weekend off-road rides

 Above: the author, looking better than I ought. Thanks to Martin G for the photo.

 I have not posted often about rides this fall, mostly because I haven't gone on group rides, and my solo rides don't generally include anything interesting (even to me). 

When it gets this cold, we generally stay off the roads, and ride paths and trails to avoid the wind. (Sometimes, the wind-avoidance is successful.) I got invited on two such rides this Thanksgiving weekend. The first was a ride around the Lawrence-Hopewell Trail, led by Tom H. 

 That's not all of the folks who came; we were ten or eleven. The LHT is one of our regular winter rides, although we tend to do it only once per season (or maybe that's just the frequency that I go along). Our path wends through paved trail, clay-surface trail, along local streets, through parking lots and parks, and even through a private school. 

This crew had riders at a range of abilities. Some went off at their own pace; others slowed to ensure that nobody rode alone (partly because the LHT is not ideally marked, and it's easy to get lost). We swapped off on the riding-in-the-back duties.

We left from the Maidenhead Meadows lot (which was PACKED! Evidently, a number of folks had the idea of hiking or running part of the trail on this Thanksgiving Friday). Early in our route, we came upon a boardwalk, of considerable length (and apparently, newly-finished), over some wetlands along the route:

 The surface makes for a pleasant ride, and it protects the fragile surface below. There are other wooden bridges at other points along the route, but nothing as long as this.

 You can see our route on the ride page.

 

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While we were on that ride (apparently), Laura OLPH apparently got the idea to do a D&R canal towpath ride from Washington's Crossing up to Lumberville and back. She sent out feelers later in the day to gauge interest, and there was enough to run the ride (we had five).

At the start:

 This is a simpler out-and-back route (although we did vary a couple of short sections on the way back, as you can see from the ride page). It felt much colder to me than the previous day (but I also find that, after about six or seven miles, I begin to acclimate to the temperatures). 

Some of our number stopped at the Prallsville Mills.

 I'd misread the planned length of the trip, and was grateful when we got to the store at Lumberton.

On the way back, crossing the bridge, we saw a huge flag. Martin G thought to stop for pictures, and I decided he had a good idea.

 Also on the way back, we found this abandoned railroad car, apparently a favorite stop for the local taggers.

 Martin G got this one, with my back in the foreground:

 And to end, one more from Martin G. I don't post pictures of myself in this blog, but when Martin gets these shots, I make a point of including them.

 Thanks, Martin.

rain, unexpected

 

When I planned this ride, there was no sign of rain in the forecast. (Literature students will recognize this opening as foreshadowing of a particularly heavy-handed kind.) When I left the house, the skies were lowering, but off to the northeast, and the weather in these parts usually blows in from the southwest. An d the phone weather app was still calling for cloudy, but no rain.

A couple weeks ago, I went on a ride with Tom H and his Insane Bike Posse. You didn't see a blog post about that one, because it was gruesome for me: I was weak and slow, partly because I hadn't eaten enough (but only partly). On that ride, the deli where Tom planned to break wasn't open at the time we got there (ad wouldn't be open for another hour); we rode six more demanding miles to another spot, where I ate enough to make up the deficit, but it was too late: I was still exhausted, and couldn't keep up. I finished, but there was no joy or healing in that ride.

So for this one, I chose a shorter route, and included in the description, "I'm not as strong or fast as I used to be, so I've shortened the route a bit." 

We went out of Veterans Park in Skillman. I had nine signed up, and two hangers-on who just showed up at the start.

 We headed up towards that Italian Bakery in Raritan that Eric H likes so much. On the way, droplets started to fall... We had two riders with flats prior to the stop, and I impressed one of them with my tire-changing prowess at roadside. Following that, we headed to the bakery in increasing rain.

 At the bakery, Mike V checked his weather radar, and initially thought we might skirt the bottom of the rain pattern, and not get too wet... and then decided no, we were probably going to get wet anyway.

I'm blaming the DOGE fiasco for firing all the federal weather-wallahs for the inaccurate prediction.

Wet we got. We shortened the already-abbreviated route. One rider appeared to be having trouble with the headwind (of COURSE there was a headwind in an unpredicted rainstorm), so Mike led the rest of the group back, and I stayed with the slower rider. The rain got into my glasses to the point they were nearly opaque, so I finally just put them in my pocket and rode without.

