Belmar, NJ
3 August 2025
There was a haze around the moon when I stepped out of It's Nutts after Our Jeff's Wednesday evening ride. I pulled my dying camera out of my bike backpack. I could get the moon in focus or the haze around it, but not both.
I got in the car and checked my email.
Tom: "Saturday's weather looks like it is going to be one of the best days of the year. Unless you have a better idea I was going to do a ride from Etra. We can either go to Farmingdale OR for a longer ride(67mile) we could actually got to Belmar and back. Let me know what you think and I will list the ride."
Me: "If you do Belmar I might have to make it a century, which I’m not ready for. Lemme think on it."
Me, an hour later: "Okay. I done thunk on it. Go ahead and list a flat ride, your choice of destination. I might bike into Etra regardless because it’s an annoying drive from Lawrenceville."
Tom, the next morning: "Okay, I think I want a long ride on Saturday so we will probably go to Belmar."
Tom, at Etra Park on Saturday morning: "I baited you. I knew you'd want to do a century."
I wasn't trained for a hundred miles. Three things made me decide to try: First, I knew that I could get 100 relatively flat miles if I rode from home to Etra. Second, the weather would be perfect. Third, I hadn't done a century since 2023, and both of those were miserable affairs. I'd had all my bikes' stems adjusted since then. It was time to give Janice another chance.
Martin, who claimed he wasn't trained either, started with me. Knowing Tom's route was a mile or two shorter than my usual one, we took the long way around to Baker's Basin. I call this "front-loading." Martin says "Griffing it up" can only apply to adding extra miles at the end. So, by front-loading, we arrived at Etra 15 minutes before the official start with a bit over 17 miles.
Jack H met us on his bike as we came up Cedarville Road. He'd wanted extra miles, he explained, but not a hundred.
I like Tom's route better than mine. It gets the rollers out of the way first. The temperature was in the mid-70s, the air was dry, and the sun was out. A light wind blew out of the northeast. We don't get many days like this, let alone in August.
I made sure to stay in the small ring. A rule I've had since my early century days is to ride the first half as if I was pedaling air. Today, I decided that if I fell off the back while pedaling air, so be it. Once in a while I did, but I always caught up.
Somewhere after the hard rollers on Sweetmans Lane, we passed a farm advertising "baby goats for sale."
"Baby goats are called 'kids,'" I said to John K. "But they can't put that on a sign."
We took part of the Edgar Felix Bikeway when we got near Manasquan. It's been repaved since the last time I was there, when it was definitely bumpy. This time it was smooth. We rode north along the beach to Belmar. There was far less chaos and traffic than I'd expected for this time of year.
John K and I went into the Dunkin Donuts in Belmar. When we came out, we learned that we'd missed a parade of MAGA losers in a trio of fascist-flag-bearing pickup trucks parading their insecurity down Ocean Avenue. "What are they afaid of?" I wondered. People like me?
"No coffee?" I asked Heddy.
"Does Dunkin Donuts make a cortado?"
Fair point.
The beach was crowded by the water. I tried to take pictures of the open sand instead.
The sun was so bright I couldn't see what I was aiming at when I blindly pointed the lens at gull tracks.
Tom led us out of Belmar by taking the wrong way up a one-way street for half a mile or so. I'm sure we pissed off all the drivers we passed.
I made sure to keep eating, hungry or not. I'd had a lot of salty food the day before. I'd packed a baggie of pickles. I was determined not to get a cramp. As we approached our second rest stop at mile 72, I wasn't cramping and my back felt fine.
We rested our bikes outside of the Dunkin Donuts in Freehold. Across the lot was a Panera. Heddy went that way in search of a cortado. I followed. She had to explain to the server how to make a cortado. We waited a good ten minutes, but the drinks were worthy.
Between Freehold and Etra are rollers. I told Tom I'd be taking it easy. I stayed towards the back. The last three miles were on Disbrow Hill Road. Jack H jumped ahead, Heddy and John K in tow. John thought the better of it halfway through. "I don't know this area at all," he explained. "I thought, 'What am I doing?'"
We milled about in the parking lot for a bit. Then I said to Martin, "We should go, before we change our minds."
