Colleen's Journal: Week Two

Yug.

No, really, I mean it.  Yug.

I was all "mmmm, yuh huh, I am so BUTCH, I am so HIP, look at me GO" about myself, thinking, "hey, if I can just get up and bike 64 miles one day, I can get up and bike 64 miles the next."

Go ahead, smile knowingly.  You know what's coming.  I didn't.

So after about eight miles of whimpering, cursing, and pushing our bikes uphill - okay, me anyway, Molly following sympathetically (if also tiredly) after - we sat down in a field of little orange-and-yellow flowers, very fetching, though they didn't make it all the way to "comforting."  It was pretty awful going, really.  Very discouraging, after the success of the previous day.  Sad, sad cee.  I really had been so proud the day before, is the thing.  The breathing seemed better.  I was getting the hang of this biking-up-what-I-would-have-previously-considered-mountains while-simultaneously-being-unable-to-breathe thing.  We'd really and firmly broken the 50-mile barrier.  And then here I am, and I can't even get far enough to really evaluate how the breathing's doing, because my legs are trembling too hard to allow me to bike.  There was no way to "strategize" a hill, as I'd previously been doing.

Strategizing, since I keep forgetting to tell y'all about it, is essential.  You make a million decisions a minute while biking, actually.  You'd think it's simply a physical activity, but there's just as much going on in your head - is it safe to turn my head to look at a bird or look down at my gears or dodge out into the lane to have a look back at Molly, hey-is-my-gear-shifting-right, is that car going to try to pass me on this curve and how far into the shoulder do I want to be, how am I going to swerve around those rocks, and ew, I wonder just how long that particular piece of roadkill has been gracing the roadway.  And if you've got a groove going, a nice wide well-paved shoulder and no particular obstacles that require your attention, then you look around and notice all the wildflowers and try to remember them for later, the weird bits in the landscape - like, why were these horses blindfolded?! does anyone know why you'd blindfold several horses in the same field? - and various fauna - Molly saw a fox, and I spotted what we later identified as a woodchuck.  But much of the time, your mind is occupied with strategizing hills.  How much speed can I gain going down this hill, what gear will I want to be in to allow myself maximum velocity with minimum effort, at what point am I going to switch into my lower gear going up, and what can I tell about the hill beyond this curve, based on what I can see of the treeline and how fast the cars are coming around and such.

But there was simply no way to strategize these hills.  They were these incredibly steep things, all bendy-twisty, with no shoulder and rottily paved, so you could never get any momentum going from one hill to the next, you were creeping downhill, same as up.  And lemme tell you another thing: 45 pounds of bleah trundling along behind you on the uphills does not equate to 45 extra pounds of whee on the downhills.  Sure, it shoves ya faster - but it's not exactly, um, wieldly, so you can't go all that quickly.  The advantage is pretty minimal, compared to the disadvantage.  Sad but true.  So all in all, my butt was being rather soundly trounced.

Molly was terrif.  She took about three hours to explain to me, over and over, that no, it was okay, I was not a complete loser, she was tired too, she felt it would do us much better to take the day off and rest, it didn't necessarily impute any incredible dearth in my moral fiber.  I kind of whimpered and looked pitifully and played with the little orange flowers for a while, quietly letting go of my little-engine-that-could persona in my head.  I'm not a strong biker, no.  I'm certainly not a confident biker.  But I'm a persistent one, I just keep getting back on, and it was a blow to say, I can't do it, I can't get back on.

So it had been about eight miles of "suck," and then we said, okay, we'll call it quits as soon as we can.  About 300 feet more of suck later, we hit not-suck, conventionally known as "downhill."  Ahhhhhhhh.  Say it with me.  It's a beautiful word.  So round, so easily elongated; not stingy, the way "uphill" is.  We stopped off briefly at this keen maple-syrup-products place where I bought the cheapest maple sugar candy I've ever found (and ate almost all of it that night, heehee) and then we coasted for ten miles.  Oh yes.  And we had earned every one of them, believe me.  Easiest ten miles I have ever biked in my entire life.  Ever.

At the bottom, there was more Not Suck.  Nowheresville, where they apparently make the best sandwiches in the world.  And don't tell me about hunger and the best sauce, my hunger has never been much more than a dash of paprika to a really bad dish.  These were amazing sandwiches.  God wrote the recipe for that egg salad.  Yaaaaaay food.  Then it was off to find lodging.

