Monthly Archives: October 2011
Day 3: West Hartford to New Haven
Phil and Bobbie were kind enough to let us stay as long as we needed before heading off, while they went to work in the morning. We had a good breakfast and ended up leaving around 9:30. This was going to be a short day, only 41 miles.
Our first stop was the Connecticut School of Broadcasting, which we passed by before deciding to go in and see if they wanted to interview us. After a brief interview with Art, the director, we were on our way again. The course brought us through some scenic bike trails, and right by an aromatic barbecue place, which drew us in for a late lunch. This day was cooler than the first two, and it started to rain a bit for the last 10 miles of our ride into New Haven.
We arrived at Pete’s apartment in the late afternoon. Pete is a sculpture grad student at Yale, and he showed us his studio behind his apartment, where we could keep our bikes. He had some very interesting projects going on in the studio. Pete shares a spacious 4-bedroom apartment with Thomas, another sculpture grad student, and Sarah and Daria, architecture grad students. Sarah is actually from Rhode Island, and Daria went to Brown, so we were familiar with the same places. Pete found all of these connections fascinating. While Pete was in class, Phil and I went to a Thai restaurant for dinner and Starbucks to take advantage of their free wifi. Afterwards, we shared some good conversation and Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream with Pete, Sarah and Thomas.
Day 2: Mansfield to West Hartford
This morning I awoke with numb arms, having slept on them. During breakfast (Tina and Greg made blueberry pancakes), I embarrassingly drank a sip of maple syrup that had been placed in front of me in a mug before realizing it wasn’t coffee. The day was off to an interesting start.
Morning of October 11th before leaving Tina and Greg's house
Greg and Gioia snapped some photos of us before we left Mansfield. We were only 6 or 7 miles from the UCONN Dairy Bar, so our first stop was to get ice-cream. Twelve miles later, we broke for lunch at Nature’s Grocer in Tolland. This is a great natural foods store, where I must return some day (and of course stop at the dairy bar while in the area). After lunch, we rode to Hartford and stopped at a park and caught up on missed phone calls while waiting for Phil, our Warm Showers host for the evening, to get home from work. Somewhere along the last mile to the house, another cyclist, Bill, started riding and chatting with us.
Sitting on a bench in a park in Hartford
Phil was very generous when we arrived at his beautiful home in West Hartford. He cooked a wonderful dinner while we showered, and he even drove us to the nearby Best Buy so we could buy a netbook. Now we can finally work on getting the website filled with content, upload photos and videos, and, most importantly, figure out how to get maps for Garmin. When we arrived back at the house, we met Phil’s wife, Bobbie, who had just started a new job. The two of them had used Warm Showers once previously when riding a tandem bicycle in Rhode Island, and they are excellent hosts. Already, I am definitely eating better than I ever have when I lived alone in Providence. Both Phil and I hope that we can someday be as hospitable to other travelers in the future.
Day 1: Providence to Mansfield
Phil and I had decided it would be a good idea to meet at a local coffee shop for an hour or so before leaving to let friends and family say goodbye one last time and ride the first few miles with us for as far as they wish. We had a good turn-out for the send-off gathering. After eating and making sure the bikes were all packed properly, Phil and I took off, escorted by Phil’s parents and Dick, Cameron and Adam from US Open Cycling Foundation. It was sad to say goodbye to everyone, and I will miss the people more than anything.
We started down the West Bay Washington Secondary bike path towards Coventry and stopped for ice-cream near the end. When we finally turned off the greenway, it was just me and Phil. We had begun the first day of a very long journey.
The day was predominantly uneventful, aside from a pit stop at a biker bar/pizza restaurant just over the Connecticut state line, where the owner hooked us up with ice water and the regulars had plenty of questions and advice for us. There were a few bike paths that existed in Google maps but not on the roads, so we ran into a few dead ends and climbed a few unnecessary hills. As we neared the home where we were staying that night, the roads grew even hillier.
Tina and Greg live in Mansfield with their 5 year old daughter, Gioia. They were kind enough to host us for our first night on the road. They shared their delicious dinner with us, including homemade wine, homemade bread, and homemade strawberry ice-cream! We are both very grateful for their generosity in hosting us.
One more day…
On Friday morning we biked back to Fairhaven after saying goodbye to our wonderful host and stopping at the nearest bike shop to fix my shoes. The bike shop, Idle Times, was right at the corner of a bike path that we had missed on our way up the previous day and was highly recommended by Rick and Julie. The mechanic was kind enough to not only replace the plates that the cleats screw into, but he also gave me a few extras. I doubt I will need them now that I’ve got some strong Shimano plates (the Keen ones that came with my shoes were weak). Also along the way, we stopped at a jam/honey shop and a fudge shop to sample the offerings. We finished cycling before dark this time and drove to LL Bean, where I bought a much-needed headlamp and Garmin Edge 605.
