Mercer High Points on a Perfect Day

18 April 2015

I decided to add extra miles to Tom's Mercer High Point ride by biking from home to the Rocky Hill ride start about 12 miles away. Sunday was going to be a non-riding day; out-of-town guests would be spending Saturday night at our place. I figured I could safely burn up all my energy on one day instead.

The weather was perfect:  mild, dry, clear, and slightly breezy.  Tom had a good sized group, with the usual Slug compliment (me, Ron, Bagel Hill Barry, and Snakehead), another Ed, and Blake (out of winter hibernation for the second time this year).

Tom's high points are loosely defined.  There are the true high points, and then there are the highest points we can reasonably get to on road bikes.  The Middlesex high point met both criteria.  Mercer would not prove to be so easy, so we tried to satisfy both parts separately.

The first high point was on Rileyville Road at Featherbed. As with Middlesex, this spot didn't look or feel particularly high up, even though we were on top of the Sourland Mountain.

Here, Tom corrals us for a group photo:

We were somewhere on the Sourland ridge when Ron realized he'd left his keys on the hood of his car.  He stopped, not sure if he should turn back. We convinced him that nobody would take his keys nor his car from where we'd parked.  "At least it gets my mind off the hills," he said.

We descended from the Sourlands and climbed to Mount Airy (cue the White Stripes' "Prickly Thorn but Sweetly Worn").  I did not take pictures of the cows.  They were facing away from us.  Instead I took pictures of other things at the top of the hill.

Tom chose Alexauken Creek Road as our route into Lambertville (cue Blind Faith's "Can't Find My Way Home").  I took my time, stopping for pictures, while the rest of the group continued on.

There's happiness on a bike, and then there are those moments of ecstasy.  This was one of those moments.

I found Snakehead stopped across from my favorite pasture.  "This road is to be savored," I said.  That's when I saw the two white horses.

We rode together, slowly, taking it all in.  Next to a stream we saw three more white horses.  "Larry will love this!"  I said, and stopped.  The horses didn't even look up.

Tom was waiting for us at the end of the road.

Rojo's wasn't crowded, for a change.  R.E.M.'s Monster album was coming through the speakers.  "We've been listening to them all day," the barista said.  "Starting from Murmur?"  I asked.  "Yep."  Not a bad playlist.

Most of us sat outside. A shaggy, wiry-haired dog and his owners poured out of a car and chatted for a few minutes.  Groups of cyclists glided past. A man holding a tray of fresh-squeezed orange juice from Big Bear next door came by to offer us samples.

The route Tom had chosen out of Lambertville is familiar to anyone who has ridden with me for a long time, but for Tom it was his first journey up Swan and Studdiford.  We regrouped at the top of Goat Hill.

Next was Unpleasant Vallley, because the true high point of Mercer County lies within the Ted Stiles* Preserve.  We weren't able to reach it on our bikes, but we did climb the gravel drive into the parking lot.

The high point is up there somewhere:

Although we hadn't reached the same altitude as we had on Rileyville Road, Tom decided to take a group picture.  I was looking over his head at the cirrus clouds and the power line when he got the photo.  He would go on to disparage my neck in his blog, as if I didn't hate my body enough already.  Thanks, pal.

Anyway, the sky was pretty:

I had about 65 miles under me when I started to feel the long-distance hypoglycemic buzz.  From where we were I could have peeled off for home from any number of intersections, but I didn't.  Tom asked, "Are you going to go with us to Rocky Hill"

"Yeeeeahhhhh," I said.

"You don't sound too happy about it."

He hadn't heard me and Snakehead discussing the reason why:  If I were to go to Rocky Hill, I'd pass Main Street in Kingston on the way home.  Iced coffee and rice pudding were what I needed.  Snakehead wanted a sandwich.  We decided to meet there after the ride.

I said, "Also, I want to see if Ron's keys are still there."

Ron said, "Ron wants to see if Ron's keys are still there."

They were.

I grabbed them.  "How much you want for these?"  He held his hand out.  "You know what we'll be asking you from now on," I said.

"I'll never live this down," he said.

A small tailwind pushed me to Kingston.  Snakehead arrived soon after.  There was no rice pudding.  I wandered around, lost, not sure what I wanted to eat.  I settled for something I'd never choose under any other circumstance:  two little cake pops.  "Sugar and fat, " I said, not sure if I'd barf them up later.  That and a small iced coffee.  Snakehead got his sandwich and a big bag of chips.  "Have some of these," he offered. "They'll help with dehydration."

We were close to finished when TEW appeared, on her way home from the ride out of Sawmill in Hamilton. She sat with us and the chips instead of going straight for an iced coffee.

This is one of the grooviest things about being a Freewheeler.  You get to be out on a glorious day, eat cake pops and chips, drink as much iced coffee as you want, and run into people you'd never have met otherwise, all the while your bike waiting patiently against a tree.

I finished the ride with 77 miles.  I didn't feel dizzy.  I didn't need a nap.  And I didn't barf up the crap I ate in Kingston either.

Instead, I set up the sofa bed for our guests, showered, ate some more, invited the Saturday night folks over to join our visitors for take-out dinner on our back porch, and waited on the front steps for people to arrive. In the end, there were six of us with far more food and beer than we needed.

We all slept in on Sunday morning.  I made coffee for everyone, and then we went to a diner for breakfast. My friends hit the road around noon, the leftover beer with them.  I went into the back yard to resume what looks to be a long-term project:  cutting down the stories-tall bamboo that is dying by degrees, looking more and more like a bad comb-over than the dense thicket it once was.

Next week, Tom's high point mission continues in Monmouth and Ocean Counties.






[*Going back to the Lost Years:  Ted Stiles was on my dissertation committee.  He was one of only two professors I met in grad school who were truly involved in land preservation.  The other was Ralph Good, who helped create the Pinelands Preserve.  Both died, the latter during my time in grad school, the former a few years after.  Anyway, there I was, during my oral exam, flailing and failing, secretly angry and disenchanted.  Someone on my committee asked a question that took me some time to come around to answering.  I noticed that Ted was rifling through voluminous papers in his wallet.  "I'm boring Ted," I said. He looked up, sheepishly. Fast forward five years or so.  I was working on the trail plan for Baldpate Mountain with some other Sierra Club members and a handful of other local conservationists.  Ted was there.  We were gathered around a huge map, our goal to convince the County not to put so many trails through the park that there would be little undisturbed forest left.  As we were working, I noticed that Ted was doing something else. He was rifling through the papers in his wallet.  "Son of a bitch!" I thought.  "This is just something he does! He wasn't trying to psych me out after all!"  As everyone was leaving, I was talking to Pat Sziber, a big name in local land preservation then and now.  At the time, she was a lab manager at Princeton University (I would later work across the hall from the lab she had only recently retired from. Small world).  I was jealous that she actually had a job there; I was still a lab tech at Penn.  I gave her the short story of my sordid career: that I'd earned a PhD in ecology, didn't want to run a lab, and was now a career technician, "a lifer," I said. Ted chuckled.  "A lifer," he repeated.  I never saw him again.]