.

In two weeks I'll be back in Flemington to lead a ride with Michael Heffler.  His route will go to the Delaware River and point out open space preserved by the Hunterdon Land Trust there.  I'm not sure of my route yet, but I'll probably go north into uncharted (by me) territory.  Stay tuned for details.