Hill Slug Chronicles: Autumn Slugs

Delaware and Raritan Canal Towpath at Washington Crossing

2 November 2025

Bear with me here. We're going all the way back to October 11. I'd listed a ride from Lambertville to Upper Black Eddy. There was rain in the forecast, supposedly for later in the day, in bands, as a hurricane churned offshore.

It was dark when I woke up, the sort of dark that should tell a leader to cancel a ride. It was 7:00 and I emailed everyone that the ride was on. By 8:00 a.m. there was drizzle. It was too late to cancel when I loaded the car 15 minutes later and got wet. As I drove towards Lambertville, the rain stopped.

While we were getting our bikes ready, the rain caught up to us. It wasn't much, but it was cold. We would be riding in and out of rain bands all day. If the temperature had been 30 degrees warmer, I'd have shrugged it off. But being wet in 50-degree weather is miserable. I wavered. Then the rain came down harder. I called off the ride.

Tom, Martin, Rickety, Pete, and Brad decided to ride anyway. Roger said he'd drive back towards home in PA somewhere and climb some hills over there. Our Jeff, Heddy, and I had a different plan: coffee.

We walked south on Main Street from the CVS parking lot. People had already begun to decorate for Halloween, which is a big deal in Lambertville. We stopped at the Lambertville Bakehouse first. They don't do cortados, so we bought some pastries and walked toward Union Coffee. Sometimes we had our umbrellas up, and Heddy would say the guys would be getting wet now. Union was crowded and didn't have decaf, so we went along to Lambertville Trading Company, which had decaf, pastries, and seating.

We strolled up Union Street, looking at the Halloween decor. At the end of Union, in the same building Luminary Coffee is in, was a nameless cavern of antique house bits. Doors. Doorknobs. Stained glass windows. Lead-paned windows. Intricately-carved moldings. Lampshades with maps on them (on one I found the town I grew up in, which was creepy because my childhood sucked). A chandelier from Murano. All were for sale. "I'd need a bigger house," Heddy said.

Right around then, I got a text from Tom.

Ah, the beloved middle finger photo. He said they'd "managed to stay dry" so far. Heddy didn't believe him.

That was Saturday. Sunday was the big Covered Bridges ride that all the mountain goats register for. I didn't. Heddy and Our Jeff did, but now the forecast was for a washout. They wanted to drive up to Tinicum Park to pick up the event shirts they'd paid for. Heddy mentioned that she used to get breakfast at the Frenchtown Cafe when she lived up that way.

When they included me, perhaps inadvertently, on a text chain about Sunday breakfast, I FOMO'd my way in. Jack wanted nothing to do with getting up early to drive an hour to breakfast. Our Jeff picked me up, then Heddy.

The sky was dark again, and this time there was wind, too. But there was no rain all the way up past Frenchtown. The parking lot wasn't packed the way it was the one time I did the Covered Bridges ride, but there were plenty of cars there, and a lot of people who looked sort of miserable getting their bikes ready.

We had a decent breakfast at the Frenchtown Cafe. Too bad it's so far away. Or maybe it's a good thing it's so far away.

As we were walking back to the car, Heddy saw a poster on a telephone pole. "Cat show at the Art Barn," it said, and gave an address. Cat show? Well, why not? It was a few blocks away.

But the joke was on us. The "cat show" was in a tiny barn, and it was all cat art. Bad cat art.

However, it made our day. The owner of the property, a painter whose work lined a fence behind his house, was a chatty fellow. Several other artists were setting up on the lawn. It was location where anyone could, for a small fee, set up and sell their work.

The barn itself was plastered with art and sculpture, and next to it was a tiki bar that was equally loaded. I've enlarged the photo here, but click on it to zoom in even more. I dare you.

When the rain came, it was much later in the day. I was too busy blogging about a spider to write about the Frenchtown weirdness.

