Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Sergeantsville General Store: The End of an Era

the penultimate piece of cherry nut squash bread

27 May 2014

Mid-week, Blake wrote to ask me if anything was going on hill-wise over the weekend.  There was the Memorial Day All-Paces ride to avoid, and a pilgrimage to Sergeantsville needed to happen before month's end, so it was settled.

To every FreeWheeler this side of Route 1, and to a fair number of flatlanders too, Sergeantsville is synonymous with hills and dumplings.  Me, I prefer the homemade cherry nut squash bread and the occasional chocolate muffin.

Now that Sun and his wife have sold the place, there has been much mourning and musing.  What will replace the dumplings?  Will the place be any good?

We're losing rest stops right and left, it seems.  If they don't burn down (Peacock's), they close (Roy's, Perricone's) or turn into useless pizza joints (Stanton, Neshanic).  

Nobody wanted to ride with me from home, but Blake, Ron, and John K were in the parking lot at the usual Pennington starting point.  Ron said, "A marshall came through here.  He says that this is going to be the staging area for the parade.  We might have trouble getting out if we get back here before one o'clock." We were starting late, 9:30; I figured we'd be able to miss that.

When it comes to biking, I play the long game.  I never go all-out at any point on a ride.  I focus on having enough energy not just for the day's ride, but for the next one, and for the commutes during the week, and for whatever long-distance deal I make with myself for the following weekend.  I've overtrained more than once.  I'm not keen on repeating the experience.

Having taken Sunday off (I did yard work, housework, and lab work and then went to NYC with Jack to see Taj Mahal perform), my legs were fresher than John's (he'd burned it up with Ken) and Ron's (first Philly, then the Etra speed demons).  I was feeling pretty good.

Ron and I got talking about the speed of the Sunday Etra rides.  He and Dave H have both said that I can handle it, but Ron finally put it in a way that made me think that I probably can:  "It's just talk," he said.  "It's like your rides.  You get a reputation and it's not true."  

"I've been hearing he's averaging over 18," I said.  Ron said it's not true.  "Seventeen, maybe.  And it's only 40 miles."  Yeah, I can probably do that.

Anyway, Sergeantsville.

As I said, I was feeling good, so I threw in a few extra miles on the way over. We went down to the covered bridge.  Blake watched the rest of us go under it, chiding us because it's the only covered bridge on this side of the river. The Pennsylvania side is lousy with 'em.

I don't usually ride these roads in warm weather.  Sergeantsville and Lambertville are winter destinations.  Things look different when the trees have leaves.

Sergeantsville-Rosemont Road:





The Sergeantsville General Store is packed with cyclists.  What's a pack of cyclists called, anyway, if they're sitting around at a rest stop?  A stink.  A stink of cyclists.  There was a whole stink of cyclists sitting around the general store.

"Sun!"

"Heyyyy!  Long time, no see!"  He always says that.

"When's your last day?"

"Tomorrow."

"Yikes!"

"Tomorrow is our last day, then closed for one day," he explained. And on Wednesday the new owners are going to reopen the store.  They already own a store in Stockton, he explained, so this would be easy.

"I've been here nineteen years," Sun said.

"Ninteen years and open every day, no vacation" I added.

"Yep."

I took one of the last two pieces of squash bread, to take home, and a chocolate muffin.  And, of course, a small cup of watery coffee (they never did get that part right).

We sat outside.  John took some panoramic pictures.


"We're losing rest stops and people," Blake mused.  "When's Cheryl moving?"  We got to talking about the few general stores left around here.  When I told him that I'd never stopped for any decent amount of time at the Carversville General Store, he said, "Sounds like it's time to do a ride out of Yardley."  

I went back inside to use the bathroom.  Sun emerged from behind the counter.  "Give me a hug!"

He must be stinking as bad as we do from hugging so many sweaty cyclists.

Sun's wife -- I never did learn her name -- appeared out of nowhere and asked for a hug too.