The weekend in Providence was crazy. It was a huge weekend for the bike crowd, as the cyclocross festival was in town, there was a bike-walk summit on Friday, a frame builders ball at the Biltmore, and a veloswap going on in Roger Williams park concurrent to the cross fest. Upon returning to Providence on Friday I went straight to the builders ball, where several frame builders from New England had an array of frames on display. This was a good networking opportunity for possibly finding a bike sponsor.
Saturday was unseasonably warm – a perfect beach day. Unfortunately, I spent mine selling my belongings at a yard sale on the front lawn. I woke up at 7am and the neighbor was also having a yard sale. When I looked out the window and saw a crowd of people across the street, I panicked briefly, thinking that all these people had shown up hours early and were waiting for my yard sale. I started putting the boxes outside at 10am, and people were immediately picking through everything. This was my third yard sale of the year, and I noticed that the majority of my customers are spanish-speaking, they all want to buy tons of stuff, and they don’t want to pay more than 25 cents for everything. After the yard sale, I had just enough time to put away all of the unpopular items that didn’t sell, shower, and go to our going away party downtown. In preparing for the trip, I had accidentally purchased two sleeping bags, thinking that one of them was a sleeping bag liner, when in fact it was a sleeping bag that came with a liner. I brought this extra sleeping bag to the party to raffle off. It was a great party, with the highlight (in my personal opinion) being that my friend Andrew brought an entire gateau concorde to share with everyone. I discovered this cake only within the past year, and it is my absolute favorite. I encourage everyone to try it from either Meeting Street Cafe or Rue De L’Espoir.
Sunday was the last day before taking off for good, and I had more to do than time permitted. I woke up early to check out the cyclocross fest before meeting my friend Ashley for breakfast at the Duck & Bunny (one of the places I’m going to miss). After breakfast I drove to Dartmouth to visit family before leaving, and then drove to Warwick to look into buying a netbook or tablet so I can upload photos and videos (and update this website) from the road. I spent several hours looking around but became overwhelmed by the options and ended up leaving empty-handed. I needed to go to Newport one more time to collect the last of my things from the apartment where I was living and to say goodbye to my friends down there.
I felt like I was doing an awful lot of driving a car in preparation for a bicycle trip. I struggled to stay awake long enough to drive back to Cranston and try to sleep before the big departure.
Practice day 1
This morning Phil and I set off on a practice ride from Fairhaven to Orleans, where we are staying with Julie and Rick, a couple that Phil contacted through Warm Showers. Despite a late start, the day flew by insanely fast.
We drove from Providence to Tiverton, where Phil made sandwiches and I wrote out the route that we were planning to take (we still have yet to acquire a GPS navigation device). From there we drove to my family’s beach house in Fairhaven, where I discovered that a squirrel had broken in and made itself at home. We finished packing our panniers and set off towards the cape.
broken screw plate on shoe
We had planned to hit LL Bean on the way out, but because of the late start decided it was best to save it for the way back. Several stops were made along the way to adjust seat height, check directions, refuel and stretch. Due to the adapting to our new rides with all of our equipment weighing us down and challenging our balance, our average moving speed was a modest 13-14mph. My new shoes broke less than halfway through the day! The screws holding the cleat to the bottom of the shoe tore apart the fitting on the shoe, so it could no longer be held to the shoe, and the right cleat ended up stuck in the pedal.
Rick and Julie's dog, Dude, lounging on the couch
By the time sun had set we were still 15 miles from our destination. After pedaling 6 or 7 miles with me using Phil’s head lamp and Phil using a blinking light on the back of his helmet, we decided it was too dangerous to continue in the dark on that road. We ended up hitching a ride with Tim, who generously went out of is way to drive us and our bikes straight to the door of our hosts. After a delicious meal and good conversation (and a warm shower), it has been an eventful and educational practice day. We owe enormous thanks to Tim for the ride and to Rick and Julie for their hospitality.
Back home and back to planning
I returned from my weekend in Minnesota, sore but happy. I had managed to run the marathon on Sunday in 3:37:18, only 3 minutes slower than my PR, despite not having run farther than 11 miles all summer. And my legs are not in as much pain as I remember they were after running my last marathon. I do wish I could have seen more of Minnesota. The International Wolf Center is in Ely, a 4 and a half hour drive from where I was staying in St-Paul. Wolves have always been my favorite animal, and when I was younger I had speculated about going up to Minnesota to live with them for a while and make friends with a wolf pup. Anyway, I didn’t want to tire myself out beforehand and was too sore to do much after the race, and there wasn’t enough time to really explore. I’ll have to go back another time, hopefully on bicycle.
Phil and I had tentatively planned to do a practice ride tomorrow and Wednesday, but we still have much to do to get all of our gear together and bikes ready, and it’s supposed to rain all day tomorrow anyway. Instead, we will leave one day later, on Wednesday. We may be able to stop at LL Bean on the way to Provincetown, our chosen destination for this ride, and collect the remaining equipment necessary. Among the things I need to do before the real trip commences are write to potential sponsors, add content to complete the website, advertise my yard sale, and plan our going away party/fundraiser. The party deserves its own post, which I will promptly write once I have an idea of prizes for our raffle!
Nomadic Cycling 