Rowlf Likes Rollers

Island Road, Columbus, NJ

23 July 2017

Rowlf needed some road time. I drove him to Allentown this morning for the 8:00 a.m. start from Bruno's. While it was cooler than yesterday, the air was far more humid. Chris led me, Joe, Mike, and Chad south in an almost drizzle.

I set Son Of the $500 Piece of Shit to record, which is the one thing I can trust Garmin to be good at. Chris had only a vague idea of where he wanted to go; I had no idea where we were once we got out of Allentown. We crossed 206 and 130 a bajillion times. I had the vague sense that we were near the Delaware River.

I knew this because we were hitting a lot of rollers in the shade. I didn't build Rowlf to be a climber, but, despite his weight, he's not bad at going up the little stuff. 

What Rowlf really wants to do is descend. Rowlf and I have fewer than 500 miles together, yet on a downhill I feel more secure on this 1986 Colnago steel frame than I do on any of my other bikes, including Kermit, who has something like 38,000 miles with me. If I were to have the legs to carry Rowlf to the top of Acadia's Cadillac Mountain, I bet I could ride back down that scary part without getting the heebie-jeebies. If he didn't weigh a metric ton (and if I didn't), I'd put a triple and MTB gearing on him and see what he could do up in Warren County.  For now, though, Rowlf is my recovery ride bike.

We took our rest stop early, at a 7-11 only 18 miles in. I'm never hungry that early, and I dislike 45 to 50-mile rides that make their one and only stop at fewer than 25 miles (Winter Larry, I'm looking at you and Battleview Orchards). I drank some orange juice but I got hungry on schedule at 25 miles anyway.

While there wasn't much of a chance of rain in the forecast, the sky hung heavy over us nearly the entire time.

I stopped for my first pictures on Oxmead Road, about 23 miles in.

I stopped again about 3 miles later, on Gilbert Road, because the sky was doing a drama thing:

I seem to be snapping a lot of sky like this in 2017.

On Island Road we came upon a flower farm. Mike stayed back with me as we watched the water spray.

The corn in Burlington County is ahead of the corn in Warren County. 

Here, the silk is already browning.

The smell of corn flowers was powerful again today, inching closer to nauseating.

A few miles from the end of the ride, Joe and Mike peeled off to go look at another flower grower. I almost followed them but I had second thoughts and doubled back to catch up to Chris and Chad. I was wet, sticky, hungry, and a little tired. Chris then peeled off too, needing to get some food into himself before he rode home. I guided Chad back into Allentown.

As is becoming custom, here is Moxie, posing by dozing while I unload my wallet, phone, and camera from my soaking wet jersey:

I'll Meet You Guys Down by the Pope.

Asbury-Bloomsbury Road

22 July 2017

Tom, full of Guiness and Gatorade, less than a day back from a business week in Dublin, did, indeed, make it to the parking lot behind the Bridge Cafe in Frenchtown, to lead us to Asbury, Warren County.

He'd adapted my route from last summer, and I'd edited out the software incompatibility bobbles in the route to minimize Garmin implosions. We were going past the Blue Army Shrine and I wanted to route us up the curving, hilly driveway. Ridewithgps wouldn't let me do it. Certain that Son Of the $500 Piece of Shit would never recover from such a large course diversion, I dutifully created my standard 3 x 5 card cue sheet.

The parking lot was only half full at 8:30 a.m.

We were the inner circle of the Hill Slugs and Insane Bike Posse -- me, Tom, Jim, and Jack H -- plus Blake, who is a hardcore Slug only when we start close to the Delaware River. 

"I'm definitely today's ride canary," Tom said. He wasn't sure what energy stores he'd have and planned on being conservative. That put him in the back with me because that's how I ride every day.

We started with two miles along the river before we climbed out of the valley. Somewhere in there Jack got a phone call and we stopped. The sun was shining through the leaves in a field of soybeans.

