Another Sticky Day

Smithville Road: "What part of 'no' don't you understand?"

4 July 2018

Holiday All-Paces rides are a Princeton Free Wheelers tradition. Anti-All-Paces Rides are a Tom tradition.

Given the weather forecast and the usual crowds that the All-Paces rides attract, Tom opted for an earlier start and a longer distance from Bordentown.

Tom, Ricky, Jack H, and I headed south into the thick haze of another sticky morning. We passed through Crosswicks, Jacobstown, Cookstown, Browns Mills, New Lisbon, and Buddtown before we stopped at the Vincentown Wawa.

Everything on me was soaking wet. It wasn't very hot -- only about 80 degrees -- but the humidity was over 70%. There was no shade to speak of. We parked our bikes in front and gathered on the side of the building. I slumped down against the wall with 32 ounces of some sort of almost-no-calorie lemonade and tried to eat some of the peanut butter sandwich I'd brought with me. It was 10:00 a.m; I wasn't hungry yet.

Our route home took us into Smithville, where the bridge has been out for-roughly-ever. As is our custom we went right up to it, having been able to get around the construction in recent attempts.

Not this time.

Behind the customary orange and white striped barriers was a concrete Jersey barrier, and behind that a chain-link fence that wrapped all the way around the site.

"We've been crossing over," Tom explained to a neighbor who was among a handful of walkers crossing the street from one side of the park to the other.

"We all have," she said, and told us that we could take the path through the park. We'd done that once before; Tom knew the way. I took pictures when we got to the other side.

I found myself counting the miles as we approached Bordentown. Tom and I were more wiped out than we normally are. Ricky and Jack H probably weren't because neither one of them ever gets wiped out.

"Can we get a breeze up in this bitch?" I asked as we dismounted in the parking lot. I was dripping again.

"Nope," Tom said. "Normally I'd have done a metric today, but not in this weather." We were 8 miles shy of one.

It was 12:00. Maybe the All-Pacers were still out on the road, or beginning to trickle back to the park. I was glad to be finished early.

It's more than 8 hours later now. I've taken a nap, which I normally don't do, and I'm strangely achy. A few ligaments are twinging too. Every summer I have to re-learn how much a heat wave takes out of me.

The weather is supposed to break on Friday. This weekend we'll be back to not having to worry about the heat index.