Lake Winnipesaukee

A week ago DP and I rode the CRW Summer Century, 103 miles with the ski area Mt Wachusett as its centerpiece. We had a great ride but I really felt the last ten miles or so as we went far beyond any distance I'd ridden since last year. DP and I joked a bit along the way, including references to the old cemeteries we periodically passed. A couple years ago I mentioned to him that I liked seeing them because I knew soon enough I'd be in the other side of the fence. For me, a cemetery is in part a signpost reading "carpe diem".
We tended to ride by ourselves instead of with the other CRW riders. While a big group ride like this offers a chance to draft other riders and save energy, we felt in more control and a little safer away from the bunches.
That ride was the first of three big weekend rides in a row, a set that will probably define my summer adventure of 2008. Saturday was the middle event, a solo attempt to ride from home to a point on the north side of Lake Winnipesaukee in NH. The rest of this post describes that ride.
I left at 7:15AM, a little later than I'd hoped, but the air was still cool and the roads vacant. The riding was easy up into New Hampshire, but then the hills began to gather and roll beneath me.
Riding alone on an unknown course is reasonably easy with a handlebar GPS routing system, but I feel a bit uneasy being so dependent on it and also knowing how many mistakes it can make. I could wind up with 18-wheelers with their blown tires littering the breakdown lane. I could be blocked by construction and face a much longer alternative route. The little box of electronics could simply break. Our Garmin Legend has been reliable for about two years, but the handlebar of a road bike takes an awful lot of vibration.
Around 10:00 I started into a zigzag shape on the map, a rather frustrating shape because it's far longer than a straighter line, and the middle part was on a major road (NH Rt 4) going in the wrong direction. I got a second surprise six miles later when I realized I'd underestimated the size of this zigzag by a factor of two. The good news was Rt 4 was big enough for me to find a reasonable lunch spot where I could sit outdoors with my bike. I took my shoes off for a lavish ten minutes or so during lunch, and coupled with my iced coffee, that helped a lot.
Just a mile or two after lunch, it happened: a detour. All of us eastbound traffic on Rt 4 were diverted southward, and one of the people running the detour affirmed I could travel north this way. I had eyed a left turn near the detour, but I assumed that if it were a useful northbound road the GPS would have found it long ago. The GPS re-routed and looked happy as I rode with traffic toward the south, but then I recognized the car-centric GPS' way of indicating I should go to a good place to turn around and then reverse on this same road. So I turned then and did go up the northbound road I had eyed but which no car took. The GPS dropped about 15 minutes off its ETA for the new course, so I was very happy. A more direct, faster and less busy road - this is just what I wanted! In fact, it became the road I had imagined riding in NH: quiet, surrounded by trees and the occasional water view, with few houses or cars. The hills grew and got steeper too, and after several miles I was having flashbacks to Mt Wachusset. This was Rt 107, and my ears popped twice with changes in altitude (I don't recall that at all on Wachusset).
Originally, the plan was I'd ride until about 2PM, when A would pick me up so I could be clean and rested for a day-before-the-wedding party. For a while I started looking forward to 2:00 for the promised rest, but as it drew closer I wished I had time to reach the destination. The GPS has a great feature of calculating ETA at destination, and this time slowly crept down throughout my ride. After I found some water near 2:00, I called and said I'd ride to the end. I could hear E in the background having fun, so it was best for everyone if I could ride the last hour and a quarter. The last miles passed easily and at the corner of my very last turn I passed a tiny plot inside a low wall. The sign read "Swett Cemetery".
(Anticlimactically, I then got lost for a full 15 minutes as the GPS and I got confused on a branching delta of gravel paths and roads. The GPS even turned off mysteriously, twice. Its batteries seem ok; is it dead?)
Totals: 117mi (a personal record), 8 hrs wall clock time.

Goodbye Disc Brake

These (unretouched!) photos show me removing the awful disc brake from SlushBike. After my last ride on it, commuting home in good weather with this thing squealing and useless the whole way, I know I was happy to be rid of it. But if you look closely, I think you'll share my impression that the bike frame itself was relieved to be rid of the thing.

IF Hits 15k miles

My good-weather and long-distance bike rolled 15,000 onto the odometer this morning. The first 2000 were on a different frame though it looked the same. That version was destroyed in my "big" crash May 21, 2003. This bike gets a little under half my miles in a year; I ride SlushBike in the winter and rain. There's a picture of this one in the Brewster ride article below. IF stands for the frame manufacturer, the local Independent Fabrication.

Squirt P4

The Leatherman Squirt P4 is my second-favorite bike tool, and my favorite pocket tool off the bike. On the bike you certainly need a set of hex keys for adjusting and tightening the many fasteners on the bike. But beyond that, I like to have a set of pliers, even if they're small. (I would have really liked pliers when I was trying to pull cactus needles out of a tire one time, but the TSA rules are too pesky about little knives in airline carry-ons.) I also find a small knife handy.

The Squirt P4 is tiny enough to store easily in a case made for a USB flash memory stick, and it weighs just 55g. The blades are high quality and precisely formed. But the capability it has that sealed the deal for me is it works very well as an emergency cassette lockring tool, as shown above. I discovered this in a time of need, around 15 miles from home at night when my shifting stopped working properly and I found the lockring had come loose. I couldn't find any way to tighten it with any of the tools I had, until I thought to try the Squirt, and it fit perfectly. Thanks, Leatherman!