Well, we kinda found it and kinda didn't.  We stopped at a bed and breakfast.  Now, I'm a cheapskate.  Eighty-five bucks for a room for the night is a lot to me.  But you add onto that the fact that this guy all but said, "Get lost, you loser biker chicks," and it seems an extremely expensive room for the night.  Jerk.  We pretty much decided against staying there because of him, the so-called innkeeper, because he was so inhospitable.  Very odd, I think - why would you run a B&B if you can't be even pleasant to your guests, let alone show them some nice courtesies and pay attention to their wellbeing?  So it was back on the bikes again.

Fortunately, that only served to make our next stop all the more lovely.  I will massively highly recommend the Breakfast on the Connecticut to anyone.  They were soooooooo good to us.  Aside from all the lovely amenities (jacuzzi, private baths, cupboard of in-case-you-forgot toiletries, collection of many hundred videos, etc etc), they were really sweet and took fabulous care of us.  It was four miles from there to anywhere serving food, and they offered to drive us, since we were feeling too pathetic to want to bike it.  They told us about the wildlife there - foxes hunting fieldmice, a moose or two, a couple of bear spotted in the last few years.  Suggested we watch American  Flyers, which I hadn't heard of but was a fun movie for the evening - this 1985 flick about bike racing in the Rockies.  (Ew, by the way.  Never.  Never never never.  Like, hitting 60 mph going downhill, aside from the utter insanity of trying to race uphill.  It was a big lesson in "people who are in infinitely better shape and infinitely more confident as bikers than cee."  Just in case I was, momentarily, delusionally, inclined towards thinking myself a power biker or anything.

Anyway, we ended the day saying thank you for the blessings of John and Donna, our hosts, and reveling in the ludicrous luxury of beds.

Oh, god.

Kids, today was No Disney Ride.  Good lord was it not.  The crazy haul up the hills, followed by the teeth-gritting downhills, and then the long, long drawn out, are-we-there-yet of making it another 36 miles...

I thought we'd hit Maximum Suckitude yesterday.  I thought, it can't be harder than this.

How very silly of me.

I've gotta say, though, I love Vermont.  No, I really do.  I hate biking up its worst hills, I even hate biking up its third-or-fourth-worst hills, but I love this state.  They have Ben & Jerry's, civil unions (replete with the campaign of "Take Vermont Back" and the counter-slogan, "Take Vermont Forward"), Jim Jeffords (who is my personal hero this month), gorgeous gorgeous landscape, and the best people you could ask for.  I love Vermonters.  I'm going to move to Vermont and marry a Vermonter and bear him nine children.

The day started promisingly, all fed and rested.  Well, okay, Molly had to adjust her rear brake, which was rubbing on the rim.  In case she doesn't mention it, Molly is kicking massive butt and taking names all along.  Yesterday, while I was complaining about my breathing and my poor tired legs, she was dealing with the fact that she can't use her two lowest gears and her rear brake was dragging on the wheel.  In case you don't speak biker lingo, this basically means she was working her BUTT off, against two massive disadvantages, to haul up the same hills that I could barely make with my bike in tiptop shape.  Massive kudo butch biker brownie points to her, especially for being able to true her wheel and fix her brake problem on her own.

Anyway, we started off in as good shape as could be hoped for, which is why it was so, so hard to deal with it when I died about three miles out.  As soon as we started hitting the big hills, I was miserable again.

In Orford, we finally rejoined the Adventure Cycling route.  Not to belabor the point, but this is Very Good News because it basically tells us every single tiny little thing we could want to know about the town through which we're passing, elevation profile of the route to come, etc, so we can strategize much more efficiently.  We can figure out where we can stay, how hard we're going to have to work over the next three or ten or fifty miles, where's a bike shop or a mail drop or a snack shack along the route.  These maps rock.  I wouldn't always agree with the route they've chosen, but the maps rock.  So we knew what was coming, when we set out, we knew that we'd be hitting Oh God Suck Factor Five or Six right off, and Suck Factor Eight or So shortly thereafter.  I just didn't expect it to so thoroughly and effortlessly kick my poor whimpering biker-chick butt.

I also didn't expect to have to deal so much with the breathing dilemma again.  I'd been counting on the concept  that it was getting better.  This mattered tremendously to me.  Also, I think I'm running out of Albuterol, either that or I'm acclimating to it, so I won't have the advantage of bronchodilators much longer.  So it really, really freaked me out that right off, I collapsed.

I was scared when we started, knowing that today and tomorrow were going to be the hardest yet, by far, on this route.  I suspect that it was the fear itself that did me in.  (Yes, JFK, fine.)  When, three miles into the route, the very start of Big Huge Long Hill was too much for me, and I stopped, panting, it sent me into a minor panic attack.  I felt like I was being strangled, when I tried to breathe; like a vise was wrapping around my neck and shoulders.  And that sent me into a big old crying jag of impotent frustration.  Molly said, go ahead, cry, it's okay, but I felt so stupid, standing there weeping on the shoulder while Vermonters whizzed their merry way past.

