Lockdown Chronicles: Accidental Meetup

Assunpink Creek at Mercer County Park

17 May 2020

The wind was out of the south-southeast today. I headed into it, with a hazy idea of a route through the Assunpink WMA.

As I approached Mercer County Park I saw two cyclists turn in ahead of me. It's not as if I know every bike owner in central New Jersey, but sometimes I can guess. I caught up to them, pulled my mask over my face, and looked sideways.

"Hey, you two!"

I hadn't seen Terry and Gordon since well before the country went to shit.

"Hey!"

"Where are you headed?"

"West Windsor." They invited me to ride with them, so I did.

We took the bike path through the park. I darted ahead to give myself enough time to take the customary picture from the wooden bridge.

The water looked muddy in the sun, even though we hadn't had a soaking rain in a while.

The shady side was all the greens:

Despite having lived here for twenty years, I do not know my way around West Windsor. All the streets look the same. It doesn't help that half of them are some permutation of "Village" either. Maybe I'd been on some of them before. Who can tell? Almost every road had a bike lane, though, so kudos to West Windsor for that.

I met Terry back in 1998, when I first moved up here, at a gym that no longer exists. I met her again when I joined the Free Wheelers, and we've been friends ever since. We belong to the same gym again. Today we talked about whether or not we'd go back when it reopens. I have loads of strength training implements of torture at home now. Gonzo is pretty much welded to the fluid trainer. We have an elliptical cross-trainer and a dinky rowing machine. What I don't have at home is the impetus to push just that little bit harder when I'm surrounded by other people working hard. We're both hesitant to return until we know it's safe.

Terry led us past a field on one of the Village Roads (East).

I didn't know, until I got home and uploaded the photos, that I captured this winged beast in flight.

Terry wanted a picture for Strava. She took out her phone. Things can seem almost normal until the reality of  the lockdown creeps back in. She was about to hand her phone to me and then hesitated. "I can clean it off," she said. "I have alcohol wipes."

I didn't want to cause any stress. "I'll use my camera and send you the pictures," I said.

We took a little detour to the north side of the lake, where rowing center is. The parking lot was half full. There were boats on the water and people fishing from the dock. People walked and biked past us, all at a respectable distance from us and each other.

We wound up on one of the Village roads again, south of Old Trenton. It was loaded with potholes and slightly busy. I jumped ahead to get out of there faster, turning onto South Lane. I got another picture of Gordon and Terry as they approached.

We decided to go back through the park, if for no other reason than the tailwind. Anyone who rides around here knows one never has a tailwind through Mercer County Park. Cheryl and I used to call that stretch of road The Vortex. "This is our one tailwind of the year," I said.

So. Many. People! The parking lots were half full, which is to say at capacity. I've never seen it this crowded when there hasn't been an organized event or three going on (in other words, every weekend in the before times). The thing is, everyone was obeying the social distancing rules. Everyone.

I let the tailwind push me, stopping to get a picture of the half-house a couple of hundred yards off the road. With my zoom lens I tried for a picture of the plaque, because I have no idea what this house is.

I had to look it up just now. It's a "constructed ruin," whatever that is, of the Rogers House, whoever Rogers was.

On Youngs Road, I followed Gordon and Terry down a side road I've passed a million times and never noticed. There's an industrial park, a small office complex, and a Little League field. A quick hop onto a sidewalk and some gravel crunching landed us on the other side of the field and to a street in their neighborhood.

It's amazing how close to home I can ride and still wind up on a handful of streets I've never seen.

It was fun catching up with Gordon and Terry, and now I have a route for southeast wind days, too.

On a completely different subject, I grew up near a park that had loads of azalea bushes. I loved the colors. We had a few in our front yard as well. I decided that, when I grew up, I'd put as many colors of azalea in my yard as I could.  Well, here are three of them: pale pink, hot pink, and white. Behind the white one is a deep red one whose flowers are almost finished. Out of the frame, to the left, is another one, a paler pink. A sixth one is hogging up all the space between the garage and porch; it's a deep magenta. There are two more, pale purple, farther back in the yard. Both of those bloom in the spring and again in the fall. I don't have all the colors. Yet.