Tom, Jim, and Andrew
18 June 2017
Shloomph!
That's the sound of the summer's humidity blanket covering central New Jersey until further notice.
I removed all of the routes from the $500 Piece of Shit and loaded in Saturday's ride. I also hand-wrote a cue sheet in my usual way: in three columns on a 3 x 5 card. Still, to be safe, I sent the route to Tom and Jim to load into their GPSs. I told them that they could decide between themselves who would be the belt and who would be the suspenders. Jim chose suspenders right away. Tom was left with being the belt.
We were good to go when I went to sleep on Friday night. When my alarm went off at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, it looked awfully gray outside. I checked the weather. Yeah, no. The belt and the suspenders had already sent bail-out emails.
I canceled by email first, sending a message to everyone who had told me they'd be in Lambertville for the 8:30 start. Then I posted the cancellation on the PFW Facebook wall (the other ride leaders were busy canceling there too). Next I updated the blog. It was all done before 7:00 a.m. I went back to sleep for another half hour. I checked my phone every few minutes until 8:30, and, seeing nothing, figured that everyone had received my message.
Not so much. I found out later in the day that Ricky, Pete, and Rajesh had showed up and had been heavily rained on. Pete later emailed that he'd never been so wet on a bike. I feel bad, but only a little. When it's that dark out after sunrise, best check the radar and with the ride leader.
Sunday morning looked much brighter. Still, when six of us set off from Lambertville, we were met with sticky all over. I warned the group (Tom, Jack H, Jim, Andrew, and John K) that we'd be on some new roads. "Some of them might be dirt," I said, because I hadn't remembered to check.
I didn't give my usual two-mile warm-up on Route 29. Instead I headed for Alexauken Creek and Lambertville Headquarters right away. At the top, John K, who had been doggedly training his JDRF riders in the hills in the rain yesterday, and who had spent the night standing at a concert in the seat-free Electric Factory in Philly, was feeling a bit rough and did the discretion over valor thing. Wise move. We were only going up from there.
Looking back on all of my Lambertville to Clinton routes (there are seven), this was neither the longest nor the hilliest version. It did, however, start steep and stay that way for the better part of a dozen miles. Humidity is nearly everything on a hilly ride; it can turn an otherwise heavenly route into one of the outer circles of Hell. So it was today.
We got to the ridge eventually. Our first real descent was into Pittstown, where I took a sucky picture and later edited it halfway to decency.
Jim took a better one so I have stolen it from his post:
Right. On to Clinton, via Cooks Cross and Perryville, neither of which I'd been on before, and neither of which were dirt, so that was good. I also crossed over 78 and took 173 most of the way into Clinton, which was okay, but Frontage Road on the south side of the highway is much better. Lesson learned.
After a frozen mocha from Citispot, I took the obligatory pictures, which were also sucky so I'm only posting a couple, which I had to crop to make halfway decent.
This is the picture everyone has to take. Jim did. Tom did too.
I've taken various routes out of town.
To the west is Sidney Road, a long, smooth, curving, 500-foot ascent with a couple of decent vistas along the way.
Farther west than that is Baptist Church, which lands on 579 close enough to the 3-mile Rick Road descent that I always have to do it.
To the south is a long, flat stretch that follows the Raritan River.
Part of Hamden Road is closed to cars. The pavement is slowly being taken over by weeds, and in a few years won't be much fun to ride on. Past that, the road turns to gravel on hard-packed dirt (maybe it was paved once) for something less than a mile. None of this was a surprise to me or to anyone who remembered that I've gone this way more than once. Jim, who is proud of the fact that he can't find his way out of a paper bag, let alone remember that he's been in the bag before, viewed the whole thing as an unplanned accident.
The river was to our left, and to our right was a wall of green hill. Jack said, "This has to go up eventually, doesn't it?"
"Yep. And boy howdy will it."
Andrew wanted to know if there was a tunnel. I suggested a cog railway would be in order.
In the past we'd done the climb on Spring Hill, which is wooded and has a scenic gap in the trees halfway up. It ends on Sidney, but not at the top.
Today we were going to try Cherryville-Stanton Road. I'd only been on it once, descending, at the start of the latest iteration of the Double Reservoir Ride out of Flemington. I remembered that it was high and steep. I remembered being able to look out and down into the Raritan valley. I'd looked at the profile ahead of time. I knew what we were in for. The steepest segment would get us up 178 feet in three tenths of a mile. The whole thing would go up 529 feet in 1.7 miles. I didn't bother checking the grade; ridewithgps isn't very good at that.
"Finger Lakes people!" I called out. "Think the climb out of Seneca." This was going to be a slog.
Jack H, Andrew, and Jim, among the strongest of my regular climbers, were out of sight in the first half mile. Tom and I, who had taken a good, hard look at the map, were down in our granny gears, conserving energy. There was a pause in the action. "There's more," I warned him. He figured we were almost finished. I wasn't so sure.
I got a little ahead, and facing me was a wall of asphalt. On it, Jack H was tacking across the road and back. Then Jim got off his bike and started walking. And then Andrew did too.
I broke my Slugs.
"One and done," I thought. There would be no reason to try this route again.
I dropped into the lowest of my low gears, 29-32, and focused on keeping my front wheel on the ground. To distract myself, I broke the climb into intervals between mail boxes.
When I cought up to Jim and Andrew, they both got back on their bikes ahead of me. Tom was behind, out of sight. We pedaled to the next flat spot and waited.
"One and done." I said.
"On the way up I figured out exactly what I wanted to say to you," Jack H said. "Fuck, fuck, FUCK you!"
Yeah, pretty much. I deserved that.
Tom caught up. His heart rate had spiked so he'd stopped and walked a little until it came down.
"I broke my Slugs," I whined.
"I know how I'm going to start my blog," Jim said, and proceeded to expound upon the closed road (it's only closed to cars), the gravel (we've seen worse), and the hill (we'll give him this one). "I know it's not true," he said, "but I like the way it sounds." This will do wonders for my reputation.
We really didn't have much climbing left after that, but every little ascent invoked complaints from the crowd.
When we hit the dirt road, Zentek, a little stretch connecting Lambert and Rosemont-Ringoes, Jim had more fuel for his fire. Now I know why I'd never been here before. It was passable and short.
The humidity had gone down, but the hot sun was out now and the wind had picked up. At the top of Lambertville Headquarters at Sandy Ridge, we collected the spread-out Slugs.
From there it wasn't quite all downhill, but compared to where we'd been, it was close enough.
For the record, my muzzy-headed GPS, cleared of all but one route, guided me perfectly. For those of you keeping score at home, that's the fourth time since the end of December.
"Where are you going next week?" Tom asked me as we put away our bikes.
"Dunno," I said. "But it's gonna be flat."
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