And then the first miracle of the day happened.  This old man pulled over and said, "You gals look like you're having a spot of trouble."  Yes, sir, said Molly, while Colleen hid her weeping eyes.  "Long hill you've got ahead of you," he said.  Yes, sir, we know, Molly said.  "Don't suppose you'd like me to take those trailers and bring them to the top for you?"

Ray of sunlight.  Ray of magic glorious dazzling sunlight.

We loaded in our trailers and he told us where to meet him at the top, and off he set and off we set.  And we did it.  It still wasn't easy, but with 45 pounds of sheer dead weight from off our shoulders - or legs - or minds - it was doable.  I walked the last third of a mile or so, but I felt okay about that.  And there he was, sure as could be, asking if there was anything else we needed before we went our way.

The road was doable for a while after that - plenty of hills, but nothing particularly steep.  I can do hills.  I can do hills with my trailer.  I can even do hills with my trailer and my Albuterol wearing off, or whatever it is.

But then came the biggie.  About two or three times as long a hill, unending, the steepest thing I have ever, ever encountered.  Well, on a bike anyway.  Somehow you just don't notice in a car.  There as a sign that said 8% grade, at one point, a warning for trucks.  Apparently you can use that to gauge the angle of the hill, but you need to use sine functions in your computation or somesuch.  I haven't had this since tenth grade.  Anyone want to take a shot at it?  Next time I'm bringin' a dang protractor, just so I can impress y'all with the hill of doom that I conquered today.  In the meantime, suffice it to say that Boston's hills look like the baby fetal larvae of this thing.

And we have a much worse one tomorrow.

At the top of the hill - 17 or 18 miles so far, and it was already 2:30 - Molly finally got enough cell phone signal to contact David (her husband, for those of you following along closely) and he arranged to meet us in Rochester, another 34 miles further, where there would be lodging.  And then off we set again.

Twenty-five miles into the day, I was beat.  My brain had turned off.  And we had that many miles still to go.  We were sitting at a gas station, drinking Gatorade - which tasted good, a bad sign - when this adorable lad, name of Earl, motorcycled up and started querying us.  Whatcha doin' whereya goin' how long ya takin' etc etc etc.  They're questions we routinely get and gladly answer, but he showed much more interest than most and was so obviously thrilled by the idea.  He laughed at my dorky Vermont joke - it's, like, my totally favorite joke in the whole wide world, but I'm not going to write it here because it has to be told just right - and said he'd email us and basically totally perked me up.  I think someone should commission cute lads to come be charming at me whenever I'm miserable and tired.  Y'all get right on it, okay?

Well, that helped a lot, second ray of sunshine, but twenty-five miles over hill and dale when you're already exhausted is, surprise surprise, still twenty-five miles.  But I did it.  It was really really hard, and for the last ten miles I was pretty much biking on fumes, expending no effort beyond that which was absolutely necessary, but I did it.

At the very end, we hadn't encountered David yet (he'd be coming along the same road we would be), so I pulled off on a wide spot in the road to watch for him and Molly went ahead to see if he was already in town.  I was stretching and resting when a few more Vermonters came over to chat.  Water, coffee, could they get me anything?  We talked about everything from tattoos (ain't mine byootiful?) to other bikers to living in Vermont, all very pleasant; they took off to find Molly by van when she hadn't returned when I expected her; and, most importantly, they told me of a different route we should take than the Adventure Cycling course, tomorrow, to avoid the steepest hill of Breadloaf Mountain.  Third ray of sunshine.

So then Molly retrieved me and David caught up with us and we came to the second delightful B&B in two days, the Cooper Weber house..  This one is from the mid-1800's, fabulous in a totally different way than yesterday's.  It has a wood-burning stove, original to the house.  You build a fire in it and then remove one of the godawful-heavy sections of cast iron from the top to correspond to the size pot you want to put on it.  The proprietess showed me how it worked and told me about others of the fascinating antiques here - handcarved bed from several generations ago! - and basically made me feel like I was the most important person and that my wellbeing was absolutely crucial to the functioning of the world.  This is how cool she is: after David made the reservation for this place, she put up the No Vacancy sign so that the three of us wouldn't have any competition, wouldn't have to deal with anyone else if we wanted the bathtub for soaking or somesuch.  Made me dinner herself, chatted with me for ages, etc.  Again, this is what this trip is about, to me.  Meeting all these keen people and sharing a slice of their worlds for a few minutes or hours.