"Lemme get your picture," I said.


"C'mon outside so I can get your picture in front of the store."




He did come out, eventually.  Here he is, summoning Blake and John to join him:


John, Sun, and Blake:


We said our goodbyes and pushed off as the inevitable next wave of cyclists pulled in.

Deciding against one of my usual routes home, we went up to Back Brook and took Runyon Mill to the top of the Sourland Mountain.  In true Hill Slug style, we tested the hard-pack dirt section of Stony Brook Road.  There are fewer potholes there than there are on some of our regular roads.  The extra miles got us back to Pennington at 1:15.  The streets were empty, and so was the parking lot.

There were five leftover chocolate bunnies in my bag.  I gave them out and headed home.

I had just enough time for lunch and a shower before heading off to the lab. Dale and Sean gave Jack a ride to Terry C's while I did what I had to do with an ataxic mouse.  When I got to the lab, everyone else was there too.  So much for the holiday.  "Why are we all here?" Andrea asked.  "Because we're sick fucks," I said, turning back to my now-dead mouse and taking out its brain.

I got to the cookout only 45 minutes late, and yes, I did wash my hands first.

We shared the cherry nut squash bread, five FreeWheelers and two lookers-on. Sergeantsville is dead.  Long live Sergeantsville.

Tom's Philadelphia Ride

Ben Franklin Bridge from Delaware Avenue

27 May 2014

Yeah, I found it on a map, but I had no idea where the Pine Road entrance to Pennypack Park was in relation to anything else.  All I needed were the directions to the start of the ride.  The rest I didn't bother to investigate.  We were going to Philly, somehow, and that's all I knew.

As it was, I almost drove right past the entrance.  If there hadn't been a dozen or so cars parked on the road, I wouldn't have needed to slow down enough to see that Tom's was one of them, tucked into a gravel drive leading to a gravel parking lot.

Tom warned us that most of the roads would be busy.  "Not as bad as Princeton Pike at rush hour," I offered.  "Worse," he said, but he was hoping that the holiday weekend would be keeping people off the streets.

Mid-week I'd asked Tom what the terrain was going to be, because I was trying to figure out which bike to bring.  He said he was taking his Feather and that, aside from the Manayunk Wall, which would be like the hill at Twin Lights, there wouldn't be much climbing.

So I took Kermit.

Then Tom said, "There are actually three thousand feet of climbing on this ride."

"What?!? You said it would be flat!"

"I said it would be rolling, but not as hilly as the Sourlands."

Still, for the first twenty miles, every time we hit an incline, I said, "You lie."

The first few miles backtracked the way I'd driven in, but then we turned onto a side road and found ourselves on the Bryn Athyn College campus, facing a cathedral.  "We'll stop for five minutes so you can get pictures," Tom told me.  I said, "I'm an atheist.  Gimme two and I'll be done."

We spent longer there, though, because a couple of us were fiddling with our bikes.  My front derailleur cable, recently replaced, had stretched. When I went to turn the barrel adjuster, I saw that the plastic housing above it was cracked; the barrel wouldn't turn.  Tom said, "Well, you know what Chris Cook says: 'The more you mess with it, the more problems you'll have.'"  So I left my chain in the small ring.

Bryn Athyn Cathedral looks like most of the old buildings on Princeton University's campus.


Winter Larry noticed the stairs inside of the bell tower.


After that I lost track of which way we were facing.  We wound through hilly suburban streets.  I looked at every street and store sign,  hoping to find something familiar.

It took fewer than nine miles for that to happen.  Old York (yes, there's another one), Jenkintown, Abington, Cheltenham, Baeder Road.  "My aunt and uncle and cousins used to live near here," I said.  "Their house was a duplex.  There was a stream in the back yard.  The stream flooded a lot.  The houses were torn down after they moved away."  I looked left and saw a neighborhood that seemed familiar, but not, because my aunt's house was stone and these were brick.  (Later, after Tom posted the route, I figured out that we'd come within a block of their old neighborhood: mile 9.6, satellite view, that gap in the houses, where the map says Tookany Creek.)

