Wertsville Road at Rileyville Road
"I don't wanna say this too loudly," Pete murmured, having ridden in from the north, "but I think I had a tailwind." Louder, he said, "When you hock a loogie to the side and it stays with you, you know there's a problem."
Yeah, there was a headwind all right. I'd been in it with Linda, Ricky, and Jim for the ride from home to Twin Pines. Two days ago a nor'easter toppled trees and power lines. The wind stuck around for an extra day. Today was calmer, with gusts of only 25 mph.
Andrew, Jeff, Richard, Chris, and a visitor invited by Linda rounded the group out to ten. "We're going to Flemington," I told them. "We're going to have a headwind the whole way up and a tailwind on the way back." Jim volunteered to sweep, although I didn't believe for a minute that I'd be ahead of him once we got into the hills.
I said that we'd have mostly rollers, and that the wind was going to be the bigger problem, and with that we were off into it.
Our warm-up hill was at the northern end of Pennington-Rocky Hill Road. We got ourselves well spread out. Jim kept to the back with Linda and the visitor. At the top of the road we waited.
"That guy is having a hard time," somebody said. Someone else added that the visitor said he could push 600 to 800 watts in spin class. I've only ever hit above 500 in ten second bursts, and never more than once in a class, if I even try to get that high. But a 45-minute spin class with a flywheel isn't a near-freezing road ride with a freewheel and a 25 mph headwind. So we waited.
We saw Jim's helmet bobbing up the crest of the hill. He appeared, by himself, grinning. "They didn't make it so I ate 'em," he chirped. When we were finished laughing we turned left for the descent into Hopewell.
For the first time my GPS didn't get itself lost as we went through town and up Greenwood. "All the way to the end," I said, and Jim groused about what my definition of rollers might encompass. "Never believe a ride leader," I said.
We passed houses running on generators, saw uprooted trees, and noticed a handful of power lines that were not where they should have been. At the top of the mountain we passed a house with half a dozen fire trucks in front of it.
The wind was pushing away the clouds on Wertsville Road.
I let the guys get ahead of me as I paused near Losey to take a picture of my favorite lone tree there.
More headwind, open fields, rollers, and then we were in Flemington at Factory Fuel. We were just about the only ones there. The factory space behind the coffee house, usually a farmers' market, was empty.
What took us forever to get to took us no time to return from. The tailwind pushed us to Manners Road, where I stopped for a picture, as I usually do. I didn't expect much this time, the sun being in the wrong spot and the Sourland Mountain an indistinct gray blob. One of them came out well enough to share.
Jeff hung back with me for both of my Manners stops, the second one being at the bottom of the hill, where the fields on either side look as if they should be posters for an Americana that we imagine flyover country to be.
We went sideways up the mountain: Rileyville to Saddle Shop to Runyon Mill to Orchard to Linvale. Chris complained about the crosswind, stronger now than it had been this morning, the whole way. Although we could have kept the tailwind if we'd stayed on Rileyville, there wasn't a one of us who wanted to climb that hill.
Andrew left us when we reached 518.
On Stony Brook there was a situation that the local electric company hadn't gotten to yet.
We rode right under it, of course.
I got a few shots of the stream while I was at it.
In the summer all of this is hidden.
Pete turned off for home in Pennington.
We finished the ride with six of the ten we'd started with. My reputation is intact.
When I got home, Moxie supervised as I photographed the sign-in sheet with my phone and sent it on to Ken W to be recorded.
Outside our first crocus was in bloom.
Three days later it's covered in six inches of wet, heavy snow. I ventured out three times during and after the storm to shake the snow off of four evergreens in the back yard, doing my best to keep the pitch pine from permanently pitching over and the three arbor vitae from being arbor mortis.
Spring officially begins in two weeks. We set our clocks ahead this weekend. If you're in New Jersey don't look out the window right now.
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