Tomorrow will likely be the hardest day yet, Breadloaf or no, and yes I'm scared again, but after that... well... that should be the end of the hills.  Of the big ones anyway.  And I do think my breathing is better.  So either I'll survive that and be reasonably fine thereafter, or I'll be dead.

If you're following along on maps, you know that we did all of about 21 miles today.  I do worry about this kind of thing - this means we're going to have to do so crazily much more in the weeks to come - but it couldn't be helped, and I doubt we'll have anything this hard to do again until the Rockies.  So.  I'll deal.

Last night, Molly and David drove over Bread Loaf and came back reporting, "no. No, no, no, we can't do it."  They'd had to drive a lot of it in third gear.  It was longer and steeper than anything we'd done yet, and what we'd done yet had been way too much for me as it was.  So this morning, while we still had the car, I scouted out a couple of possible routes around it.  Much of it was tremendous yuck, but I did find some passable passes, as it were. And some plausible plauses.  Or something.

So we saw David off, or he saw us off; whatever.  Then, because Molly's bike still wasn't in tiptop condition, we went to a bike shop in town, Green Mountain Bikes, and met Doon.  Doon was cool.  Doon was very very cool.  Doon rocked our worlds.  Guy who lived in his bike shop and had plastered his walls with bizarre postcards and various leftover-hippie lit & paraphernalia.  Very sweet to us.  We chatted, he read us poetry and gave us stickers (the first we've put on our bikes, on this trip), and we headed off, heartened.

And we headed up what was still, despite being not-so-incredibly-horribly-impossible, really-really-damn-hard.  I wish I had stats for y'all, just to impress the bejesus out of you, so you won't have to take my word for it.  Suffice it to say that for about four miles of the day, I could bike about 2/5 of a mile - or less - in my lowest gear.  Then I'd get off and walk for about as far.  Then I'd rest in the shade, trying my best to be resilient but really computing in my mind, desperately, how much more of this we had to go.  Finally, after exactly ten miles of continual up - no, really, not a single break - we hit the summit.  Down was going to be even steeper than up, so we started off carefully - it can be kind of hair-raising, knowing that we can't always be seen around a sharp curve by a car traveling 50 mph or somesuch.

And then, a mile out, Molly broke a spoke.  This is not to suggest that she did anything wrong - just that a spoke went ping!  Very bad.  She couldn't figure out what was wrong at first - had just heard a loud bang - but as soon as I drew up alongside her, I could see that her rear wheel looked like it was trying to emulate a hula hoop, it was so far out of true.  We pulled off immediately and she tried to repair it herself, and she could have done it - we had extra spokes and such - except that we didn't have one tool we needed, to take off the rear cassette.  Argh!

So I started the trek back up to the top of the hill, to see if I could get cell phone service at the top.  After a couple of minutes of trudging, I was like, "forget this!" and stuck out my thumb.  The second car stopped.  Did I mention I love Vermonters?  He took me back up to the top and I tried to call Doon, but no go.  So then I stuck out my thumb again.  First car stopped.  Did I mention I love Vermonters?  He took me back to Rochester (and, though he wasn't a chatterbox like I am, amiably answered all my questions - like, there are these cows that look like Oreos!  Really!  black hindquarters and foreparts, white band down the middle! what's up with that?) and dropped me back off at Doon's place.

Doon!  Save us!

Doon saved us.  Closed up shop, drove back over the hill with me and some tools, fixed Molly's bike in minutes and charged $15.

Did I mention I love Vermonters?

By then it was rather late, almost 7:00, so we coasted down into Brandon, calculated that we didn't have enough sunlight left to get to our chosen destination for the day, grabbed some groceries, and lit out, expecting to, as Molly puts it, "guerrila camp" alongside the road.  But we found a campsite quickly enough and set up there.  It was rather nice, actually - not because of all the amenities, canoeing and birdwatching or whatever, that they tended to offer in Maine, but because it had big fields where I could watch fireflies prettily begging each other to mate.  A short day, and a tiring one, but not altogether discouraging.

And hopefully tomorrow really will be easier, because the Albuterol really is wearing off.  I'm saturated with the stuff, or I've developed a tolerance, or whatever, but from here on out, it looks like it's up to the Protonix to save me from reflux disease.

Well, darn, but not really.

