Thursday, August 26, 2010

Vermont trip: CONQUERED

All right, so we weren't actually supposed to be back in brooklyn until tomorrow, but matt and I decided to stop being pre-schoolers and ride our bikes like adults and we made it back last night. We started riding on tuesday and I asked matt if he wanted to beef up and combine the mileage for the next day and get home sooner. After little deliberation we decided to go for it and biked 88 miles to macedonia brook state park to camp. We biked across the entire state of Massachusetts in an afternoon which is pretty impressive I would say. We technically hit 3 different states starting in vermont and popping in to new york for like a minute before finally chillin out in northern Connecticut.

The ride through Massachusetts I would have to say was definitely my favorite day of the entire trip. We were surrounded by mountains the entire day and went up and down lots and lots of hills which meant lots of bad ass descents. The weather was pretty much perfect. Not too hot, not too cold. However, it was very cloudy, which I think rules and makes the world look scary. Honestly, the day couldn't have been much better. Toward the end of the day we rode through sharon CT which I have to say is possibly the richest town I have ever seen in my life. There were mansions ALL over the place. It was actually kind of absurd. Matt said he thought it must be the home of the freemasons and that they were running the country from sharon CT. Not long after, we needed to find a place to sleep for the evening. I really wanted to pull up to one of those mansions and ask to sleep in their yard just to see how hard the rejection would be, but I was too lazy to travel the extra two miles down their $20k paved driveway. We instead stopped at some potential hippie house (which I deduced from their subaru outback with a bucket of compost in the back) thinking it would be a sure bet. We were unfortunately denied and had to instead cross a broken under construction bridge by foot and then bike 3 miles up steep ass hills to get to macedonia state park. It all turned out to be pretty awesome in the end as the park was really nice and not near civilization and we met a couple of old wiccans who gave us sweet corn and hung out with us until our 9pm bed time.

The next morning we decided to suck it up and do the last 100 miles to brooklyn in one day. Honestly, 100 miles isn't shit. People get all worked up about centuries... but the way I see it is if you can do 60 you can do 100. You still feel the same at the end of the day. So yeah, the day started off really nice for about the first 40 miles until we started getting in to NYC suburbs then everything just got sort of stressful. Lots of wrong turns and re-routing to try and stay off hectic streets. However, we had to take some shit roads here and there to get things done. Once we got right outside of yonkers things got much more bike friendly as we hopped on a bike path for 8 miles or so which popped us out on broadway which we rode down to 181st street to hop on the west side highway. Basically the trip was over by then (even though we had almost 20 miles to go haha). Once we were on the westside highway we knew we were home. Amazingly, matt managed to get his first flat of the trip with 10 miles to go haha. He made it the entire way to vermont and back with no flats until the west side highway haha.

Anyway, the trip was a success. The first week was kind of boring to me as we just biked through suburbs and farmland, but the last half was super nice and very scenic. I shall post photos soon!

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