When we crossed Germantown Avenue I remembered my summer job as a house painter, my sophomore year of college, the summer of the Philadelphia garbage strike, the summer I learned my way around Mount Airy and was the only one in the crew with a car big enough to carry our ladder.  I damn near drove that poor old station wagon to death.  Germantown Avenue.  Cobblestones.  We'd be in the city limits soon.

You can tell by the street signs.  Philadelphia labels theirs with block numbers and directions so that you can figure out which way to go to get to whichever address you're trying to get to.  The signs are green, and most are not rectangular. Here's what I mean.  Thank you, Wikipedia:



Then we were in Wissahickon Park.  I don't need to look up how to spell that. Where I grew up, "Schuylkill" was on our spelling test.

So here's the Raritan Wissahissahickinson River Creek:



Henry Avenue?  We're biking on Henry Avenue?  Jeebus.

We were approaching Manayunk, riding along the Schuylkill River.  At a red light, I asked, "Anyone dare to try to pronounce this like a Philadelphian?"  No takers.

"Skookle," I said.  "We swallow our consonants."

Then we were in Manayunk, and Tom was leading us up a short, steep hill that he said was the Wall.

"This is the wall?" I asked.  A pedestrian looked over at us but said nothing.  Turns out it wasn't; we were one block over.  Same incline, though.  Tom gestured left.  "That's the Wall," he said, "If anyone wants to go up it."

I said, "If you've got 94, you might as well go for 100," and turned left.  Larry and Ron and Ken followed me.

Kermit can climb.  I forgot.

Behind me, Larry was groaning.

Here they are on their way back down:



Tom and the others were waiting at the bottom.  We went in search of a snack. Main Street was empty.  When we passed a cafe called Winnie's LeBus, I hollered out to stop.  Le Bus used to be just that:  a bus in University City that was famous for its bread and bakery.  Then they got a real storefront, on Sansom (not Samson, damnit!) Street.  Then that closed, and the rest of my college years were bereft of Le Bus muffins.  I'd heard they'd opened up in Manauynk all those years ago.  This must be the place.

We all got off our bikes only to find out that this was a real chi-chi sit-down place, and that they weren't really a bakery, and that there were no muffins.  I'm not even going to link to the place.  Phooey.

We saddled up again and headed over a couple of blocks to a real coffee shop. That's when we realized that we'd left Dave H back at Winnie's; Dave had gone inside.  Tom called him, he found us, and all was well.

Then we were turning onto the East River Drive (that's what it was called back in the day), then the West River Drive (that's what it was called back in the day), off limits to cars this time of day.  High school.  Bike path along the river. Bluestreak, my 1983 Raleigh Grand Prix, with my sister and parents, me wanting to hammer (not knowing that it's called hammering), my mother yelling at me, Boston's "Long Time" in my head, my first bike tune?  (I've come a long way with the bike music.)

We turned off and started to climb again, up to the Belmont Plateau.  Maybe I'd been here in that old station wagon on the way home from painting or college or something, but I never did stop to see the skyline, no reason to, really.  Off to the far right on our way up, I saw the high-rise once-hotel once called Adam's Mark, which sits at the edge of the Skookle Expressway (I-76 to the rest of you), on City Avenue, City Line Avenue (Route  -- yes, that Route 1, our Route 1) to the rest of you), the divide between the city and the Main Line. Good riddance.

We did stop at the plateau, and we did look, and I explained the breach in the gentleman's agreement not to build taller than Penn's willie, and named as many buildings as I could.

"That tall ugly thing on the left is the Comcast Tower.  The spire is Liberty Place.  That thing on the right is the Cira Centre."  Tom found City Hall (far left).