We'd hoped to leave this state today - not because I don't dearly dearly love Vermont (y'know, marry farmer raise nine kids etc etc) but because we really have been making slow time, basically due to me, and it would be nice to have crossed into NY.  But it was godawful hot today, any cloud in the sky would have been trying to hide behind another to protect itself, and the road was, again, Not Easy.  And we've received info that the next many days are also going to be Not Easy.  Nothing like Bread Loaf or the hill we took in lieu of it, but still, a heckuva challenge for your ailing, wheezing intrepidheroine.

We set off and made fairly good time to begin with, up to Middlebury (15 miles up the road, where we'd hoped to be the night before), stopped off for a delightful repast at a fabulous little bakery - what a charming town! - and took the advice of the bike store people and went up to the Morgan Horse Farm.  Saw lots of pretty horses.  I admit, I'm something of a city girl - for all that I grew up picking tomatoes in our backyard and catching fireflies on the lawn - so I'm rather too easily enchanted by horses.  And seeing a yard of dams and their very young foals was enough to send me into little cute-conniption fits.

Then back out, where the road rather quickly got the best of me yet again.  And here I got rather scared, because I really don't have Albuterol to fall back on anymore.  For the last several days, I've been walking this tightrope over a big pit of fear, and sometimes I have guidewires, and sometimes I'm just done for.  I haven't known definitively, at any point, whether I could make it; and every time I so obviously can't make it, it sets me off again.  And I feel so futile, so helpless, gasping for breath and half choking, half crying, just wanting it to end.  I don't think I'd still be out here if it weren't for Molly.  Every single time - EVERY single time - she's right there, saying, "Take as long as you need.  We'll walk up this hill if you need to.  Rest.  It's okay.  We'll take it at whatever pace you can."  She's never once made me feel inadequate or incapable.  She waits it out and comforts me when I despair.  She does everything she can to make this easier on me, without ever making me feel coddled or condescended to.  Everyone send Molly email and tell her she rocks.

We spent a lot of time hanging out in the shoulder, or in the grass where there wasn't shoulder, waiting for my fear to pass, waiting for my heart rate to come down to something, oh, below 100, cooling off as best we could.  I wrote a little ode to Mack trucks.  If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you go biking in 90 degree weather up some really frickin' big hills hauling 45 pounds for a few hours.  Then sit in the shoulder and see if the breeze from a passing Mack truck doesn't feel like the breath of God.

We were hoping and planning to make it to Ticonderoga, NY, ferry over, today, but at one point, when we were walking along slowly investigating a sound from my front wheel, this woman pulled off ahead of us and said hey, what's up, y'all okay?  Sure, we said.  Where ya heading?  Ticonderoga.  Want to stop at my place instead?  I'm about five miles up the road, we've got a trailer in our back yard where you can stay, give you supper and showers, we can exchange stories about cross-country bike touring..,

Well, duh.

So we thought we'd finished with magical Vermonter experiences - surely there wasn't time for any more, only a few miles from the state border - but no, this one took the cake.  She told us exactly where she lived and said just go in if she isn't there yet.  And then her husband, coincidentally, caught up with us - biking blithely up the same hill that I was pushing my bike up - and started chatting with us and led us here.

They ROCK.

This is the Romp family, and it's a totally appropriate name, and oh, I love Vermonters.  First off, they threw us in the shower and made us lemonade and took us to a church social of fresh strawberry goods and made us supper and opened up the trailer for us.  And then they just Be'd Cool at us.  The five of them biked across America two years ago, on a 5-person bike (the kids were 3, 8, and 12), from here to Homer, Alaska.  They're both massage therapists.  She milks cows.  Etc etc.  I mean, it just goes on and on.

But most of all, Billy took one look at my bike and said, "Uh....no."  He spotted what no one else had bothered to mention to me, that my chain ring is the wrong size for the hills we're taking and the load we're hauling.  Both the front and the rear gears are too big.  And y'know, I'd often wondered about that, I'd keep feeling like I should be able to change into a smaller gear than I was able to achieve, and there was nothing for it but fight as long as I could and they get off and walk, gasping.  He offered to change it himself, for nothing but the cost of the new gears.  He said, I was gonna laugh at how much easier it'll be to take the hills.

I don't even have words for the gratitude.

So hopefully he'll do that tonight or tomorrow, and I expect that the gain we'll make in ease - and hopefully thereby in mileage - will vastly make up for the loss of a few miles today.

Now, I'm going to go out and take part in the vastly cool conversation happening out in the living room...

An unintentional but welcome day of rest.  We stayed with the Romps and experienced their massive coolness all day.  I really do recommend that you go check out their website, www.rompfamily.com, if you want to know more about the great art of cross-country cycling, done by people who planned and experienced far more than we did or likely will.  Patti and I talked alternative medicine and other health aspects (such as perhaps how to help me keep from waking up four times a night with my legs aching, which is so not conducive to restful sleep), they took us to pick cherries and lounge by a lake, and la de da, Billy and Molly and I went back into Middlebury and he picked up lots of schtuff and did unto our bikes.