As we trundled along Everittstown Road, I rode up to Jim and, pondering our impending GPS doom, asked him if he'd ever learned this song as a kid:

No you can't get to heaven

On roller skates

'Cause you'll roll right by

Them pearly gates

No you can't get to heaven on roller skates

'Cause you'll roll right by them pearly gates

I ain't gonna grieve my lord no more

"No!"

No you can't get to heaven

On a pizza pie

'Cause the lord he is

A kosher guy

"HA!"

No you can't get to heaven on a pizza pie

'Cause the lord he is a kosher guy

I ain't gonna grieve my lord no more

"We learned 'I ain't gonna study war no more' in camp," he said. "It was a call-and-response thing."

"Yep."

No you can't get to heaven

On the Frankford El

"I know where this is going."

'Cause the Frankford El

Goes straight to Frankford

"HA!"

(You pretty much have to have grown up in Philadelphia to know what this verse means. Maybe you heard it in the Hooters paean to the city in "Beat Up Guitar," which got airplay for about five seconds. If you don't know who the Hooters were, they were the band who wrote and played behind Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time." If you don't know that song, I can't help you.)

If you get to heaven

Before I do

Just dig a hole

And pull me through

If I get to heaven before you do

I'll fill that hole with sawdust and glue

I ain't gonna grieve my lord no more

Moose, having grown up outside of Philly, knew what the El verse was all about, but he'd learned the last verse a different way:

If I get to heaven before you do

I'll drill a hole and spit on you

Those South Jersey kids are mean.

We turned onto Schoolhouse and I explained, "I have another verse for today."

No you can't get to heaven

On a Cannondale

'I you try to climb

Your Garmin will fail

No you can't get to heaven on a Cannondale

'Cause your GPS will surely fail

I ain't gonna grieve my lord no more

By the time we crossed over 78 into Clinton, Jim had another verse:

No you can't get to Frenchtown

I sang along.

(No you can't get to Frenchtown)

From Mary's shrine

(From Mary's shrine)

'Cause the GPS

('Cause the GPS)

Won't draw the line

(Won't draw the line)

No you can't get to Frenchtown from Mary's shrine

'Cause the GPS won't draw the line

I ain't gonna grieve my lord no more

Harmony! 

There's something about Tom's rides that invites song parodies. At least he wasn't the subject this time.

Tom's entrance to Warren County differed from mine, and his approach involved a winding, badly-paved descent on Dutch Hill Road that last year had me gripping my brakes so hard I'd blown out my front tube. Blake remembered it.  Tom and Jack coasted on down. Jim, Blake, and I stopped at the top of the steepest section to let our rims cool off.

I let loose first and got to the bottom with my tires intact.

I know it looks flat. It's not. The final curve back there is 16.6%.

After that, Tom turned onto a street that wasn't on our route. We called him back.

Rymon Road felt like the top of the world. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't get the glare out of my pictures. The air was full of haze and my camera doesn't have a modern number of megapixels.

Then there was the Blue Army Shrine. I was the only one in our group raised without religion. Jim nearly missed becoming a priest. Several yards past the gate my GPS, known already as being in cahoots with the devil, razzed its dissatisfaction.

Having been to Spain and Italy, I've seen my fair share of crosses. This is one of the most jarring artistic representations I've seen:

As Jim and I were climbing the rest of the hill to the shrine, Tom was making his way back down. "I'll meet you guys down by the pope," he said.

"Okay!"

I hadn't gotten close enough to the shrine last year to realize that the whole thing is outdoors.

The vantage point from the top gave a view through the haze of the cross and a leaping guy.

Oh, oops. I think that's a crucified Jesus, not a leaping guy. I'm such a heathen.

We rejoined Tom, Jack, and Blake under a tree down by the pope, and wound our way back to Mountain View road, where our Garmins found the course again with no trouble.

"Yay, Garmin!" I called out.

We turned south on Asbury-Broadway Road. I kept looking back across the corn for a glimpse of the shrine through the haze in the distance.

Further on, the guys were waiting for me and Blake. I scooted across the road again to catch the sunlight on the tassels of corn. The hot air was thick with the smell of corn flowers. At first the smell is pleasant. After fifty miles, it's nauseating; I fully expected to be nauseated by the end of the ride.

