Fresh Oil Loose Stone

Locktown Road

31 August 2019

Tom promised an easy hill ride today. He delivered, more or less. The chip seal wasn't his fault. It's late August. Late August is chip seal season.

Tom, Jim, Ricky, Blake, and I started at Lambertville. His route was classic Hill Slug: Get out of the valley and stay on the ridge for as long as possible. Most of the getting out happened on Lower Creek Road, which is a double-barreled slog on an ordinary day. This morning we were greeted with a coating of chip seal so recent that there were still tire tracks from the heavy truck that laid the stuff down. (Near the top is the glassblowing studio where I had a couple of lessons. I slowed to look down the driveway, hoping I'd by chance see the artist and be able to tell him what I've gotten myself into. No such luck.) 

There was more chip seal and more climbing on Featherbed. Hammer is a climb too but at least the pavement was smooth.

Up on the ridge there are three roads with similar names: Oak Grove, Lower Oak Grove, and Oak Summit. As many times as I've been up there I can't tell one from the other. Today we were on Oak Grove first. I stopped for the barn, and in focusing on it, apparently missed seeing a fancy bike hiding in the grass.

I was trying to get a good picture of the turkey vulture on top of the silo.

He was less than cooperative, the ungrateful buzzard.

Every road up on the ridge looks something like this:

Two turns later we were on Oak Summit, which leads to the Sky Manor airport. There's a good view of Pennsylvania's hills from the top of the road:

We turned away from the airport, and away from Pittstown. Originally, Tom had planned to stop in Pittstown, but with Brew 362 a thing of the past, I had warned him that there's nothing else up there. So we were headed to Factory Fuel in Flemington instead. We turned east on Locust Grove, which gets jumbled into the Oak mix by looking exactly like them.

Allen's Corner doesn't look much different, except that, facing east, it goes downhill, out of the Delaware watershed and toward the Raritan watershed.

We went downhill some more, including on Old Croton Road, also newly chip sealed. Tom took us into Flemington on a few back streets. We ordered our goodies from a pair of tattooed baristas and sat outside.

I was facing the parking lot, where a terrified asshat advertised that he's a terrified asshat.

Tom, contemplating a new camera, played with mine. He took a picture of Jim taking a picture of me that was so bad* I asked him to delete it.

I took the camera back.

We doubled back to Old Croton, going all the way to the top this time. Every time a car went by it would kick up a cloud of chip seal dust, which, as I write this, is still slowly working its way out of my lungs.

There was a blacktop reprieve for a few miles because we were on Route 12. But then we reached Locktown, where the chip seal started up again.

We passed through Sergeantsville and went south on Rittenhouse. When we reached Buchanan we were met with so much gravel that we all stopped. It would have made a good picture, and I tried, but this was the moment that my memory card** decided to glitch. Descending in loose chip seal is a buzz kill.

After that, though, we made it to Lambertville without any more surprises, and a little tailwind too.

(*Long-time readers will already know that I have major body image issues. I don't need a photo that shows me slouching into my body fat shared with the outside world. I don't need the general public staring at my gigantic, shiny forehead. If I'm on my bike, leaning into my handle bars, hiding behind a helmet and glasses, with only muscle showing, that's okay. If I'm just uglying around, it's not okay. Jim was gracious enough to remove the offending photos.)

(**I spent the drive home hoping that it wasn't my camera, my merely months-old camera, that was defective. The first thing I did was put the card into my laptop to see if it would read; it did. Uh-oh. The next thing I did was dig out an old card and put it into the camera. That read. Whew! So I picked up a new memory card, this one a micro SD that slides into an adapter, and it reads just fine. Crisis averted. And for those who think I have some sort of techno-curse, Good Dog, my new GPS, is close to perfect.)