#39

29 June 2014

I went out with Statler and Waldorf again yesterday.  

Neil had planned a flat to rolling route in the high 70-mile range.  He wanted to go to Delicious Orchards in Colt's Neck ("I need some doughnuts," he wrote). When I wrote back that I was thinking of tacking on enough miles biking from home to Cranbury and back to make it a century, he threw in another rest stop. I told him not to go out of his way for me, but he confirmed that he likes route mapping as much as I do.

I always prep my bike the night before.  Kermit's rear tube was flat again.  I guessed that I'd missed whatever was still in the tire from the last one, and went about changing tubes.  I found a small nick in the tire, but it didn't appear to have gone all the way through.  In the morning, the tire was still full, so I set out at 6:50 a.m. in order to give myself plenty of time to get to Cranbury.  

I had a headwind, and my speed was lower than it ought to have been.

We were about 11 miles out when we hit a bumpy patch.  I started to fall behind. Two miles later we rounded a corner, and that's when I felt the rear wheel go mushy.  We stopped so I could pump it up again.  "There's no point in changing the tube," I said.  "I can't find the puncture."  I got it back up to something approaching 100 psi.  Neil kept looking at my wheel, though.  It was going soft again.

Semi-soft is good for cheese.  Not so much for tires.  So we stopped again, Neil being determined to find the culprit.  It took all four of us, but we did.  The nick had, indeed, ever so slightly gone all the way through, enough that a grain of sand could get in and pierce the tube (Neil extracted said grain).  The leak in the tube was so small that it took Steve five minutes to find it.  Mark had a patch that he stuck on the tire.  We filled it up.  "So much better!"  I said.  "I can feel every bump in the road again."  I like running my tubes at 115 psi.  This time it held. No wonder I'd been so slow on the way to Cranbury.  "You don't notice it until it gets below 100," he said.  "You were leaking air all night."

At Delicious Orchards, Neil was dejected.  There were no apple cider doughnuts. "I got two brownies instead," he said.  I was perplexed, because he was holding two foil pans, each about an inch deep, four inches wide, and six inches long.  He was holding two brownies, and he was going to bring these things home in his Camelbak.

Now, I'm no stranger to hauling things home.  Usually it's coffee.  Sometimes it's pastry.  Once it was a loaf that Mike B carried in his front pack for ten miles.  I'm pretty sure that Neil's load was heavier than anything I've carried back.  Anyone who has ridden with Neil knows, though, that the weight of two gargantuan brownies is but a tiny fraction of his usual load.  I once witnessed him remove a can full of change and a tub of Gatorade powder. So in the brownies went.

About twenty miles later, Neil said,  "My back is killing me." I suggested that we could eat some of his load, but he said his wife would see right through that.  Oh well. We stopped at the Manasquan Reservoir for water and readjustment.

 Neil and Steve

The stop was Mark's idea.  One of the shore cycle groups uses this place a lot.  It has a ranger station with real bathrooms and a water fountain, and a couple of vending machines for drinks.

We watched an egret and a heron, and talked with a park ranger who told us about the pair of bald eagles and the osprey who live on the edge of the water.

He told us about the cat collar that the rangers found in the eagles' nest when they were banding the chicks. Keep your cats indoors, folks.  The birds'll turn on kitty sooner or later.

The wind shifted, because this was a ride with me and Neil.  As headwinds go, it wasn't much, but it was enough for us to keep our reputations.

The route back was through the low rollers of Millstone.  It was enough to start to wear us out.  In Monroe, Steve peeled off for home.  At the edge of Cranbury, I went straight as Neil and Mark turned towards the park.  I found a tree to sit under and grabbed a quick snack, then headed for home, into the wind.