We had 84 miles. If I took the most direct way home, we'd need to Griff it up at the end. Instead, I decided to take Allens Lane from Windsor-Perrineville Road. I figured that would get us some more distance and we could avoid the bump-bump-bump of Windsor on the way back.
I was right about the distance, but wrong about the bumps. At the end of Allens, I turned right, and we were back on Windsor Road. Had I turned left, we'd have had to make an immediate right, then go a little ways to reach Gordon Road. That would have given us slightly more distance. As it happened, I rolled into my driveway with 100.1 miles. Martin had a few tenths more. Ridewithgps Griffed it up to 100.3.
It wasn't my fastest century. It might even have been my slowest. That's fine with me. I've finished 100-mile rides and felt sick. I've finished 100-mile rides and been unable to move for hours. I've finished 100-mile rides and been jangly for the rest of the day. This time, none of those things happened.
And my back didn't hurt!
A few hours later, I signed up for Ron M's towpath ride to Bristol and put Fozzie (the gravel bike) in the car.
In the morning, I didn't feel stiff. I was hoping for a relaxed recovery ride.
Ron didn't post the route, which would help keep us together. Getting to Bristol is tricky. I'd only done it once, maybe twice, before.
We started from Lower Ferry Road in Ewing and went south towards the Calhoun Street Bridge. Instead of staying on the towpath to Calhoun Street, Ron sent us down a hill, through a residential area with a giant Victorian house painted in shades of orange (I ought to have taken a picture!), then up a screened-in pedestrian overpass that crossed Route 29. We rode through a park that was empty save for three people walking. The path ended at Trenton Water Works.
Things got a bit gnarly as we had to make our way up Calhoun Street with neither a sidewalk nor a shoulder. (Now that I'm looking at a map, I think this convoluted route was probably the safest.)
We walked across the bridge, whose railings were loaded with spider webs. I took pictures of the water because my dying camera has never been good at macro photography, and, anyway, the spiders were all tucked away for the day.
There was a building with a bathroom on the Morrisville side. I took a picture of Trenton with the sun in an unflattering position.
Martin, meanwhile (yes, he survived the century feeling well enough too), posed his gravel bike to match the sign and the purple loostrife on the path.
Purple loostrife in an invasive plant. Morning glory is invasive too. But they sure do look pretty together!
We followed the towpath south to Bristol, riding next to and under the northeast corridor tracks, Bristol Pike, and I-95. I remembered some of it from the last time. The canal looked as if it had been cleaned up.
Ron took us off the path into the town, where we stopped at a sculpture commemorating Lincoln's speech from a train car and explaining that his funeral train ran through here too.
There was also a mural memorializing the origin of the
Bristol Stomp. I was today years old when I learned about the Bristol Stomp. Silly me, when Our Jeff started to explain, I thought he meant Bristol, England!
Our rest stop was on Mill Street, where Caffe Giovanni is across from Papa's Pretzel Place. Decisions, decisions. I followed heddy to the former, where we ordered macchiatos and ate a pastry that looks like a scone and a croissant had a baby with nutella inside. It's not the sort of thing I generally eat or like, but they'd just come out of the oven and they smelled sooooo gooood. To avoid FOMO, I bought a pretzel across the street and put it in my pocket.
In the tree outside of the pretzel shop was a luxury squirrel feeder and a handful of glass and metal hot air balloons.
I think mine are better.
We rode down to the wharf to look at the river. I didn't think to search for where the canal met the Delaware.
On our way back out, I took a picture of the
Grundy Mill tower. I used to look at it from the train when I commuted to work in Philly. There's a park in front of it now. We didn't ride through it this time.
We were back on the towpath when my rear tire went flat. It took a few of us to find the shard of glass. I let others seat the tube and tire, since I'm conveniently allergic to rubber. That went well enough, but when it came time to get the wheel back on, everything went sideways.
I can, and do, put rear wheels on myself. I'm not great at it, but I do it. Now, with so many people watching, I was messing it up. I asked for help, but nobody who stepped forward was any better than I was. I even got the chain to kink, which is a new low for me. I ended up stepping away for a few seconds to calm down. In the end, I pretended nobody was watching and got the wheel back on.
