Bike Tires on a Gravel Road

With apologies for ripping off the Lucinda Williams album title (and thanks to Tom for recommending that - I love it), there couldn’t be a more appropriate title for today. What I thought was a strange anomaly in Massachusetts is actually a real, and omnipresent thing throughout New England - the dirt and gravel roads. Apparently with all the frost heaves around here, it’s way better than paving and repairing them all the time. Out of 65 miles or so today, a solid 20 of them were on gravel. I have really come to enjoy it - most of the time. Kelly’s cousin Gil (henceforth, just Cousin Gil), says that he loves the sound of the tires crunching in the gravel. With that in the back of my mind, I relaxed and didn’t worry so much about wrecking or getting a flat and turns out it was a lot of fun. Thankfully, the bike can handle the less than smooth terrain. All until I reached Middle Rd. As I turned on to another dirt road, I quickly realized this one was not like the others before it. First of all, it started off with large chunky rocks instead of crushed gravel. All of a sudden my anxiety level started to rise. It just got worse from there. The rocks stopped, more or less, but gave way to a deeply rutted (ok, trenched) track that was covered in deep puddles that stretched entirely across the road. If you tried to get out of a rut, the ground was soft like riding in beach sand. I spent as much time going side to side trying to get around the puddles as I did going forward. When I thought it couldn‘t get worse, I found the source of the ruts - I was on a logging road. Over the course of 4.6 miles on this road, a dump truck passed me going the other way and there was a log (more like a tree) down in the middle of the road that looked like it might have fallen off one of the trucks. This is the trade-off on Google Maps for staying off the highways and main roads.

Despite the struggle on the last dirt stretch, it was another gorgeous day of riding in New England. I may have seen stuff like this elsewhere had I gone to Google Maps earlier in the trip, but for what I’ve seen so far, this is the place to ride. I continue to make amateur moves with my Strava, again pausing my ride and forgetting to restart it, costing me the information on probably the most challenging hour I’ve done so far. It was just under 9 miles with just over 1000’ of elevation gain (as recalculated on MapMyRide this evening). Without a doubt, I spent more time in 1st gear in the first 30 miles of today’s ride than in the first 5 weeks of this trip. The never-ending Appalachian Mountains (aka the White Mountains in New Hampshire) strike again.

The day was capped off by a rendezvous with not one, but three old Rice friends this evening, including two I had seen previously on this trip, but who hadn’t seen each other in many years. We had a beer and dinner with a promise to meet again in Portland, Maine in October when Kelly comes to run the Maine Marathon.

Tough picture to get one-handed going up a hill on a busy highway. I didn’t want to stop as I was less than a mile into my ride this morning

Random beautiful lake in New Hampshire. There are hundreds of these. They call many of them ponds but don’t be fooled - no one buys pondfront property.

Nature’s Classroom

One of the better stretches of Middle Rd.

Lydia Brownlow (Plamp), Kristen Swartwout, and Janet Ranheim (Jackson)