The following Saturday was No Kings Day. Tom wanted to lead an off-the-books ride from Freehold to Sandy Hook, but that would have gotten me home too late to attend the demonstration in Princeton. Instead, I joined Our Jeff on the Lawrence-Hopewell Trail. The weather was perfect.

We started at Village Park in Lawrence Township. There are two parking lots there, which led to some confusion at the start of the ride. I'd come in on Fozzie from home and had never entered from Yeager Road before. One rider was in the other lot. We found him and wound our way onto the LHT.

I stopped for pictures at Rosedale Park. This isn't Rosedale Lake; it's a smaller one to the east of it.

The new trail through Maidenhead Meadows was completed a few months ago. This was my first time on it. The elevated boardwalk goes on for almost a mile over the forested wetlands.

A week later, I led a hilly ride. I'd listed it at 5:00 p.m. the night before and got all of two takers. One was a new guy. The other was Pete. We went to Lambertville.

On Rocktown Road, Pete stopped to take a picture of a line of trees across a field. We might have been at peak fall color, and it didn't seem like much.

At Mount Airy, there was a lack of the usual bovinity.

On Alexauken Creek Road, we stopped at the washed-out bridge.

On our way to Union Coffee (Pete calls it "Onion"), I only stopped once for a Halloween decoration photo. Click and zoom in for details.

We were using a route I'd come up with in the spring. It takes us down Woodens Lane from Route 518.

I was tired when I joined Tom's ride from Etra Park the next day. It's been a stressful month, what with my day job, a bundle of annual doctor's appointments, work being done on the house (with me painting 7 doors and door frames as part of the project), and glassblowing (more on that eventually). So I wasn't at my best on our ride to Farmingdale. That I made it back without bonking was reward enough.

There was a bit of fall color at Etra Lake.

Still stressed and way too tired, I listed a Saturday ride on Thursday afternoon. I limit registrations to 10 people because any more than that becomes a chore to corral. By Friday mid-day, the ride was full. One Caboteer asked if I could let him in. I edited the event to allow one more rider. Another Caboteer wanted in. I upped the limit again. In the evening, one more person asked to join. I said no. Twelve was more than I wanted already. Then guilt set in, and I texted the rider back, telling them to register now. Seonds later, the spot was taken by someone else. I edited the listing yet again, to 15, and the rider jumped in. That was 14, and I closed the registration for good.

With a group that big, I get strict about stopping to wait for everyone. I didn't expect to be stopping for photos, though. But when we reached Orchard Road, with fall colors popping and the expansive view of the Highlands to the north, I had to hit the brakes. I wasn't the only one with a phone out.

We spent a few minutes figuring out which hill was which. "That's Stanton Mountain," someone said of the roundest lump to the right. Behind it were the hills of Cokesbury.

I took a circuitous route to get to Sergeantsville. The wind, remnants of Thursdays's nor'easter, was pushing at us from the west with 20 mph gusts. I tried to route us out of it as much as possible, but I have a reputation to protect. At least we had help getting back up to Mount Airy (there were cows this time but I didn't stop) and over Dinousaur Hill. And I had a tailwind home from Twin Pines too.

Somehow I managed to keep everyone together. Even the speedy boys behaved. Still, next time I list a ride, I'm tempted to write "ten means ten" in the description.

Today's towpath ride was the perfect recovery from all that. We started at the NJ Washington Crossing park.

Our leader likes to walk his bike up the ramp from the lot to the towpath. I like to ride it as a warmup and and agility test. There are two tight corners. Getting up there early gave me time to take pictures of the towpath facing north. I thought peak color might have been last week, but this weekend was pretty good too.

We left the towpath in Lambertville to catch the Halloween decorations. I was suprised by how little was left only 2 days later.

North of Stockton, a bit past Prallsville Mills, I pulled over to get pictures of the Wickecheeoke Creek

(of Lower Creek Road fame).

It drains into the Delaware River on the other side of the bridge.

Our halfway point was Bulls Island. We spent some time on the pedestrain bridge, which felt unusually bouncy. Maybe it's always bouncy and I haven't noticed it before.