Hill Slug Chronicles: 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.