That wasn't the end of the troubles, though. We could not get the through-axle skewer to catch. Over and over again we tried, with people squeezing the stays while I turned the skewer. Nothing we did worked. We could see the threads reaching the drive side, but they wouldn't go through. It was as if the skewer were too short. That didn't make sense, because I'd changed a flat on this wheel before (by myself!), and had been riding it for a while since its last tune-up.
Al P didn't want me to ride the bike anywhere. I figured I could see how far I'd get with the skewer mostly in. Having lived with steel frames that had horizontal dropouts, I knew that the worst that would happen would be that the wheel would start to slide out and I'd grind to a halt.
So I pushed the skewer in as far as it would go, then cautiously pedaled forward. When I reached the next intersection without incident, the group was following me.
Hopping a curb, the skewer moved, and I had to dismount to slide it in again. At this point, everyone was in front of me. I hustled, cautiously, to where Heddy and Dave H were waiting. We missed the turn off of Bristol Pike onto the path. Had I not been looking left at an intersection half a mile later, I would not have seen the rest of the group crossing the street on the path a few hundred yards down the road. We ended up in the middle of the pack.
The dumbest part of the path, all of which is considered a state park, is where it runs through the front of a big box center with Home Depot as an anchor. This is where, following Chris C, the group disappeared behind us. I stopped and waited, chatted with a fellow who saw the grease on my hands, surmised that I'd been fixing a flat, and asked me how to get to the waterfront from the path. I pleaded ignorance, then turned around to find out what was holding everyone up.
Someone else had gotten himself a flat, and this one took even longer to fix than mine did. I felt vindicated, and also hungry. How many Free Wheelers does it take to fix a flat? How many you got?
While we were waiting, I took a picture of my skewer. Here, it's in, but not all the way.
We got moving again and made it all the way back to Morrisville without incident. While people used the bathroom, I leaned Fozzie against a tree and took another picture of the Trenton skyline. This time, the light was better.
Martin suggested we stay on the PA side to the Scudder Falls Bridge, which we could ride over, then take the NJ side towpath back to Ewing. It would add miles, but we could stay on our bikes.
At first I thought it would be best, given my axle situation, if I took the short way home. But I decided to follow Martin's group, which was now the majority of us. As I pulled out, the shifting got funky. I looked down and saw the skewer working its way out, probably from my having leaned the bike against that tree. I dismounted, slammed the skewer back in so that it no longer protruded, and hammered to catch up to everyone else. This was not shaping up to be the relazing ride I'd been hoping for. I had a headache.
It took what seemed like too many miles to finally reach the bridge. At the base, I did another skewer slam, just to be on the safe side. When we got across, I did it again. The cement bridge, it turns out, is not the most forgiving surface, and the skewer moved again. The gravel towpath, on the other hand, was softer, and after slamming the skewer in one last time, I made it all the way back to Lower Ferry withoug incident. Al was waiting in his car to make sure I'd made it back alive.
I drove straight to Hart's, shoving the pretzel, which was sticking to the bag, into my mouth, chunk by chunk. I drank the last of my water, thankful that I'd decided at the last minute this morning to pack two bottles.
Ross diagnosed the problem in minutes. With the bike up on the stand, he checked the skewer size and threads, then noticed that the derailleur hanger was a little loose. Once he tightened the mounting screw, the skewer slid in and caught. The derailleur, he explained, was catching the threads an not allowing the skewer to move any further.
On the drive home, I imagined what would have transpired had Plain Jim been on the ride. He'd have noticed the loose hanger for sure. I could picture him saying, "I don't like that. I don't like that at all," and, with the turn of a tiny Allen wrench, solving the problem before it became one.
I rode the bike across the yard after hosing it off, to make sure things were working. They seemed to be until I tried to move the pedals backwards to put more lube on the chain. I'm taking the bike back to the shop tomorrow. I'm too chicken to try a rear derailleur adjustment at home. It's my fault for being so chatty that neither of us remembered to run the gears to make sure things were properly aligned. I assumed that he'd put it back the way it was, but now I'm thinking the screw must have been a little loose for a while, including at the bike's last tune-up two winters ago.
Whatever. Having to take the bike to the shop immediately after work gets me out of the temptation to ride Miss Piggy to work tomorrow. I really do need a rest day.
No comments:
Post a Comment