Won't go into massive details, but he changed the chain ring and the cassette of each, giving us many, many more options for gearing.  I was not using my largest gear at all - I mean, not even on the steepest downhills - and was struggling mightily even in the lowest gear, when I could even work the darn thing at all, on the uphills.  Billy was hilariously correct in deducing that the guy who had sold me the bike and put on the triple chain ring had been some crazy-ass young male cyclist, who didn't consider that I was a fairly inexperienced and not particularly strong girl who would be hauling 45 pounds up over mountains.  The bike is great and well fitted to me, but it was geared very high, something I often felt - wanting badly to keep switching into lower gears - but didn't know I could do anything about.  So he changed them, lickettysplit, and tomorrow we set out, hopefully freshly able to conquer hills (we're told that there are many humdingers coming yet) and renewed and emboldened by the stories of the Romps' trip and their reasonably astonishing day to day lives.

And if you happen to be a cyclist using the Adventure Cycling route, please do yourself the favor of stopping in with them.  They're great, they'd love to put you up, and they're right on the trail.  If you're crossing over from NY into VT, about two and a half miles from the ferry, you go up a hill and 74 takes a pretty sharp turn to the left.  Go to the right instead, onto a dirt road, and they're the first house on the right, with a huge elm tree in the front and a trailer (that's your accommodations) in the back.  And tell 'em we sent you.

I don't even know how to start this entry.

I always plot these things out in my head.  Think of things I'd like to share with you, try to figure out how to phrase things so that they communicate my mental state, try to discern the prevailing feeling of the day.  And I often forget these things by the time I'm writing - such as a choice phrase of Molly's from a couple of days ago, "Your chest may say `Aryan goddess' but your butt is all funk."  Maybe you had to be there, but it made me laugh so hard I couldn't stand up.

Anyway.  Today I kept revising, in my head, what I wanted to say about today and how I would start.  Here's a catalogue:
Wheeeeeeeeeeeee!
Ohmygodwow.
Weeeee are the chaaampions...

You see a trend here, yes?  Then you'll likely understand why it's so much the worse when the day switched over to:
Oh, SUCK.

Today started wonderfully.  Lovelyly.  It was splendiferous.  Billy had changed our gears, we were rested, we were excited, my breathing is definitely much better - it only gets bad on the worst of the hills, it seemed - and I felt really inspired by hearing about the Romps' trip.  Not that it was all easy, no, but that they persevered through the hard bits, that they understood what it was like to have something really bite and to keep going.  We zipped through the three miles left of Vermont before we got to the border of the state & ferry to NY.  It was delightful.  It was so obvious, the difference with the new gearing system - hills that I wouldn't have been able to climb before, I could; I had so many more options with the gears, I could use the highest front gear with some of the lower back gears and feel all butch and powerful.  Very, very cool.  Today promised to be great.  Patti, with five-year-old Timmy assisting on their tandem, caught up with us at the ferry to do some of the day with us.

The Romps had warned us about the massive, heart-breaking hill soon over the border, and it was indeed a mountain of doom.  Even with the new gearing system, I had to walk the majority of it.  I could do more when I did bike, but still, I've tried to be really careful, not to set the breathing off, not to aggravate it.  It wasn't bad, though.  We knew it was coming, we could see the entirety of it - almost two miles of really intense "ugh" - and once it was over, we could just be happy and celebrate the joy of our new gears, right?

Right for a while, yeah.  Molly had her own woes, but I was just really totally diggin' on the gears, whizzing up and down the hills, thrilled to pieces not to feel like I sucked.  Billy assured me that it wasn't me, it was the gears - that I wasn't a wuss, that it really was that much harder than it should have been.  And he certainly seemed right, for the eleven miles or so that I was dipping and scooping and feeling kind of like a bird on wheels.

But then.

My chainring.

Broke.

When I was switching gears - which I'd been doing with impunity - the chain fell off.  Now, this is an icky thing to happen at any time, and it normally happens when you're going uphill, of course, but it was made a bit worse for me that it hadn't happened before with this bike, hence I wasn't at all anticipating it, hence I didn't react at all quickly and the chain got massively entangled in the chain ring.  And since I was pedalling so hard, it forced the chain so hard into the ring that it bent the ring.  Thereafter, the chain would not stay on the smallest ring - the lowest gears, for you non-bike-rider-types.  Fell off immediately.  So I lost the use of nine of my twenty-seven gears.

