Molly's Journal: Week Two

In which our heroines both whimper and zoooooom

Well, after our longest day yet, I expected a nice, slow, light day, almost a rest day. I didn't exactly get it.

Colleen continues to soldier on, but as Guardian of the Morale, I sometimes feel it is my duty to try to keep her from pushing herself too hard. (One is always one's own harshest taskmaster.)  So, what's the first thing we do? UP. Lots of horribly twisty prickly UP. Miles and miles of it. I don't really know how many, but it felt like years' worth of uphill to Orford, NH. David suggests that I get the GPS unit working (or trade it in for a new one) so that I can give an elevation profile of our days. I'd love to do this -- a little map with arrows pointing at it, saying "This was where the road had no shoulder" or "This is where we saw the blindfolded horses" or, simply, "sucked". There would be lots and lots of that last type of arrow pointing at today's uphill. But we stopped, and had a long rest partway up the hill. While we were sitting, several cyclists passed us in both directions, which should have indicated to us that even though we were still off the Adventure Cycling route, plenty of cyclists not only used but enjoyed the roads we were roundly cursing. When we did get up and sling our legs over the beasts again and take up off the hill, we found TEN MILES of downhill waiting for us not a quarter of a mile up the road. So we hoisted ourselves over the other side of the hill and just sat back and enjoyed the long ride down into Orford.

Some descents will fill you with a sort of marvelous mortal fear, where every muscle in your body is involved in guiding you over bumps and around potholes and making sure you don't get in the way of all the traffic, since there is no shoulder. These are the video-game hills. Then, there are the easy-chair hills, where the road has 6 feet of well-paved shoulder, and the curves are graded for 60 mph auto traffic. They made me wish I had skates instead of wishing for a magical wormhole to take me to the end. And at the end of this hill, in lovely downtown Orford, I had the best liverwurst sandwich of my life. Big slices of it, with mustard and pickles and veggies on a big wheat sub roll. God, but I love liverwurst. So we decided to stay in Orford -- Cee was happy but beat, and I wanted some good quality sleep. We decided to try out the White Goose Inn a mile down the road, where the owner actually said "I know what bikers are like" and slammed the door in our faces. Pff! Unwelcoming does not encompass the poison of this man's attitude.

It turned out to be a stroke of fortune, because we ended up at Breakfast on the Connecticut a few miles down the road, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the standard against which all other B&B's should be measured.  Our hosts were friendly and accommodating, the place had gorgeous scenic grounds and lovely porches and acres of window. So we slept lots, showered, and watched a charming movie about wholesome bike-racing brothers with brain aneurysms.

And now, we rest.

In which our heroines are daunted by the profile map

So, now we have joined up with the Adventure Cycling route and people are suddenly more accustomed to bike tourists.  The maps are wonderful and as detailed as we could possibly hope for - it's nice to know the next campground is 5 miles away and the next bike shop 45 - but it's true, people are sometimes almost blase about the idea of cycling across the country. They do, however, still seem to think it's interesting.

Today was our first day using the elevation profile map that Adventure Cycling provides in mountainous areas, and it seems that Vermont still has three walls left for us to scale. I think the profile map is a mixed blessing - it lets you plan for what challenges are in store, but you have a terrible certain knowledge of what challenges are in store. Sometimes the anxiety is worse than the payoff. It worked out, though; to make a tall story short, we licked two hills and have saved the last for tomorrow.

The best part of today was getting to play grown-up with David. He called ahead into Rochester and got a room at the fantastic Cooper-Webber house, run by an amazingly hospitable and cool woman named Sandy. Then he drove up to meet us. Colleen was feeling tired and stay-at-homey, so David and I drove over to Middlebury for dinner. The dinner was OK, but the driving was phenomenal. Cars! They are amazing! They are so fast and magical! They climb hills with zero effort on the part of the driver! I mean, like, wow! So, yay - we kicked some hill butt, I hung out with my wonderful fantastic husband, and slept in a comfy bed.

Our heroines scale a mountain of great magnitude and are saved by a knight aberrant

At this point, I have no doubt that Colleen is the Karma Priestess.

