Ride to Chocolate, Chocolate to Ride

Cocoluxe!

8 July 2017

The $500 Piece of Shit's replacement, Son of the $500 Piece of Shit, arrived in the mail on Friday. I loaded in Tom's Cocoluxe route (he does one every summer) and hoped for the best.

For most riders, Cocoluxe is a destination. Not for us. We start there, around the corner in a park. The trick is to get up to Gladstsone early enough to buy pastries before the ride and stick them in a cooler in the car, or to stop there after the ride, or maybe both. I do the early purchase thing; by noon a lot of the best-looking chocolate whatevers are gone. And while I've never been disappointed with anything I've bought there, what they have on offer doesn't work well for me as a mid-ride snack.

Tom has run his Cocoluxe ride for a handful of years. Although it always follows a similar path, it's never the same route twice. Sometimes he does the route in reverse. Sometimes he tweaks the route to put us on new roads. 

On the wall in the upstairs hallway I have county maps of Mercer, Hunterdon, Warren, and Somerset. Somerset wound up behind a door in low light. There's no room for Morris. What little I've ridden in those counties is better represented on the curled edges of taped-together NJ Bikemaps, hung low by the stairs. Needless to say, these aren't the places I find myself staring at while I'm brushing my teeth. Anything north of Califon or Peapack and Gladstone remains largely terra ingognita.

POS Junior glitched as soon as we turned onto Main Street. The screen froze on the first cue. In retrospect I'm not sure if I properly started the route in the first place; when I looked at the record later, the starting point was two miles in, exactly where I'd restarted the computer. I'll give Garmin a tentative pass on this one. Meanwhile I've turned off the automatic wireless upload. I suspect strong stray signals don't play well with the GPS when it's trying to navigate; I've seen this before. 

Bob N, who has a new-ish model the same as mine, was eager to compare his less than seamless experience with mine. What we decided was that Garmin devices come with a host of bugs, and that my original Piece of Shit had extras. What we navigated today was the usual Garmin shit, like pulling into a parking lot for a rest stop and being told we were off course, and coming in too fast to the next turn so that we were riding ahead of our cues.

Anyway, Tom led us off with a hill, because there's no avoiding that to get out of Gladstone alive. Pottersville Road is one of the prettier ones in northern Hunterdon County. With a certain amount of restraint, and also because the best stuff was on the other side of the road, I didn't stop for pictures.

I did on Hill and Dale Road, though, because it's been a few years since I've taken a picture of the pond.

The guys got ahead of me.  When I caught up I apologized for taking so long. "I always have to take pictures of water," I said. "No more water pictures today."

I stopped again instead for hay bales strewn along the side of the road.

We regrouped at the end of the road at Rockaway:

This is the first time I've climbed Guinea Hollow with hearing aids in. After yesterday's rain, Rockaway Creek was running strong and loud. I had to stop.  I couldn't keep my promise even for three miles. (If you zoom in to the upper left, you'll see Bob and Tom around the bend.)

I stopped again a few minutes later.

OK. I wasn't going to take any more pictures of water for the rest of the ride. From now on I'd have to work on dry land.

We had a leisurely break at a Quick Chek on Route 206 in Chester. Tom warned us that there was at least one more big climb, a mile at 10% grade, towards the end. I'd been conserving my energy all along, so I was only a little bit tweaky when we set out for the second half.

It didn't help that Tom, anticipating the big one, stopped for a Gu not too far out of the rest stop. I attempted a dry photo while he fueled up.

The big climb wasn't as bad as I'd feared because I took my time and spun in my granny gear. When we reached the top I wasn't sure if I'd been there before. It was all gated mansions set far back along narrow, curving driveways. He'd said that the descent would feel as if we could catch some air, and he was right. It wasn't bumpy, exactly; it was humpy in a way that would massively suck if one were to climb back up. Not until we reached a curve, where Tom let loose and I grabbed the brakes, did the road seem familiar.

The new part of the route was around Ravine Lake in Mendham, southeast of Gladstone. Through the trees to our left there was a large spillway. The center of the plume was cappucino brown, the sides bright white with spray. Behind the spillway was muddy lake water. There were no boats and nobody was fishing. I didn't stop for pictures because water.

The narrow road divided so that our direction was higher up. I doubled back to take a picture of a very faded sign hidden among the trees on the narrow lane: "divided highway ends."

I thought for sure that Son Of would lose the course when I turned around and turned around again. While the next cue was vague, the route hadn't been lost. Huzzah!¹

Too bad about the lake pictures though.

As luck would have it, and probably very near the same time we passed, Paul I, who can ride faster than most of us, write better poetry than any of us, and who actually knows how to use a camera, was taking pictures of Ravine Lake. While I have sworn off taking pictures of water, I haven't sworn off taking other people's pictures of water. So, here's Ravine Lake, in all of its muddy glory, courtesy of Paul:

We'll definitely have to go by the lake again, preferably in the fall, and next time we should stop for a closer look.

As for the Cocoluxe pastries, I brought home three chocolate mice (at least one, probably two, will go to the lab), one flourless chocolate cake-thingie (to be split between me and Jack), and a chocolate torte (also to be shared). I'm less looking forward to eating them than I am enjoying looking at them. It seems a shame to stick a fork into such artistry.

(1. "Huzzah!" is a word I learned in eighth grade English class. It was demonstrated to us by our ever-animated teacher² jumping through the doorway in loud proclamation. I rarely if ever use it. I'm not often in the position to leap through a doorway.)
(2. This would have been around 1980. Our teacher rode a bike to work. Affixed to the back was a bright orange flag on a tall pole³. It was distinctly eccentric, and if he hadn't been one of the school's favorite teachers, he'd have surely been labeled a weirdo.)
(3⁴. Remember those? Back in the day before we had kabillion-lumen, flashing LEDs and cameras ready to record every driver infraction? Back when banana seats were a thing?)
(4. David Foster Wallace⁵, eat your heart out.)
(5. I'm done.)