I tried and tried to fix it, but it really was pretty much a useless proposition - I just couldn't bend it back, not with the leverage I could assert against the ring, using only a Leatherman.  And here we just kind of went, "Um."  We'd biked some 32 miles, were expecting to do about 50 that day.  Nothing spectacular, no, but respectable.  But here we were with a bent chain ring and many miles to go before we slept.  We inquired at a campground, but the guy was monumentally unhelpful and we couldn't get ahold of the bike shop, about 35 miles away, that might be able to help us either.  I thought of hitching a ride, but honestly - I hate to say it, but it's true - New Yorkers seemed about as unconcerned with us as Vermonters had been concerned.  All those times I've beamed, "I love Vermonters!"...well, those are times today that I muttered, groaned, and bitched that I did not feel similarly about New Yorkers.  Here we were, two girls with a bike upended in the shoulder, obviously experiencing techinical difficulties, and in half an hour, not a single car that passed us even slowed to ask if we were okay.  Grrrr.  So hitching seemed a rather unlikely proposition (aside from which, many of the vehicles passing us were big trucks for construction and logging), and there was no way to call for help.

So.

We biked it.  Molly got on my bike - her suggestion - so that I could use a bike with a full set of gears.  I could never have done it.  I could barely make it up many of the hills with all those lovely gears intact.  But she soldiered on, never once complained, walked the hills with me when I needed to, kept asking if there was anything she could do.

Meanwhile, the evils of the entire known universe descended on our heads.  The roads SUCKED.  I mean, well, kind of literally.  First the shoulders were absolutely horrendous, and then, once we'd hit some newly paved stuff, ironically, it was asphalt so fresh that it was sticky.  I can't tell you how demoralizing it is to try to bike when the very road is grabbing you to slow you down.  The hills were killers - we were still going a majority of up.  The area was depressing and unfriendly.  Worst of all though were the black flies.  I am not exaggerating when I say that I have never known anything so vicious as these bugs.  They are like airborne leeches.  They swarmed down on me (ignored Molly, lucky her, but I had some sort of bug "Eat At Joe's" sign on me) and wherever they bit, they drew blood.  I look like a horde of one-fanged vampires has been snacking on me.  Tomorrow, I'm told, they'll itch like the mother of all bug bites.  Oh goody.  Oh, and I got sunburned.

The worst of all of this is, I spent the last twenty miles furiously angry.  Just couldn't get over the anger.  I'd been so excited about finally getting my wings, about being able to leave the worst of the suck behind us.  And then this.  It was incredibly disheartening, and at one point I really just let go and bitched up a storm at Molly, bitterly upset, about how I wanted just ONE DAY of real biking, of not having any problems, of just enjoying biking.  I'm sure she feels the same way.  And I found out the hard way that when I'm angry - apparently when I'm in any intense negative emotional state - I can't breathe.  Not quite as bad as when I've had a panic attack, but similar.  So, twenty miles of hills and having to stop constantly to try to breathe.

So yeah, it was pretty damn awful.  New York, thus far, sucks.  A lot.  As much as Vermont didn't.

We've ended the day on an up note - pulled into Newcomb, 53 miles of biking today, and found something resembling food and there were directed to a nice B&B.  I had every intention of camping today, but I really feel like we deserve something not-icky.  And the people here are lovely and nice and have already offered to help us get my bike to a repair shop tomorrow.

The astute, keen-eyed, and overly-fanatically-interested among you will notice that today's entry did not begin where yesterday's ended.  Sit tight.  Reality will return in good time.

Our hosts at the B&B, Brian and Diane Britt, were more than kind.  They were the first good thing in the entire fifty miles of NY we biked yesterday.  Perhaps I should say a little something about B&B's here - I certainly wasn't familiar with them before this trip.  They are, as far as I can tell, as individual as the people who run them.  The first was clearly a commercial proposition, created as such, and very very spiff, meant to service lots of people at once.  The second was this house from the 1830's that Sandy Brown had bought as place that could hold her collection of antiques, and B&B'ing seemed just a way to share her interesting life and self with other people.  Last night's seemed like they'd realized, "hey, we have extra room, we're neat and capable people, we could let others use some of the space once in a while."  They were obviously not primarily a B&B, but they certainly accommodated us nicely.  They perfectly well understood just how tired and discouraged we were and were quite concerned to make us feel better.