Yesterday, she struck up a conversation with a local guy named Peanut who told her that there was a good way around the daunting mountain we had been planning to scale today. She practically tapdanced at this news. Peanut also said that the bike shop (Green Mountain Bikes in Rochester, VT) came highly recommended. So, since my shifting hadn't been up to par and my rear wheel/brakes needed a little love, we stopped by the shop and met the owner, Doon. I think it's probably a safe bet to say that anyone who runs a bike store is going to be at least moderately interesting, but Doon goes above and beyond the call of cool. We brought him gazpacho, he read us a poem and chatted for a long time about this and that.  Colleen and I agreed that it's nice to have interesting people talk to you and share things -- it's delightful news that they noticed you were interesting or worthy of whatever they had to share. Anyway, we had a delightful lunch in town and Doon gave us stickers for our bikes, and a card, saying "call me if you ever have weird bike questions."

I didn't figure on calling him that DAY.

So we huffed and puffed our way up this smaller mountain and stopped to take triumphant pictures at the top. Actually, a local law officer stopped to snap a shot of our beaming mugs. What a nice guy.   On the way down, I heard a sharp twanggg! from my so-recently-out-of-true rear wheel. It started to rub a bit, too, so I figured we woulc glide down to the nearest stopping point and take a look there. I went in front so that Colleen would not lose me should I fall off the limping bike, and after 200 yards, she yelled several distinctly unladylike profanities and let me know that my wheel was massively out of true. I repeated the aforementioned profanities and pulled off the road. Yipes! I'd broken a spoke. Good thing your intrepid heroines had thought to bring along spare spokes. However, we didn't bring along anything to remove the cassette off of my rear wheel, and wouldn't you know it, I had to go and break a spoke that was behind the cassette. Gr.

Calm rational Colleen offered to take my cell phone, hike back up the mountain, and call Doon, or possibly AAA. My role in this (with which I was more than thrilled) was to sit with our bikes and read Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins. This was especially fitting, since I felt like nothign so much as a roadside attraction: one woman, two trailers, two bikes, three wheels, and a paperback. Whatever - back to Colleen, who carries the bulk of the interesting part of this story.  She actually had to hitch a ride back into Rochester and ask Doon in person what we could do. Now this, this is the part that cinches my everlasting faith in Doon. Colleen walked up to the shop, and found him out back gardening. She explained the situation, and he promptly made a few phone calls, closed up shop, and brought the Shining Volvo Sedan of Salvation out to help my sorry butt.

Now, I don't have any delusions about being the next Nobel Prize winner, but I do pride myself on being smarter than, say, your average mollusk. Colleen is also a savvy, intelligent chick. So why is it that neither of us thought to bring the wheel to Doon, who was tending shop twelve miles away, rather than vice-versa? No matter. So, Colleen and Doon drive up and five minutes later, he has replaced my spoke, trued my wheel, pumped up the tire, and replaced the whole thing back on my bike. With a smile! Ergo: Cee is the Karma Priestess. End of story.

For which there are no words

I know, I know, people who say there are no words for something never follow up on that promise. Now I, too, am going to forge boldly ahead, putting words to the unwordable, fitting them improperly and inefficiently around the interesting things I see and do, like butcher paper over a snowmobile. Or something. Today, we passed through lovely scenic Middlebury, Vermont, toodled up to see the Morgan Horse Farm, and then set off to camp in New York State tonight. When walking slowly along trying to figure out what the weird clicky noise from Cee's front wheel was all about, a woman in a pickup truck stopped in front of us to ask if we were all right. We allowed as how we were, but we all had a little chat where she mentioned that she and her family had biked across the country a couple of years ago and then invited us to spend the night in the camper they had in their backyard, just before the New York border. OK! Sounds terrific! Then, a few miles later, a local biker who had passed us on the road earlier slowed down to chat a bit, and mentioned that he and his family had ridden across the country a couple of years ago. Oh!, said we. We're staying with you tonight! So he brought us home, fed us lemonade, and told us that the gearing on our bikes was all wrong and not nearly low enough. THEN, he offered to fix it, for just the cost of parts. Fantastic. I would love to have lower gears. This would thrill me on a truly Doon-like level.

The best part of the whole deal, however, was getting to hang out with their family.  We talked about their trip (they rode a 4-person bike (!) from Vermont to Virginia to Alaska), about home schooling and horses and dairy farming and bike touring and the whole shebang. We ate good salad and shared stories and promised to send any wayward bike tourers along their way. So! Anyone making long bike trips through Vermont, go far, far out of your way to stop at the Romps' place. I couldn't dream up better hospitality on the best drugs that modern medicine has to offer me.

