The Group that made it to Boston, plus random pics

If you can't read this, it says: "Welcome to Hillsboro, The Home of 600 Happy People and a Few Old Soreheads". I wonder if the soreheads know who they are?

Here's the ghost of other tours that have gone through this town.

Another example of something tall on the great plains other than a silo.

This is another one of those towns, like Blue Balls, Pa, that warrants a stop and see just how many double meaning articles can be seen in one store. This place had a plethera of shirts with sayings like: Hooker...a location NOT a vocation. Oh, well, something to do while your traversing this country of ours.
Here we were, 1,000 miles into the ride, and still half way between nothing and nowhere. Man, this is a big country!!!!! Another Winslow, Arizona shot with my roommate and a statue commemorating the song with the name above the statue. Bob was the one on the bike.
Just a monument to my faithful companion after the second century in the desert. Notice that the shadows were getting a bit long as it was a long-g-g-g-g day.

Note that while posing, I was also, unbeknownst to me, incurring my first flat. This was a ramp to a highway, and I picked up some of the famous shards of steel upon the enterance to the ramp, and the tire went flat as I was posing. This was somewhere around the second day as we began to leave any semblence of TREES for what seemed to be weeks, because it was. We were moving from the right of this picture to the left, and heading directly to the Mojave. This was the Manhattan pier and the first and last picture of the first day, given that I managed to NOT recharge the camera before the start of the day.

This is the group that made the XC tour, door to door. I'll use this location to post various random pictures from the ride, in no particular order. The pictures will be posted as I get around to them.

Atlantic Ocean

Day 48--THE END

Burlington to Boston, Mass.

SMILE>>>>>>>>>>YOU MADE IT!!!!!

After all the smiles and drinks, and good-byes of last night, there are even more parting hugs, hand-shakes, pictures taken, and, of course, promises to stay in touch during the day and at the farewell banquet. And, in fact, the web continues to transmit messages and pictures to and from the crew that not only made it door to door but among everyone that rode with us anytime: all the way, at the start and retired, or joined us near the end.

The bonding that occurs from these shared personal experiences is nice and is probably why I do these kind of things. Even the vacation trip to Alaska with my wife was on a small cruise ship in August, still has us sharing emails with a few of the people we met pver the course of that week. The same is true of the friends I've made over the years doing the Anchor House charity ride. I'll probably continue this blog with stuff about the Anchor House ride, and perhaps the Alaskan vacation over the next few weeks, if ever. Just not this minute.

Back to the ride.........
There was a large folded map of the US that was placed in the lobby of every hotel we stayed at. It had a blue trail of the route we were taking, and every evening, a black mark was placed over the blue for the distance we covered that day. It just seemed forever to get to the first rest day, and then I don't seem to recall focusing on the map until we got to Ohio. It's not that I didn't look at it. Actually, I'm sure that I was occasionally found staring at it. It's just that I didn't want to focus on the distance until it became more emotionally manageable.

I guess I was surprised to find how many people do this cross the US trip more than once. For some of our riders, this was their 3rd or 4th time. If people ask any questions of me, then they ask at least two: why did you do it, and would you do it again??

The why I did it question has as many answers as there are days. There always seems to be another reason depending on just I might be thing about when they ask. There are all the glib answers, and the usual answers, and the thoughtful answers; but, I just don't have one perfect answer. If I had to pick one, I guess it was simply for the experience of it all: the people I met on the ride and throughout the country, the wind, the rain, the sun........just whatever happened, and the enjoy it for what it was. It didn't stop me from complaining at times, it just was the power of living it, whatever IT was. Would I do it again? Possibly. But, first, I have a number of other things in mind, not the least of which is doing things that my wife can share it.

These things were running through my head as we all shared our congratulations to each other, and the corresponding good-byes, as we road to the Ocean. We had all kinds of chatter going on during the ride, and the occasional craziness. (We won't talk about the "mooning" provided us as we gathered at the staging stop just before the Ocean. I won't name the person, but those who where there know.) The route through the towns to the Ocean was not a straight shot but we had Al. Al does national level orienteering races at a high level. We just give him a cue-sheet with the directions, turn him loose at the front, and though our cue-sheets away, and make sure we stay close.

I will now go back to post and share some of the pictures that go with this last week, as well as a few that I may just post from prior days that I'll add here. I'm not sure whether I'll add them to a given day or just add a post of just pictures. We'll see. See ya...............

P.S....I did have a few slips with the gears going to the ocean, but not enough to cause me to fall back, just enough to make me slip with a few expletive-deleteds!! When back home with the mechanic who sold me my bike with the SRAM components, he noticed that my cables were a bit more beat up then we gave credence to on the ride. After changing out the cables, and replacing the chain (that had gotten beaten up from all the slipping), I had a great Anchor House ride with all the hills on that ride, have ridden a few centuries to date, and hundreds of other random miles and everything is fine todate. This is not a condemnation of the work that Rick provided during the ride, but just a PS to all my comments in regards to the gears over the course of the last week of the blog. SRAM is relatively new company and like many new things, if you don't work with it, there is a learning curve. I trust my experience will only help those future SRAM riders on the XC ride. See ya...........

Day 47--Last Full Riding Day

Brattleboro to Burlington, Mass.

Again, no stats. The day was again truncated by gear troubles, and I cut things short for all the reasons I've mentioned before. I was torn between that fact that this was a poor last week to finish an other-wise great ride. There were other far more serious situations outlined earlier in the blog that happen during the ride, and my minor inconveniences this past week do not even compare to those.