They're also on the Adventure Cycling path, so they know what it's like to break down and be helpless; they'd helped someone previously who was pretty SOL.  I expect we'll see a good bit of this, as we go - though I'm a bit surprised that thus far, we haven't met anyone else biking these roads as part of the AC route.  We've heard tell of two girls a couple of days ahead of us, and it would be very cool if we caught up with them, true, but haven't met anyone yet and swapped stories or anything.  Anyway, Brian made us a breakfast that made up for the horrible lack-of-dinner the night before (meals have more significance when you're biking scores of miles a day) and Diane borrowed a truck from her brother and drove us to the place I could find, after some calling around, that thought they could repair the chain ring.  This was about 40-50 miles down the road - right along our path, but it would have been absolutely miserable going, trying to do it by bike, given that the roads were still extremely hilly.  There was no place with a replacement chain ring, which didn't surprise me.  These few days of biking are going to be in very sparsely populated country.  The towns are, like, 500, 1000, maybe 1500 people.  Diane talked with us, as we drove, about the countryside and interesting tidbits of her life there.  Sea planes (a great form of transportation - they can land in any of the innumerable lakes or, if properly converted, land or even ice), schools (Newcomb's school serves 50 kids, K-12; the graduating class this year was 3), the various flora and fauna we asked about (apparently I saw partridge yesterday - and a deer leaped across the road today!).

Anyway, when it was apparent that the bike shop in Inlet was at least going to have a go at fixing the bike, Diane headed back out with our massive gratitude.  Sadly, as a whole the people in NY still aren't impressing me.  I hope to be able to say otherwise within the next few days, because really, the interacting with people is the best part of this trip.  We're finding that they differ so much, just within a day's ride.  Mainers are different from Vermonters are different from upstate New Yorkers.  I would have thought they'd be fairly similar, so it really makes me wonder what Midwesterners are going to be like.

While they were repairing my bike, Molly and I picked up some groceries - we had realized, because of incident yesterday regarding the bad food for dinner, that we really should have more emergency rations.  Hard to manage, when you're trying to travel very light, so we chose carefully.  We picked up more sunscreen, too - an essential, when spending all day in the sun - and Super Insane 40% DEET Get The Hell Away From Me bugspray.  The bike shop guys were pretty skeptical about the state of my bike, but they did their best.  The chain ring isn't absolutely straight, but it's serviceable.  They said, "That guy didn't do you any favor, putting a ring this small on here," and oooooh, I wanted to crack some heads.  What is it with bike store guys, can they not get it that I am just some chick trying valiantly to bike across the country, against a few substantial handicaps, and I need every advantage I can possibly get?!   Hmph.  I'm sure they meant well, but still, it came across as kind of arrogant and made me really defensive about the work that Billy did for us.  As far as I can tell - and if profanity offends you, skip this sentence - it's all bike shop guy dick-sizing.

So I have to shift more carefully from here on out.  So big whoop.  What that guy at the bike shop, for all his good intentions, simply couldn't understand is this: there is something immeasurably valuable to me, that I feel right with my bike.  More than that - today was the first day when I had a sense of being part of my bike, even for brief periods.  Like Glen and I were in this together, tackling and conquering the hills, instead of me fighting him to perform the way I wanted him to and feeling tired and cheated when he couldn't.  I can go in these itty bitty gears now which can get me up all but the worst of hills.  And I feel so much less tired.  The psychological benefit, on top of the physical benefit, is really beyond words.

We didn't exactly have the perfect cycling day from there on out, haven't yet fulfilled my I-want-a-day-with-absolutely-no-problems.  My breathing was still troubling me - which worries me with its larger implications, but I'll deal with those if and when they arise.  Molly broke another spoke, and being the macho capable awesome gear chick she is, she managed to repair it, but it took quite a while, as one problem after another arose.  I'm sure she'll tell you more about that in her entry.  And we didn't even get to start until 2 p.m.  And yet, with all of that, we did 40 miles with no worries - I felt really good about the pace I could set, and it gives me a lot of hope that we can catch up in the days to come, put in some real miles.  We're heading out of the Adirondacks soon, and that's the last of the mountains until the Rockies, I believe.  It's certainly a relief to know that we don't have to emotionally and physically budget for big whopper hills.  It's pretty much gently rolling stuff from here on.

We stopped at a campsite when the sun was getting low, and it's been very pleasant here tonight.  There was a square dance going on upstairs until fairly recently - recorded music, not live, but still nice to listen in on, and the participants were very friendly when they wended downstairs.  They offered sandwiches and soup and told us about these two ladies that came through last year - 65 and 58, and determined to set a pace of 75 miles a day, staying in churches as they went.  That's cool.  Now it's hopefully, hopefully a pleasant sleep and a reasonably early start tomorrow.  Perhaps tomorrow will be the day without troubles...