"Every picture's gonna suck," Tom said.  "No matter how you adjust it, it's gonna suck.  I tried.  The light's wrong."

I punched up the contrast and turned down the brightness. It'll have to do.  The sky was much more ominous than it looks here.  The sky looked like it was ready to piss on us and enjoy it.




Then the zoo, the Girard Avenue bridge over the Skookle, the view of the city I saw from the train five days a week twice a day for twelve years and no, I'm not stopping for a picture because it's burned into my brain.  Damn, I shoulda taken a picture.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, or should I say the Art Museum, or should I say the blasted Art Museum steps, and no, I do not want to run up them and pose like fuckin' Rocky like that asshole up there is doing.  Let's get out of here.

Tourists everywhere.  Shit.  We're tourists.  I don't work here anymore.  I haven't lived here since half my life ago.  I'm a fucking tourist.

We were able to ride like cyclists again on Spring Garden, where there's a wide bike lane.  The light was red at Broad Street, which gave us time to admire one of the many, many city murals.



We were facing due east, the sky gunmetal gray in front of us.  Winter Larry wanted to know if we'd be able to see the new Barnes Foundation building. I know where it is because it followed my parents out of the suburbs and onto Logan Circle.  As we approached 17th Street, I told Tom that we were getting close enough to their apartment that I was feeling guilty.  He said, "We need to get home before it rains."  We didn't detour for the Barnes either.

On 6th Street we turned south, which seemed to me to be in the wrong direction if we were heading home.  Tom was taking us to Independence Mall.  Greeeeeeat. More childhood memories.  This is what happens if you grow up close to Philadelphia during the bicentennial.  "I know more about George Washington's wig than I ever wanted to know," I said, remembering how we learned to weave rugs and had to wear mop caps.

"Can we see the Liberty Bell from here?"

Oh, god, no.  "It's a farce," I said.  "The crack is a manufacturing flaw."

Tom got us out of the tourist throng eventually, and we headed towards the river on Pine Street.  We stopped at Penn's Landing.

Across the Raritan Delaware River, Camden.  In front of me, a thistle.  Which one gets more respect is a toss-up.


"Okay, guys.  How does a Philadelphian pronounce Walt Whitman Bridge?"  They shook their heads.

"Wall Wimmen."


The Battleship New Jersey, in Camden:


Left, the historic RCA Victor Building; center, Not Rowan:


Delaware Avenue has a decent bike lane.  Who knew?

Here's the Ben Franklin Bridge:


It was somewhere in here that Tom's rear derailleur pulley started hopping something fierce.  At every red light he'd bend over to turn the limit screw one way or the other, but nothing helped.

When Delaware Avenue petered out, we turned onto Aramingo, which also has a decent bike lane.  Not a single car gave us trouble.

When Aramingo faded out, we turned left, crossing Tacony Street.  "Hey, guys. Wanna know how to pronounce this one like a native?  Tah-kaewn-ee."  Laughter all around.  I did some Northeast Philly accent for them:  "Throw the bool against the wool and make a phaewn cool.  Is that ool?"

We turned onto Torresdale.  Somewhere on this road was my grandfather's pharmacy; the family lived upstairs.  I remember the place only vaguely, a long, skinny apartment.  I was a little kid, trying to get my grandmother's attention:  "Mom-mom, the ceiling's peeling!"  I shouted it over and over again until she heard me, looked up, and exclaimed, "The ceiling's peeling!" They moved away shortly after that.  (My mother informs me that the drug store was at the corner of Torresdale and Magee, a street I don't remember noticing, although I did look at every corner store and wonder, "Was that it?")

I spent a lot of time looking over at I-95 and looking for the Northeast Corridor train tracks.  I looked at the stone fronts of the row houses, each identical front meticulously painted, one color for the stone, another for the grouting.  Brown and white.  Green and white.  Everything and white.  For blocks and blocks and blocks it was like this, until I finally found one that was just plain stone.

