Last Miles of the Year

Sky over Cherry Grove Farm, Route 206, Lawrenceville

25 December 2017

I never set out to have five road bikes. I never set out to count miles either. Yet here I am, a phone-accessible spreadsheet in hand, the date in one column and a row for each bike, dutifully entering the distance at the end of each ride. None of it matters, of course. Racking up more miles doesn't make me a better person. 

November came around and I looked at my total. If I could get in 250 miles by the end of the year I'd reach 5000 miles. I checked last year's spreadsheet. I'd fallen short by 120 miles. I decided that this year I wanted to get there. It would be a first*.

Then I went glassblowing twice, and it snowed, and I painted the house, and it snowed again, and all of a sudden there were 120 miles to squeeze in before the end of the year.

No problem. The Thursday before Christmas would be a short day (for work and also the winter solstice). I'd take Beaker into work in near-freezing air, get 14 in, and beat last year by 2 miles.

Friday I was staring down a stressful afternoon with the family. In the morning I stripped Beaker of her commuting light and went out for a solo ride, camera in my pocket, to find 20 or 30 miles and take some pictures.

Back in 2000 and 2001 there was a Friday night ride that left from Pennington. It was almost always the same route. It was the first ride I led when I substituted for the regular leader. It's a good recovery route, with a minimum of hills and very little traffic. Keefe Road has a bridge out, so I took Federal City instead and passed close enough to the iconic pole on the Pole Farm. This is where having 40x zoom comes in handy.

This is also a zoomed in shot:

Close to the side of the road were a few tufts of ornamental grass:

On Carson Road I stopped for a hay bale,

and, of course, the chair -- only now it's two chairs -- on the little mound where the road makes a sharp turn:

Bayberry Road:

On Woosamonsa Road, on the stretch between Route 31 and Burd, is a herd of cows:

They were perfectly positioned so that, no matter how close I got, the fence obscured them all.

I got back home with a little over 31 miles. 66 and change would get me to 5000. Two more rides would do the trick.

Then Bob N sent an email to the Hill Slug regulars. Would anyone be up for a Sunday ride from Hopewell?  Hot diggity!  The short route from home to the elementary school is 10 miles. I offered to map a route and make it official (the club's new ride calendar is handy that way). I came up with something that would give them 43 miles and figured out a sane way to stretch my to-and-from distance to give me 66.

The forecast was for clouds and temperatures hovering five to ten degrees above freezing. I wore my heaviest gloves and packed a lighter pair; I'd need to switch off several times.

I didn't give myself quite enough time; nor did I count on a mild but steady headwind. When I passed the cows on Route 206 I didn't stop.

I arrived five minutes late, one minute behind Ken G. Ed W (who had passed me in his car and so knew my whereabouts), Ricky, Bob N, and Pete were also there. Pete's healing knee would limit him to a couple of hours. Ed had a time constraint. Both would need to peel off before we reached Sergeantsville.

There was a good winter sky above us in the parking lot.

Playing with my zoom, I honed in on a pair of crows across the street:

Not once did I stop for pictures as we zigged and zagged up and across the Sourland Mountain, over the hump on Van Lieus (where we could see Round Mountain in the distance), across 31/202 on Old York, up Wagner, down Wagner, up Wagner (with more potholes than I remember), and finally north to the Sergeantsville General Store.

I didn't take one of my usual routes back. We took Frontage Road, no longer the smooth passage we'd remembered, and went up Gulick. I stopped there to change gloves and also to get a picture of the tree I know I must have taken pictures of before.

Ken peeled off at the top of Marshalls Corner-Woodsville Road. We were down to three. Bob had ridden in from home. If we had wanted to be dramatic, both of us could have split off and left Ricky to enter the parking lot by himself. We didn't do that.

On the way home I did stop for the cows. They live in the Cherry Grove Farm (not the organic one on Carter; the one on 206 that sells eggs and cheese), the largest piece of unprotected open space in Lawrence Township, which stretches from 206 to Princeton Pike. I sometimes see the herd grazing by the Pike on my way to work in the summer.

If you zoom in, you'll see the second cow on the left giving side eye to the cow on her left.

I'm having too much fun with this zoom lens.

Now something past 3:00 p.m., the sun was low in the sky.

I rolled into the driveway about a mile short of 5000. A trip around the neighborhood did the trick. I'd done 67 hilly miles in near freezing weather at the end of December in order to meet a ridiculous goal that has no meaning anywhere ever. Still, it felt good to have done it.

At least I'm not on Strava.

(*Actually, no. While writing this blog entry I found that I'd gone 5038 miles in 2015. Now do I have to find 39 miles between now and January 1?)