Tom said, "Laura's gonna be one of those people with a million cats and her camera."

Probably not. My pictures still suck. What you're seeing here is my best attempt to massage out the haze by cropping away the sky and dropping the gamma.

Too bad; the road curves away to the left and drops down. Behind the hay is a valley and then the hills rise again. I didn't like the haze and power lines, though, so this is what you're getting.

Michael H and his group were just leaving the Asbury Coffee Mill when we arrived. He and I talked PennEast again, because that's what we do when we see each other now.

Inside, near the urns of Homestead coffee (Guatemalan Bourbon and Dead Man's Brew -- both worthy, and Ethiopian decaf -- why bother?), was the truth:

We sat at a table surrounded by photographs of rock musicians, including Cyndi Lauper.

True to Homestead custom, the ice coffee includes coffee ice cubes, which I dumped into my water bottle rather than let go to waste.

We rolled out of Asbury towards Bloomsbury. 

There's a murky spot in ride leading when the roads are familiar-ish, but not completely familiar, where one remembers the handful of roads one has been on and not the new roads one means to be on at the moment. Tom was in that murky spot today, and the jet lag wasn't helping. We had to keep him on track when he almost turned somewhere we'd been on previous Warren County runs.

Where Asbury-Bloomsbury Road meets Route 173 there is no road sign. Jim and I, following our Garmins and my cue sheet, turned right. Tom turned left.

"Tom!  Right turn!"  He kept on going, over the Musconetcong, towards Bloomsbury. We kept on our way, looking back to see if he and Jack had turned around. When we were certain they hadn't, I called him.

"I wanted to go through town," he said. He was on his way. We waited.

"Sometimes I do know where I am," he said when he and Jack got there. "The general store is a pizza place now." Ugh.

Soon the annoying hill on Winters was upon us. I saw no cows on Snyders this time; instead, we had miles of corn flower-heavy fields wafting at us. I wasn't sickened by the smell quite yet; a few more fields would probably put me over the edge.

As we neared River Road, Jim asked, "Are we coming into Bloomsbury?"

"No," I said. "That was back where that mess was."

Tom said, "If you'd gone with me you'd've saw it."

"Burrrrrrn!"

We went through a tunnel. My GPS lost the satellites. I never got the turn-by-turn directions back, but the route, a thick red line on the display, was there. This is an improvement over my first device, but still, we're 0 for 3 in perfect navigation. 

We got spread out as we followed the Delaware into Milford. Jim was stuck with the earworm I'd planted in the first few miles. 

I sneaked in a couple of river shots as we regrouped.

The haze made everything look green and fuzzy.

At home, Moxie posed, also fuzzy.

I can still smell the corn flowers.

Tom's Ad Hoc Ride, Saturday, July 22

20 July 2017

Musconetcong River

Tom will be leading a ride from Frenchtown to Asbury (Warren County) on Saturday. The route is approximately the same as the one I did last summer. As Blake said at the time, "This ride needs to be part of the canon." (The write-up is here.)

Check Tom's blog for details about the starting location and time.

Oldwicky Sticky

Higginsville Road

15 July 2017

I could have biked to the beach again. The Bicycle Club of Philadelphia had a ride from Etra today. Linda M led it, adapting one of Tom's routes into 75 miles at a pace that would have been too slow for some of my Slug regulars. Tom was planning to make the trip to Belmar and stay there. Plain Jim was on call and couldn't be that far from home. Had I gone I would have added miles from home to turn the ride into another century. But I've been to the shore twice already this year; the last time I'd want to do it again would be at the height of beach season. I was also scheduled to lead a ride of my own and didn't think I'd get enough takers if I were to offer to sign people in from my house.

So I planned a trip from Hopewell to Oldwick instead. 

When I left the house on Miss Piggy at 8:10 a.m. the roads had mostly dried out after two days of rain. The air was still wet, though. It was shaping up to be a sticky day. 