"We're gonna pass a prison," Tom said, and "Holmesburg" popped into my head.  We passed on the west side; the train tracks are on the east side.  At the prison we turned left into Pennypack Park.

Somehow, there were going to be eight miles of bike path between here and our cars.  It didn't seem possible.

The trail was nearly empty, wooded, paved, under water only once (we sent Dave through with his disc brakes first, Winter Larry imploring, "It's not worth it, Tom.") and peppered with tiny, steep rises.  Tom was in front, and I was behind him.  Every time we hit one of the steep spots, I was sure that Tom's chain was going to explode.  "No no no no!"  I said to his derailleur many times. "I was ready to put my hand out to catch you on that one," I said once.

Everything held together, and it didn't start raining until we started driving home.

I went straight to Hart's with Kermit.  The rain was so intense that I left the front wheel on the back seat.  Ross had a new cable in before I knew what he was doing.  "When's your new frame coming in?"

"Dunno.  I gotta call. You're gonna build it," I reminded him.  I still feel a little guilty for getting it elsewhere, but that's a story for another blog post.

He said, "I'm anxious to see what they're doing in Italy these days."

Dave H came in, looking for new gloves.  "I washed my old ones and they still stink," he said.  "Mine never last that long," I told him.  "One season if I'm lucky."  Ross zipped by, then came back, pressing two 25th anniversary water bottles into my hands, gratis. He didn't charge me for the cable either.

The rain let up.  I went home, chatted with Jack, had some lunch, washed off the city grit, and went to the lab to check on my mice and process some brains.


Saturday, May 24, 2014

Monday Anti-All-Paces Ad Hoc Ride: Goodbye (for Now), Sergeantsville




24 May 2014

Sun and his wife have sold the Sergeantsville General Store. They'll be retiring to California at the end of this month.

With that in mind, if you want to avoid the crowds at the PFW All-Paces Ride on Monday, meet me at the Hopewell Administration Building on Main Street, across from Ingleside, in Pennington, at 9:00 9:30 a.m.  We'll go to Sergeantsville to pay our respects to the bike-friendliest couple this side of the Raritan.  The ride will be around 42 miles.

I'll be leaving from my house at 8:30 9:00 a.m. if anyone is interested in 11 extra miles.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Accidental Century


cue sheet, before and after

17 May 2014

I should not be allowed to lead rides east of Route 1.  Without the hills to guide me, I mistake one road for the next, miss turns, and wind up handing four people five more miles than they'd bargained for on an already too-long-for-mid-May ride.

Jim and I left from my house and arrived at the East Picnic Area to find a charity walk/run event for  Attitudes in Reverse (with many a friendly therapy dog more than happy to check us out) overfilling the parking lot.

We started with two Jims, one Jackie, one John, and myself (Jackie eventually named me J-Laura for consistency), but finished with one fewer Jim, who was the victim of a spoke failure several miles before our first rest stop.  Plain Jim was able to loosen the break on the Other Jim's rear wheel enough that Other Jim was able to hobble, with a wobble that would make a hula dancer jealous, a few more miles to the Olde World Bakery in Smithville.  We left him there, basking in the sun, finishing a sandwich, with his son en route to the rescue. As we left, he said, "This is the best place I've ever been broken down."

At this point we were four miles over the distance I'd written on my cue sheet, but I had no idea what I'd done wrong.  I couldn't figure out how I'd screwed up when we got to Route 206 at the wrong time either.  We crossed and I pulled out my phone.

"Ohhhh, no, no, this is so wrong," I said.  "You guys mind riding on 206 for a bit?"

So we did, for less than a mile, with a big shoulder.  We stopped again at the Columbus General Store.  I'd like to give a shout-out to the baker of the banana bread, more banana than bread.

I got us back to the park without screwing up, despite my having forgotten to write a turn in.  I knew, more or less, where I was at that point.

