Blake's Anti-All-Paces Ride

A Carversville panorama distorts how small this intersection is.

7 September 2015

Cheryl has been here all summer.  I've hardly seen her.

Blake wanted to lead a Labor Day Anti-All-Races ride.

I didn't want to climb.

I went anyway.

Now that I can fit two bikes in my car without taking any wheels off,

I picked Cheryl up at her house.  It was weird pulling into her driveway; the last time for this was supposed to have been a year ago. It was weirder still to see her house nearly empty and somewhat staged for prospective buyers.

"I coulda gone for a flat ride today," Cheryl confessed on our way to Yardley.  I told her that I didn't feel like climbing either.

Blake was crestfallen when we fessed up.  "But I had such a great route," he whined.  It worked.  We relented.  To show his appreciation, he took us up Eagle Road from the south -- "the hard way."  I've been up Jericho Mountain on Eagle Road twice.  The first time was the "easy way."  I think the second time might have been too, but all I remember from the second time was that it was early spring, it had been raining, and that I was with Jim and Dave.

The Eagle Road ascent, 331 feet in half a mile, is hardly the worst thing that's been thrown at me this season.  It can best be described this way:

One...Two...THREE.  The third one is the longest and steepest, because that's what gives hills like this their reputations.

The roads in Bucks County still all look the same to me.  I'm trying to learn them, I really am, but it doesn't help that, as Dave pointed out last year, there are approximately three road names in the area. Creamery is one of them.

You won't see any Boar's Heads nor Whiskeys, Goose Islands nor Rake Factories, no Hog Hollows nor Senator Stouts up here.  But if you're lucky you can get a juvenile giggle out of the intersection of Pidcock Creek and Windy Bush.

I'll take what I can get.

In my earliest days of hill climbing, when I'd been to Pennsylvania maybe once, and spent most of my time venturing around Sergeantsville or Lambertville, I had a dream that Cheryl and I were on a tree-covered intersection at the top of a hill.  In one direction was a sharp descent through the woods into Lambertville. The other two roads met and led off towards Princeton.  When I woke up, I was convinced that this intersection was real.  I thought about it for days, trying to locate it on a map and in my memory.  It took a while to convince myself that such a place did not exist.  The closest I could get in reality is where Elm Road East (strangely, west of Elm Road) meets the Princeton Day School entrance.  But even that is far too flat and open.

Then, today, at the end of one of the Creamery Roads, I found something even closer.  We were nowhere near Lambertville, of course, but here was a three-way intersection that was downhill in all directions.  I had to tell Blake and Cheryl about it, and I can't be certain I'd never been here before today.

It's not exactly how it looked in my sleep, of course.  I also sometimes dream that I have to bike up steps, indoors, in order to catch up with the rest of the group.  But I digress.

We arrived in Carversville at rush hour:

Bob Barish has some of his food paintings for sale in the general store.  Years ago he gave me and Jack a bagel painting as a housewarming gift at one of our New Year's Eve parties. Several parties later he gave us a painting of a Hostess cupcake.  He's showing his north Jersey roots there; as a Philly gal, by rights I ought to have a painting of a Tastykake.  Anyway, it was fun to think, "Hey!  I have that one already."

We took our time outside.  I showed Cheryl how to take panoramic pictures with her iPhone.  I took a couple.  They made the intersection look huge and the inn across the street far away.  Nothing is huge in Carversville except the climbs out.  There's only one way out that's downhill, and that's on Fleecy Dale (which is passable now, we were told, although still officially closed).

Blake, being Blake, chose the absolute steepest route closest to the store (there are two that are worse, but they're farther away).  I did my duty and called him a bastard.

After that, though, the worst climbs were behind us, although we did have to go over Jericho Mountain again.  This time we took Thompson Mill, which isn't nearly as steep.  At the top was a dead-end road.  Blake turned onto it.  I followed.

"What are you making us do?"

"We're finishing the hill."

"I'm perfectly happy, Blake, not to finish every hill."

But Cheryl and I are good soldiers, so we followed him to the top, to a cul-de-sac, and back down again.

Our conversation rolled around to evening group rides gone awry, and then the tough winter we had.  "I went nuts," I told them.  "I was all, 'I have no friends!'  I kinda felt that way last night, too.  We didn't get invited to any Labor Day parties this year. Then I thought, 'Wait a minute. I led a ride with 11 people on Saturday, and got invited out here today, so shut up.'"

We rolled back into Yardley with about 43 miles and almost 3000 feet of climbing. I'm so used to Tom's training rides that having someone lead us up only one notorious hill feels like cheating. Still, I'm glad I went, because Cheryl doesn't know how much longer she'll be around before she high-tails it back to Florida, and because there's no putting Blake on a flat road.

When I got home I tried to reconstruct the route from memory, figuring it would help me learn my way around Bucks County.  I almost got it right, save for one turn. Blake sent us his uploaded route.

In the same email, he also wrote (and I have his permission to print it here):

I was thinking about what you said about not being invited to any Labor Day parties.  Same here. But I ended up doing exactly what I wanted to do with the people I wanted to do it with.  What could be better than that?

Amen, brother.

(Also, I asked Jack if we could have a party this fall.  It's time for one.)