John Dalton Walks (and Bikes)

I had just read an email from a friend who, having not seen a blog post in the last few days, questioned whether we’d become road kill on a narrow highway or had been holed up in the swimming pool of a posh hotel. Neither came close to fact.

When I last posted, I had inherited Mike’s flu, but was suffering through. I had been able to overcome inertia each day to complete the day’s mileage, but at night the blog suffered. We were well into Maine, and I figured I’d catch up at my son Chris’s house. I kept wishing for my situation to improve, but there was little if any movement.

Mike had just come back from a business trip to Frankfurt, Germany when we met up in New York for our New England bike ride. And he brought with him an uninvited guest: some kind of Medieval Bubonic Plague. And now he’s successfully passed it on to me. @#$%&*#

Notwithstanding our infirmities, we’ve been doing quite well. In the last two days we’ve covered 104 miles, climbed 3100 feet of elevation, and in the process, logged 9 hours and 30 minutes of saddle time as we traveled from Worcester, MA to Nashua, NH and then on to Dover, NH. Today, Thursday, a few miles after we begin, we’ll be entering Maine, our last state. We have transited New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and now New Hampshire.

Not much more for now, but one timing note. I offer my apologies for using “today” and “tomorrow” rather indiscriminately in my write-ups. I usually put my thoughts down in the evening and then formalize them in the morning. “Today” when I write in the evening, is really “yesterday” in the morning when I publish the blog. In the future I’ll try to use days of the week to be more specific. Again, sorry for any confusion.

For those interested, our Strava links for the last two days are:

http://app.strava.com/rides/21778526

http://app.strava.com/rides/21881565

To be continued

I had been looking forward to this part of the trip since the first day of our planning. We were approaching the end of Long Island and headed for the ferry terminal in Orient, New York. And the anticipation was not only for the ferry ride across Long Island Sound, but also the town itself. A friend and writing associate had written effusively about the community at land’s end, on the north fork of the island, and I couldn’t wait to see it. Then life got in the way.

While stocking up on Gatorade at a market before heading off, my bike fell over from the post it was propped up against. Having 30 or 40 extra pounds of weight didn’t help its stability, but the fall broke the lever on one hand brake. Okay, I had another brake, the island is relatively flat, and I’d worry about tomorrow morning in Connecticut. It had happened once before and the fix was minor.

Saturday we left our Garden City, New York hotel, under tornado watches and warnings, and we knew we were in for a drenching at the very least and perhaps worse. In fact we were feeling a bit jinxed. Yesterday it was man-made catastrophes chasing us, today it would be mother nature’s turn. Our spirits were further dimmed an hour later when my daughter Jennifer texted that a tornado had just touched down in Brooklyn.

And the biking itself was difficult. At least the wind was not on our nose, but it was blowing from our right side and was strong enough to make controlling our bikes challenging. With our panniers (saddle bags hung on a rack) and a backpack strapped on top, we became “high profile” vehicles. Cross winds, with gusts coming without warning, would make our heavily loaded bikes temporarily unstable. Cliché, but oh what fools we mortals be.

Well I did it again. In my desire to get in just one more ride at home in California, I shipped my bike a day late, which of course meant it arrived over a day late in New York.

Sounds kind of minor, but it meant that instead of leaving New York City late on a Thursday morning, we ended up biking away from the REI store in Manhattan at 1 pm on

a Friday afternoon. We then stopped at my daughter Jennifer’s house to load up our gear, and then rode through the heart of Brooklyn and Queens between 4 and 6 pm that same Friday afternoon. The only way I can describe what we did is with a football analogy. On a “broken play” circumstances prevent the preplanned offensive maneuver, and predictably everyone is scrambling unscripted, all over the field. The guy with the ball is totally on his own, and is doing a lot of  “open field” running. Back and forth, sideways, whatever it takes to evade the enemy. That’s how we left the city.

Two years ago when my cousin Mike and I biked over a thousand miles across the country, I thought that would do it. After all I had just turned 70 (years old), and I had a sore ass, a sunburned neck, and because we’d used motels in lieu of campgrounds, a much lighter wallet.

But alas, it didn’t. For some reason that trip just whetted my appetite for more of the same. Maybe it’s because I came late in life to long distance biking, maybe it’s because I have an insatiable appetite for this kind of stuff, maybe, well maybe I’ll find out what it is during this trip. Nevertheless, here I am at 10 pm on Labor Day Friday at the San Francisco Airport waiting for my red-eye flight to New York. My bike is already on the way.