We all  need to thank Mister Garmin, Jim's GPS, to whom I turned whenever I needed to verify a turn.  One of two things, no, make that three things, has to happen before I lead another ride in unfamiliar territory.  I need to study my routes much better; I need to give Jim the route ahead of time so he can load it in; and/or I should get myself a GPS.  I'm not inclined to do that last thing.  If I rely on a device to tell me when to turn, I'll be even worse at knowing where I am than I am now.  No, what I need to do is double-check my cue sheets and write in every single intersection, whether we cross it or pass it, when I'm leading in unfamiliar territory.

The upside to my being a total yutz today was that I was so close to 100 miles when Jim and I got back to my house that I decided to go for it.  I went inside first, to tell Jack what I was up to.  He didn't say anything; he just shook his head.

The odometer read 100 as I rounded the corner into the driveway.


I figured out two of my wrong turns.  Only when Jim sent me the route he'd recorded did I find the third.  With a little tweaking, I could edit this route into a real century.  One more wrong turn would do it...

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Hill Slugs Ad Hoc, Saturday, 17 May

14 May 2014

Miss Piggy needs a rest.  Kermit needs some fresh air.

Saturday's ride, flat (really), is shaping up to be a long one.  My first attempt at a route has us back at the East Picnic Area of Mercer County Park at 73* miles. We will have two rest stops, though.

I'll tidy things up and finalize the distance within the next few days.

We'll start around 9:30 a.m.  Extra-milers can add 14 by meeting me at my house for a 9:00 a.m. push-off.

(*Don't look at me like that.  Y'all did hilly metrics with me already.  This is flat.)

Sunday, May 4, 2014

How to See a Couple of Reservoirs


My favorite puddle

4 May 2014

I've run the Double Reservoir ride so many times that I can't even find all of the blog posts about them.  Yesterday's was, I think, the first time we didn't start from Frenchtown.

I like the new route well enough that I might run it again without major changes.  I got to fill in a few blank spots on my roads-I've-been-on map, too.

Over at Jim's blog, commenters are berating us for not having taken some of the most challenging hills (of which there are many) in the area.  My response to them is, "Been there, done that."  Where we were was tough enough for the current crop of Hill Slugs. Looking back on all of the routes I've come up with since I started mapping online, I can see that yesterday's route comes within a hundred feet of being the hilliest ride I've ever led.  But, shit, why am I defending myself.  FSITAWAFH. (Ask Snakehead what that means.)

Cherryville-Stanton Road, which, when I mapped my very first Double Reservoir Ride, I went out of my way to avoid climbing for good reason, turns out to be a blast descending.  Here's the view from halfway down:


That's Round Mountain, adjacent to Round Valley Reservoir, in the distance.

Kiceniuk Road crosses the Raritan River south of Clinton.  After Thursday's rain dump, the water was turbid and high.  There were six of us on the ride; four of us were taking pictures:


John K said, "I need to document the ride for insurance purposes."  I gave him a leftover bunny.





Old Clinton Road follows the Raritan, but this is not the river; it's leftover rain:


Jim burst out laughing when I stopped for the picture.  When I asked him what was so funny, he said, "The fastboys would hate all this stopping for pictures." Fine by me.

I stood in a gravel driveway to photograph a fence and pasture under water.  As I was focusing, a truck pulled out of the driveway.  The driver said, "Photographing my problems, eh?"

He was smiling. "I can only imagine how bad it was on Thursday," I said.  There was dried mud in the road.  He said the entire road was flooded, but that it wasn't the worst he'd seen.  Back in 2010, after the Irene and Bill storms, "the water was up to the mailbox over there," he said.  The mailbox was at least three feet above the road across from the driveway.


Now that the Dr. Seuss trees are no longer a mystery, I guess I should stop taking pictures of them.  The best view is from Payne Road.



We approached the reservoir from the west.  It used to be that I could catch glimpses of it on my way up the hill.  Now that the trees have grown in, the first sight of the water is almost at the main entrance. In keeping with tradition, we went in at the boat launch.