Warning: this entry contains a discussion of Feminine Problems, and may offend some of our more masculine readers.

This day sure had a lot to hate about it. I'm going to cut right to sharing the woman stuff and then move on to the more generic awfulness. Those wishing to skip the chick thing should go down here.

OK, that's enough of the disclaimers. One of the little quotidian rituals we have that we don't usually share with our gentle readers is how, when, and how often we pee. First off, the more pee the better. If we're drinking enough water, we should be peeing right and left, though not both at once. Ideally, the pee itself should be light yellow to clear.  Right, right, yes, everyone understands how terribly important hydration is, and how drinking water just makes everything better, so I'll skip the lecture. Suffice it to say that we do pee, and it's not always convenient to find a restroom. So, rather than traipse into the woods, drop trou, and get bug bites on our poor unsuspecting butts, we have both gone for the peeing-standing-up option. Yes, women can pee standing up. Talented women can pee cleanly while standing up with jeans on, and with no help from the little plastic pee-pals we have. However, both Colleen and I have gone for what restrooms.org calls the "Device-Assisted Method." Basically, it's a little funnel that will allow women to conveniently pee on bushes or out windows or whatever it is guys enjoy about the whole peeing-standing-up thing. Me, I just like to be able to stop by the roadside and empty my bladder in relative peace. My pee-thing even has a fairly pretty brocade pouch -- it looks like an eyeglass case, more or less. I highly recommend the whole deal. It's great.

The reason this is interesting today is that I got my period. This is a prime opportunity to plug the best hygiene product EVER (no hyperbole! no foolin'!): The Keeper. The Keeper is a little rubber cup with a tail that you fold up and insert like a tampon. When it fills, you can empty it and reinsert it. You can't get TSS from it -- apparently it doesn't absorb the bacteria -- and it holds more than a Super-Ultra-Uber strength tampon. I don't even have a problem with it while biking all day.  But, and this is the problem, there's this weird little hard rubber tail that sticks out.  The aforementioned pee-thing actually gets partially inserted into the vagina during use, so I was dreading the day I'd get my period and have to find out if the two fantastic Chick Devices were compatible. Conclusion: They are! You'll all be delighted to know I peed happily alongside the road today, despite the fact that my Keeper was snugly in place.

All right! Now the other suckiness. Everything broke. I spent the middle part of the day ready to throw up. There were no towns. We left Lovely Scenic Awesome Vermont and entered Forbidding Dirty Bug-Ridden Upstate New York. The hills were OK, until Colleen's chainring bent and she lost her lowest gears. Nobody stopped to see if we were OK while we were whanging on an upside-down bike. The guy we tried to get help from at a campground along the way was  barely responsive and certainly not at all useful. Colleen was being mobbed by these evil blackflies that were actually leaving huge open bloody wounds. We were miles and miles and miles from the next tiny little bike-shop-less hamlet, and there was no cell phone service.  It was depressing and disheartening and sad, even before we got to the part where the road was so new that it stuck to our tires and slowed us down. We stopped and walked and it stuck to our shoes. (I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there's gum in my hair.) We stopped for dinner and they were out of everything real that Colleen could eat so she had to have nachos and ice cream for dinner.  I mean, like, eww. For a while there, I was afraid we were going to have to guerilla camp by the side of the road, eating graham crackers and old grapes for dinner.

Cee, lying here while I write this, says, "I think my entry today came off as bitchy and whiny. But I don't care, because I feel bitchy and whiny." To that, today, I say Amen. Hopefully tomorrow will see us safely to a bike shop and an unbent chainring for Colleen. And brownies! And real food! And no hills! And actual days filled with actual biking!

 Molly loses an illusion but gains a cool new skill

Lots of people write books about long cycling trips. One of these books -- which I have never read, only read about -- contains a story that left a big impression on me.  It was written by a Swedish man who biked from his front door to K2 or Everest or something, climbed it, and then biked back. At one point, perhaps in Iran, perhaps not, his frame broke. He had to take a bus 50 miles with his bike to find someone who could weld it back together. He then got BACK on the bus, rode the 50 miles back to the point where it had broken, and started biking again. He pedaled every inch between his front door and the start of his climb, and between the end of his climb and his return home. Somewhere, back in the back of my brain, this image simmered and stewed for a year or two, until I became convinced that this was really and truly the only way to go about a monumental cycling trip. I vowed that even if Colleen had to get a ride for one reason or another, that I would pedal every inch between the East Coast and San Francisco.