I hope it's obvious that I would have preferred to end this week on the bike. But, in the sceam of things, all's well that ends well. I started every day; I only lost about 200 miles out of the total 3,415 (not counting the occasional minor detours) despite all the truncated days; I ended up in one piece; I was stronger, in many ways, then when I started; and got to meet some great people, share a great experience, and cross off another item on the "bucket list". No nothing's wrong, it's just a figure of speach.

As with many of the riders, my wife, Chris, joined us in Burlington for the last couple of days. We went out to dinner, and found a Sushi place near the hotel, virtually by accident. We went looking for a steak place, and found this place. Chris works full time and teaches at a community college part-time. So needless to say, she stayed busy while I was gone. However, after living with each other for over 30 years, things change when the other one isn't aroung to help out in the various odd ways, or be around to yell at, or whatever. All I will say about this is that I, like most of the other riders, certainly appreciate the support of our significant others who let us wander off across the desert, over Rocky mountains, across the plains, through the midwest, and over the eastern mountains and on to the Atlantic Ocean. Actually, we had a payback vacation planned to three weeks after the Anchor House Ride: an inland waterway Alaskan cruise.

We still have a final short day (18 miles) tomorrow to the Atlantic Ocean. Compared to most days, 18 miles is just the morning warm-up. See ya............

Day 46--Another Mechanical SAG Day

Albany, NY to Brattleboro, VT
Miles: 60.1 part of 76.0
Time: 4:39
Average: 12.9 mph
Max: 34.1
Est. Calories: 4,681
Ascent: 4,532

I made it most of the day, but was just too concerned for the "ol' knees" to continue. I just didn't want to get into more hills and have to climb in the "big ring". I had been fighting the gears as soon as we started climbing today. I could feather the gears on the flats to get into and keep in the right gear, but the hills were getting to be just too big of a challenge to keep the gears in the right place. As I have mentioned in earlier posts: in two weeks from the end of the XC ride, I will be riding a 500 mile, 7 day ride for Anchor House Ride for Runaways Charity that I have ridden for 13 years, and this obviously will be my 14 year. I really didn't want anything to happen so close to the end of this ride that would compromise my ability to ride the Anchor House Ride.

I rode with Sue and Champ most of the day. We were doing fine, until I wimped out at the last SAG stop. There was less than 20 miles to go, but I just didn't have it in me to fight both the hills, and the rain that was threatening. Hank, Chris, and Nancy had already retired during the day, or did not ride for various reasons.

I obviously put poor Rick to work on the gears again that night, and as in the past, everything worked fine that evening.

Dinner was on your own that night. I wasn't big on walking too far, or being out too late, as there was strong storms coming in, and I was tired. I walked down to a supermarket down the hill, and got a whole bunch of food and drink. I brought it all back to the hotel room, and just "grazed" through the evening and watched TV. And, despite what I said a couple of day's ago, I did one more load of laundry this evening just to have more clean clothes then dirty ones. I was looking forward to the last full day of riding tomorrow, and doing my usual praying for no rain. See ya.........

Day 45--To the State Capital

Little Falls to Albany, NY
Miles: 69.8
Time: 4:38
Average: 15.1 mph
Max.: 30.7 mph
Est Calories: 4,815
Ascent: 2,,341

A relatively short day. One SAG stop, and one stop for a soda. As Harry is like to say: "just peddle, baby; just peddle". For the most part it was just a day in the saddle.

It's easy for me to say because I personally was not experiencing any physical or mechanical problems this day. That was not so true for a couple of my riding companions of the day. Hank had a number of physical malodies that he handled with the same toughness he has displayed the whole ride. Sue ended up with a flat on her front tire which put her out of commission. She rides a recumbant, and she was not carrying a spare intertube for the smaller wheel. We left her where she could be seen, made sure the SAG folks knew where to find her, and then rode on.

There was some major highway and mall construction going on leading up to and around the hotel. After negotiating a fair bit of this construction, we still had to get across the traffic into the hotel location, which was a bit dicey, but all manage to do so safely. See ya...............

Day 44--Another SAG Day, this time mechanical

Syracuse to Little Falls, NY

Again, no statistics. A short day due to gear trouble. As we climb an incline right out of the hotel, I started with slipping gears, not able to move to other gears without slipping back to the gear I was moving from. Rick had worked on the gears a few times now. Not seeing one of the SAG wagons, I rode some 20 miles with 2 gears. I finally saw Mack (one of our smiling, helpful, friendly SAG support people). I stopped and asked if he could mention my dilemma to Tracy, who had helped fix the gears one other time.

When Tracy found me, I pulled over and the other riders kept on. One we determined that we really couldn't fix it, we put the bike on the truck, and I rode with Tracy and helped out where I could. That included putting luggage in the rooms at the end of the day. Tracy was fighting some serious back problems, and Rick, who had been riding, came back to meet us and take over the truck while we dropped off Tracy with Maggie, who took Tracy to the hospital.

It was subsequently determined that Tracy had cracked a couple of vertebra. She toughed it out the rest of the week, had surgery when she got back home, and as I understand things she is back up and out, including riding.

When we got to the hotel, after cleaning up, I wandered down to McD's for lunch, and then across the street for laundry. My last tug of war with the laundry bit, as there were only 3 more riding days to go. In the meantime, Rick checked the bike out and got it working fine.

When Hank and Champ got in and freshened up, we took a walk, got some ice cream, and visited one of the world's largests canal locks located in Little Falls on the Erie Canal. We didn't take too much time because, afterall, we did need to get back for dinner. See ya..........