As I came around the bend at the top of Carter, a group of  at least a dozen cyclists emerged, headlights blinking, from Bayberry. Each was wearing a version of JDRF kit. I knew John K must be up at the front as their leader on a training ride for the upcoming fundraiser century in Saratoga Springs (donate here). He was. "Eroica!" I called out as I pulled up to him. He was taking them on a metric through the Sourlands. They went right on Cleveland; I went straight along Carter and down to the elementary school for the start of the ride.

I'd forgotten to map the turn into the parking lot as part of my route when I loaded it into the GPS. Son Of POS was not happy about that and razzed me as being off course. 

Ricky and Bob were at the start, as was a new guy, Prem. That made on Trek (Ricky) and three Cannondales (the rest of us); two Garmin 820s (me and Bob), a Lezyne (Ricky), and an iPhone (Prem). I was the only one with the route, though (also on a 3 x 5 card, of course), so there would be no comparative technology tests today. 

Son Of was already confused, telling me to turn on "Trail." I had to turn the screen off and on again to clear that mess when it didn't go away by itself halfway up the first hill on Greenwood Road. I'd seen this before, and so have others. There must be an error in Garmin's Hopewell maps. At least it wasn't telling me to get onto the D&R Canal towpath.

As we made our way down the other side of the mountain, we rode out of the clouds into sunlight. The view from Cider Mill was worth stopping for. As I snapped pictures, we talked about how a set of wheels can make a world of difference in how a bike feels.

Thanks to Gordon, I think I've worked out how to stop my camera from overexposing everything. I'm messing with shutter speeds now and it seems to be working.

Although I think I'm tending towards too dark now.

There were five or six dairy cows under a tree at the corner of Cider Mill and Amwell. I had a duty to fulfill.

We'd already crossed the Neshanic. We crossed the Raritan, Pleasant Run, and Holland Brook. Obeying my self-imposed moratorium on water pictures, I did not stop. There were no cows in Rockaway Creek on Mill Road; had there been, I would have had to stop, because the cow rule overrules the water rule if the cows are being photogenic. I did not stop on Rockaway Road, even though we crossed Rockaway Creek at least four times. I did not stop for the ponds on Hill and Dale.

We got to the Oldwick General Store at cyclist rush hour. The Morris Area Free Wheelers had taken over the place. Son Of tried to tell me I'd gone off course. I tricked Son Of by pointing Miss Piggy in the direction of the route.

You know it's a humid day when your gloves are soaking wet. I left them to dry on my saddle. They didn't.

Our ride back toward Hopewell was sunnier but still sticky. When we got to the top of Higginsville I stopped to get pictures. The view of the hills to the west is difficult to capture. Between the road and the hills, the field dips, rises, and dips again. Every photo I've taken of this spot has come out looking flat. Today I got lucky; the sun went behind a cloud at the right moment.

The trip to Oldwick always seems to take a full day; the trip back seems to take fifteen minutes. Or at least it did until we got close to the Sourland Mountain again. Prem didn't think he'd ever been up Lindbergh, so I gave him the lowdown before we started. I told him about the fire at Peacock's too. What's the point of having a new guy on a ride if you can't fill his ears with stories?

I needn't have worried about Prem at all. He floated up Lindbergh the same way he'd floated up every other hill on this ride.

As we approached Hopewell again, Son Of indicated that we'd be turning onto "Trail" in 2.4 miles. It dawned on me then that "Trail" is Broad Street and that I probably should email Garmin and tell them to fix their maps. Turning into the parking lot again sent Son Of into a confusion that it never quite recovered from as I headed home on the same roads I'd come in on. True to form, thinking I was going in for another 60-mile round trip to Oldwick, Son Of tried to route me backwards. To its credit, and much improved from the $500 Piece of Shit, the screen did not freeze, nor did it lose the route, nor did it tell me to make any nonexistent u-turns. And when I got home, the entire record was there.

I finished the ride with 81 miles and a strong desire to sleep in on Sunday. Later in the day Chris posted the Belmar ride online. They'd gone nearly 80 miles themselves.

A propos to nothing, here's Moxie in a box.