(Note: Anyone who wants to give us a ride from Reno to Burning Man is welcome to apply for the job. Since that's just a north-south jog off of our route, I don't mind. In fact, it would be really really nifty. Digression over.)

So, as I believe I mentioned in yesterday's entry, yesterday was overwhelmingly awful. We biked through abandoned Nowheresville, New York. We saw two closed motels and a closed theme park with grass growing in the parking lots. All of the driveways had big iron bars blocking any unauthorized entry. All of this empty, seemingly abandoned land was "POSTED" disallowing any and all trespassing for any reason. It was creepy. I felt like something evil wanted to happen in this area, and that we got off easy simply getting sick and having big gear problems.  We made it through the area, though, sticky pavement and all, and stayed at the one shining spot of coolness we found in the area, the Lake Harris Bay B&B.  It became clear that we were going to have to go at least 50 miles before getting to a bike shop; Colleen didn't feel good riding my bike, since it wasn't sized to her proportions, and riding her own bike with that bent chainring was out of the question. What to do?

The answer, unfortunately, was obvious: take our generous hosts up on their offer to drive us 50 miles to Inlet, NY, where the bike guy said he'd try to straighten out the offending chainring in a vise. And then ease on down the road. I spent a while today wrestling with this. Maybe, I told myself, since Rye, NH is on the coast, all of those miles in Maine were "extra credit" that I could use up by getting rides. 100 miles of free passage westward, right? Or maybe since I was riding a bike that was missing its 9 lowest gears yesterday, I earned that lift down the road. No, no, none of that really worked in my head. I climbed in a pickup truck, of my own free will, and got a ride when I could have done it on my bike. But the fact is, I'm not in this alone. The decisions I would make if this were a solo trip are very different from the decisions we made planning the trip together. If I'm broken down, so is Cee; if Cee's broken down, so am I. We're a team, and if she goes, I go.

Shortly after becoming at peace with this idea, I heard that telltale *thwang!* from my rear wheel - AGAIN. Yup, another spoke broke. This one was not on the cassette side, but was still incredibly difficult to get in. I think you're supposed to remove the cassette when replacing rear spokes, no matter which side of the wheel they pop on. At least, this is what I gather from the fact that I had to bend the durn thing a little to get it in. This worries me, since it means I've stressed the metal a little. It's not stressed in the place where spokes usually experience stress, but it still worries me. Well, I had a devil of a time even after I'd replaced the spoke, because my rear wheel just doesn't want to behave. (Duct tape fans will be pleased to know that it is currently supplementing my fond de jante in one spot.) So, Doon, Billy, whoever, if any bike guys are reading, tell me what I should do. Should I get a new wheel? Should I just bring the old one in to a bike shop and have them check it out, maybe replace my had-to-be-bent-a-little-but-it's-better-now spoke?

While truing it up so I could ride on it, I thought I noticed that the wheel wasn't perfectly round. Earlier today, I had been wondering if that was true of my front wheel, since it was a little bouncy. It was true from side to side -- it never rubs my front brakes -- I could just see that it had, er, lumps. Bear with me, gearheads, I am not a wheelbuilder or mechanic, I simply play one on the web.  I figured I was imagining things about the rear wheel until Colleen said, "You know, that wheel really isn't round." Yrrrrrrrrg. At this point, I'd just spent a really long time sitting in itchy plants on a small twisty road fixing one thing after another. We decided that we could ride on to camp tonight and I would check it out there, since it was obviously ridable, and since my front wheel hadn't seemed to be getting worse since I noticed the up-down warble. We did, another 15 miles or so, and made it in with no serious issues. But! Then! I upended my bike on a picnic table and set out to do a really dumb thing - try to do something completely new to it that I've never done before and haven't even read about or anything. I figured I knew how spokes and wheels worked, basically, so it shouldn't be that much harder to make a wheel more round than it is to make it more straight.  And, to the amazement of everyone involved (namely, me), I succeeded in not only failing to screw up my wheels, but also in actually making them significantly more round than they had been! Yes, folks, I successfully un-warbled both my wheels.