Our first rest stop was at Jerry's Brooklyn Grill in Whitehouse Station.  I sat down on the sidewalk with my muffin and coffee, and decided to check my phone for messages.  There was a text from Jack:  "Condi just backed out of graduation."  I jumped up, found Snakehead in line, and showed him the text.

There was much celebration, speculation, and condemnation over snacks and on our way towards the toughest part of the route:  the hills between us and Spruce Run Reservoir.  I'd already told the guys that the route was shaped like a mushroom cloud.

Deer Hill was the first one on this leg that I warned them about.  This is the first time I've noticed the view from the top.



Jim's beef with Deer Hill is that, once one gets to the top, one is made to climb even more on Bissell.  When we got to the Cokesbury Road intersection, I was hoping that we'd be far enough down the ridge that we'd be able to see Round Valley.  We weren't.  I decided against going down the hill just to have to come back up, because I'm a Hill Slug, remember.

We went north instead, and then west again.  One of my map gaps was the top half of Petticoat Lane, so we took it.  I'm glad we did. Snakehead stopped first with his camera.  The shadows help with the depth.  This is looking west. Fiddler's Elbow is over there somewhere.


We turned onto Herman Thau Road.  I'd been on this road before, in one of the later Double Reservoir Ride incarnations, with Mike B.  We'd come up from the river to Petticoat on this road.  I remembered that it had been work, and that it was shaded, but I remembered nothing else.

Heh. By the time we got to the end, I decided to rename the road "Fuck Thau" and be done with it.

That's when Jim noticed the moose at the corner house.


And the kitty in the window.


Jack has zero interest in our Hill Slug adventures, but he did enjoy these pictures.


I could tell that, even though we'd only gone thirteen miles from Whitehouse Station, were all starting to feel a little beat.  There were thirteen miles between us and the second planned rest stop in Clinton.  The optional stop was only a mile away. I didn't say anything about it.

Instead, we turned north on River Road and I showed them Lake Solitude and the dam behind it.


We turned left onto Cokesbury Road and soon passed under the Columbia Trail.


I knew what was coming after that.  I didn't say anything.  (Go to "map," click on "terrain," zoom all the way in, and look just east of mile 36.)

Snakehead and Jim were already off their bikes at the Hilltop Deli when I came around the corner.  "I was gonna offer this as an optional rest stop," I said.  Jim replied, "You'd have a mutiny if you didn't."  We stayed there a good, long time.

Then it was down the other side, a short stretch on Route 31 (with wide shoulders and, mercifully, little traffic), a turn at the light onto Van Syckels, and into Spruce Run Reservoir, where we didn't have to pay because it was before Memorial Day.


Clouds were rolling in.  We didn't stay long.  We also decided to skip the rest stop in Clinton.



We still had to go through Clinton, though, which was a little hairy.  The reward was a flat cruise along Hamden and River Roads.  The section that's closed off to cars had a fresh layer of gravel, but aside from that we all got a chance to relax a little.

We passed near the sewage treatment plant.  I told John that I'm always amazed when I see people fishing there.  Today there was nobody there.  The water was so high that it was almost level with the spillway.  John agreed with me, and then imagined a conversation between fishermen:

"What did you catch?"

"Oh, just a few crappies."

I handed him another chocolate bunny.

I thought things were looking a little thunder stormy to the west.  Ron said that we'd be all right until 3 p.m.  He said, "It's not 3, is it?"  I didn't know, and I decided to remain ignorant.

"Okay guys.  We've got one more hill.  There's a break in the trees on the right about halfway up, with a great view."

Spring Hill Road is one of my favorites.



We only had a little bit of climbing to the ridge after that.  Then it was downhill with a tailwind all the way back to the park.

To the south the sky was gunmetal gray, and there were some raindrops on my windshield during my drive home.