1. sucky days
2. beds!
3. detours
Since we had two back to back days of similar riding, I'm just making one point. We started in Mass. went through Connecticut for a short while and then hit New York before lunch on the first day.
1. Day one was the first day of getting up at 5AM. I'm just now getting into the swing of falling asleep before midnight, so getting up at 5 was still way too early for me. My legs have pretty well adapted to riding all day, so I wasn't really sore or fatigued, but it just felt like I was fighting off some cold medicine drowsiness all day. Thankfully everyone else was having a great day, so I was at least able to stick with them and make great time.
2. We stayed at a boarding school which means sleeping dorm style, which means......drumroll....BEDS! I'm pretty sure I passed out as soon as I hit the pillow that night. There was an incident with the van at lunch when someone flew by and clipped off the mirror, so it was late arriving to the host and I think we made good enough time that we got there earlier than planned. Regardless, While we were waiting for the van to come we had TV with cable and couches to lay on too! I don't even remember what we were watching because everyone fell asleep for a solid half hour for the van to come. Since we were at a school that was kind of out of town we were in charge of finding our own dinner. Someone stopped on the way in at a pizza shop and DMed(donation magic) enough free pizza for everyone.
3. It seems like every morning includes some kind of detour. I think the roads in town often change names or run into each other so it's hard to figure out which road we're on. Also, so far the states we've been in don't have street signs for both streets of an intersection. Usually it only has the cross street so I think of you were in a car you would know more easily what road you were turning on, but on bike it's often frustrating to try and guess if you're at the right intersection to turn at or not. In the morning I tend to ride with a group that stops for coffee early on. This is funny because I usually lead out the group in the beginning and I don't drink coffee so I sometimes just don't stop for them. Anyways, today we were cruising along trying to find a coffee shop and also find the bridge to get across the Hudson. The first several shops were closed, but we finally found a really cool hipster-ish shop in some small town. I got a bagel which was great because food supplies were running low for breakfast. Back to the detour: after coffee we continued down the road for another mile or two until we got into another small town. At this point I knew we had missed the bridge so we turned around. Turns out the coffee shop we went to was a mile beyond where the bridge was. The bridge was a highway across the Hudson, and we were told to follow a ramp and eventually would lead us to the bike path. We followed the on ramp but there was no bike path. we weighed the options of just rolling with it, or trying to cross to the other side where the bike path actually was. We decided to turn back and go the right way to get to the path.
After lunch we rode into a small town and had to find an old rail trail. There were no obvious signs pointing to it. There was a building that was clearly used to be a train station, but no signs of a trail leading from it. A couple locals pointed us to the trail, but after inspection on Google Maps, we figured out it was the right trail going the right way. I finally just pulled out my phone and used the GPS tracker to figure out where the path was. Initially it ran right though peoples back yards. After cutting through a fence gate and some parking lots, we were finally actually on the trail. It was obviously an old rail right of way, actually one for a double track, but it consisted of grass, gravel, and in a couple lucky cases, packed dirt/gravel. I don't remember what my final milage on the day was, but the people I was with said they were about 6 or 7 miles over the already 60 mile day.
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