Sunday, July 14, 2013

Weather Wonderland

I rode the RUSA Belmar-Princeton-Belmar 200K solo on Saturday in central New Jersey.  Thick soupy fog,  four torrential rains, beastly hot sunshine, and delightfully cool cloudy winds.  All in one day.  It was great.

I rode the four miles along the ocean to the 6am start.  Dozens of police, vendors, and organizers were setting up for the day's Belmar 5K foot race.  Luckily, I was able to bike through the cordoned-off road, rather than have to detour even before the start of my ride.

I rode the first three hours without eyewear since it was so foggy.  Fog instantly condensed on the lenses.  I missed my rear-view mirror.

The housing market is booming back.  I saw several new housing developments since I rode last summer.

Roadside poison ivy is booming too, vines hanging from trees over the road, and lush ground growth encroaching along the fog line.  Be careful.

As I rode through Fort Dix and McGuire Air Force base, I heard lots of booms, but encountered no black helicopters this year.  A few miles later, a huge lumbering four-engine propeller plane passed directly overhead to a landing.  Neat.

A first: As I passed one of many horse farms, I saw two harness-racing rigs racing around a track.  It looked like two large men in little  recumbent chariots getting mud kicked up in their faces from the hooves.  I laughed.

Firemen were collecting donations at the main intersection in Hightstown.  I got stopped at the traffic light next to a friendly fireman.  He chatted me up, and asked my route.  He immediately interrupted me, incredulous, as I started listing towns.  "Wait, Belmar at the shore???"  Excited conversation followed.  Yay rando.

One of the checkpoints is at a pizza restaurant in Cranbury.  I couldn't resist.  I sat for a slice.  Delicious.

As a kid, I loved biking in the rain.  I especially loved riding through lakes that formed in a nearby park (where the only hazard was bumping into a submerged picnic table, but that's another story).  Saturday's rain was a throwback.  Each time I rode through a storm, I got totally soaked, raised rooster tails through shallow puddles, and the rain temperature was comfortable and not freezing.  Yay.

I did zen cycling most of the day.  I had memorized the route and its recent updates, never looked at cue sheet or GPS.  And no odometer.  I 'woke up' several times wondering where I was, and always recognized my location shortly.  Fun!

This is a great route.  Many thanks to Rando Paul for creating and maintaining it.

Click here to see a few boring checkpoint photos

1 comment:

skiffrun said...

Nice post, Sag.
More than one (1) subject to the post.
Longer than your usual post, but still shorter than most posts by someone I could name.
But I think you caught the essence, and more.
I enjoyed it much.

Also enjoyed the checkpoint pics.
Looks as if you were trying very, very hard not to let the laugh out. :O

It rained & stormed in north central NC, Saturday (Jul-13) also. I hope to get a "sagittandy" type post (short, to the point) up in the next day or so.
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google seems to have brought back the unreadable numbers as part of proving one is not a robot. getting this past the bot-prevention may take a few attempts.
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Just realized -- I'm using Google-Chrome as I type this ... BUT ... Google-Chrome has been FAILING to post any of my blog comments for about 2 months. ... Therefore, I will copy this into the parallel Firefox universe before attempting to post.
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Interesting -- "RUSA Blogs" in Chrome shows 3 blogs posting since I posted on Irregular Velo Adventures 21 hours ago. In Firefox, the most recently updated blog is IVA, 10 hours ago.

...M