laura's goldilocks ride

 

Friend Laura OLPH, among other club members, has a bike trip to, I think, Nova Scotia scheduled for next month. One of the days of the trip has a demanding hill, the like of which is not to be found in the Hill Slugs' usual riding area... and so to train, Laura has been scheduling club rides with all of the most demanding hills she can find that are not too inconvenient to include.

Good for her, I suppose, but that's not the way this old man (I'm almost 70) wants to ride, so I've been missing from her last umpteen rides. Evidently I'm not the only one; in her listing for today's ride, she wrote:

I talked Tom Hammell into letting me lead this scenic, social ride. Compared to what I've been listing lately, this one will be relatively easy, with approximately 50 feet of elevation gain per mile. 

And in a private communication, she hinted that she was looking to ride with some of Tom's regulars. Well, that was good enough for me; I was one of the first to sign up.

Laura called it a "Goldilocks ride", with the implication that it would be "just right", and it very nearly was. The distance and climb were much more to my liking than her other recent rides, and while the day was hot and a bit muggy, it was nowhere near as awful as recent days have been.

It was, of course, Tom H's route, so there was not just one...

...but two closed roads along the way.

Certain things are dependable; one of them is that there will be a closed road, a bridge out, or a path connecting different parts of the route, on one of Tom's routes. (The roads were, of course, impassable to cars, but posed no difficulty to those of us on bikes.)

We stopped and that Brooklyn Grill in Whitehouse Station, where we ran into (club president) Mike V and his wife Deb.

(Deb at left, Mike with the red-and-white cap under the sign.) They had considered coming out, but then the ride filled, and they didn't want to ask for an indulgence. They did ride with us part of the way back, and turned off when it was convenient to do.

Go see the ride page.

Laura indicates that sanity will return at the end of August. I wait, as the Catholics say, in joyful hope.