A couple of riders went off home on the way, and the rest talked in the parking to prior to leaving as if they'd had a good enough time. And the best part for me was that I wasn't nearly as crippled as I had been on Tom's ride a couple of weeks ago. I had eaten better, and it was a shorter ride... but I may simply be in better shape than I was then. (I'm 70, and it may be that I simply need to face the fact that I can't always do what I can sometimes do.)

Ride page. 

ride on a hot day

 You probably had the same feelings we did, when all that rain and whatnot predicted for yesterday, didn't actually appear. Instead, it was just a hot day, and you definitely could have gotten out for a ride, but by the time you decided the rain wasn't coming, it was already too hot to think straight. So you didn't get a ride in yesterday...

... and instead, you made sure you got out early today, because you knew it was going to be hot. I know, because I saw you: there were people out on their bikes before 7:00 am, when I was getting my pre-ride bagels and heading to the start at the Claremont school.

I had limited my club ride to fifteen, and then got a plaintive request to add one more (that I didn't have the heart to refuse), so I had sixteen registered... and then I had multiple cancellations this morning, mostly complaining about the heat and the distance ("I'm not doin' 40 miles in this!"). But 12 hardy riders came out (I know they're hardy, because they all actually finished, despite the unpleasant temperatures).

(I CANNOT get a good picture of Rachel, above. I have several awful pictures of her, but decency demands I keep them private.)

Four riders went off the front, and we didn't see them again until we got to the stop at Boro Bean. The rest of us kept together and kept an eye on one another, making sure nobody got too far behind (different riders were at the back at different times, suggesting that this group was decently well-matched). We went down to Princeton, through ETS, then up to Hopewell. 

At the Boro Bean:

Some of the bikes (not all ours) that were out today:

Regular readers will know I love bike pics.

And back. The ride after the stop was at a more reasonable pace, at least for the eight of us in the slower group. There were times when one or another of us was out of breath and suffering in the heat. It may be that, in deference to the heat and global warming, we may need to do shorter rides on these hot days. It's something I need to think about.

(And as I write this, there is rain, which was NOT predicted for today in this area.)

So what did you do today?

rain. wait... what?

I swear: I checked THREE weather sources before yesterday's ride: 1Weather (on the phone), the MSN Weather app, and The Weather 14 Days (the most pessimistic and likely to predict precipitation of the three), and ALL of them were saying, basically, "Yeah, go ahead and do the ride; ain't gonna rain today."

The Ramblin' Wrench Mobile Shop at the start location.

So it started to rain as I was driving to the start. When I got there, Dave H was waiting, and took out his phone and looked at the weather radar; we were in the middle of a cell that looked like it was gonna pass in about fifteen minutes. 

Soggy-lookin' setup huh?

Of my thirteen registrants, five were supposed to meet us along the route, and three of those texted me before the start to verify I hadn't cancelled. But it was only gonna rain fifteen more minutes, right?

I cut short my too-long pre-ride speech, and riders added warnings about riding on the wet shiny road paint and wet tar snakes. And off we went. 

And it just kept raining on us. Almost all the way until we got to Princeton.

I haven't done the ride to Princeton in a while, and hadn't used this particular route, with a real-estate tour of northern Princeton, in years, I warned people that going across Pretty Brook Road might be tough; the hills aren't high, but they're nasty.

And, of course, because I haven't done the route in a while, I took a wrong turn, and my friendly-but-insistent crew set me right. (I often say I can get lost in a bathroom; I can get lost in my living room if you rearrange the furniture.)

WE got across Pretty Brook OK, and turned up Carter, and then onto Crusher... and it rained on us the entire length of Crusher Road. I'm not ruling out the possibility that some rain god or other picked us out particularly for attention... perhaps because I had cancelled my Memorial Day ride because of threatened rain, which then did not materialize.

And then the sun came out. At the stop at Boro Bean:

Hrmph.

At the end, I had a mutiny, and the group decided to take a little shortcut back on Butler, rather than going back up to Suydam the way I'd planned. Oh, well. After the earlier wrong turn, who was I to complain?

Ride page.