51 miles – sure doesn’t look like 75 does it?

The day started pretty well.  I made some sourdough buckwheat pancakes to start the day.  Yes – piled high!  Went for the extra pancake to fuel up for a lot of miles.

Topped with sauteed apples. Why yes, it was tasty!

I was ready for the ride.  Fresh as a daisy!

Little did I know what kind of day was in store.

We booked on out keeping a good pace.  We did a water stop after 8 miles.

I love this rest stop.  It’s very scenic.

My bud:

We were going into a fairly brisk head wind here, and it started to sprinkle just a bit, but it didn’t last.  This next part of the ride was the hilliest part of our ride for the day.  After a while, I felt like I was really struggling up the hills.  It was very frustrating.  Thoughts running through my head were “Dammit – I am going to lose 10 pounds, this is ridiculous” and “Why is this so hard today?”  We got to the top of the hills and I was fairly annoyed.  I was starting to doubt about making 75 miles.  As we approached mile 15 and Greenwich, I realized that my back tire was flat.

Well, that explained the trouble I was having.  If you have never biked on a flat, it is like riding through sand and you work twice as hard.

I was annoyed at the flat, though.

That’s not radiance LOL!  See how sweaty, too?  That was a lot of work with those hills and it toasted my quads early in the ride.

Although, this was a perfect opportunity to get in a snack.

This pineapple was sooo good!

This was supposed to be a self-sealing tire with ‘goo’ in it, so we pumped it back up and started riding again.  At mile 20, the tire went flat again, and we decided to change to a totally new tire.  So much for self-sealing 🙄

Well, the new tire had a valve stem that was too big to fit into the hole in my rim.  Eeeeek!!  😯 😯  So, we couldn’t use that tire.  Big mistake not noticing that upon tire purchase. That left John’s spare, which was also patched.  Got that changed and kept going.

Things seemed pretty good and we rolled through rural Washington county.  Then it was lunch time! We had gone to Salem, but nothing was open on Sunday.  One reason we like biking on Saturdays is that everything is open.  Small towns are ghost towns on Sundays.

We did spy a place in the middle of nowhere at mile 31:

How can you go wrong with a place called Bob’s Lunch?  In the middle of nowhere:

Sign for the restrooms:

Pointing to behind the bushes?  Hmmmm…

Anyway, this place was cute and the food actually was good.  I had a scallop roll with some fries.  My body really wanted the salty fries.

I don’t know if people outside of New England know what a seafood roll is, but they can be lobster rolls, clam rolls, scallop rolls.  Just on a toasted bun.  Sometimes it is more of a salad, like with the lobster roll.  This was fun and tasty, although I could have done without the grease for lunch.  I loaded up on sunscreen for the second time and we headed out for Cambridge.  The idea was to get to Cambridge and double back some.

I really started to hit a wall around mile 38.  I was tired and lagging.  I stopped John and told him I didn’t want to go all the way to Cambridge.  So, we headed back.  I didn’t know I had a slow leak in this tire that was making it hard to pedal. With turning around, this would have made a 67 mile ride.

At mile 45, we stopped for a refresher:

The scenery is very pretty here.

It definitely feels far from home, though.  Looking down, we saw this tire had leaked air and was low on pressure.  Uh oh.  That was the last tire we had on us.  Who knew we would go through 3 tires?  We pumped this up to see how much further I could go.  Turns out it was just a couple more miles and then we took the tire off *again* to put new patches on it.

I just wanted to make it back to Greenwich and stop at the ice cream place 😀

I was feeling pretty fatigued, too.  At mile 51, we found Ice Cream Man (featured on Bobby Flay’s Throwdown).  We were each going to get a scoop, but John said “It’s only 50 cents to add a third scoop, let’s combine into one dish.”  Behold giant bowl of ice cream!

3 scoops.  More like 9!  We got chocolate cream pie (my favorite), almond joy, and coffee chip.  It was so good.  Ice Cream Man really makes the best stuff.  And this giant bowl was only $4.  Can you believe that?

So, we formulated a plan that I would continue biking, stopping to pump up the tire periodically every few miles and John would bike ahead going home.  He would then get the car and come back and pick me up wherever I ended up.  So, I pumped up the tire, which got very flat while we were eating ice cream, and we pulled out onto the road.  It went immediately flat again.  That was really frustrating!

So, the plan was to have John bike home, then come back and get me and I would just stay at the ice cream place.  That meant me sitting there for at least an hour and a half.  I said goodbye and got to sitting.

Then I texted my sister for a bit.

More boredom:

Then I called my mom and chatted with her. She offered to come get me so I wouldn’t have to wait as long.  Is she not the best mom ever??

While I waited for her, I was arranging sticks on the ground

And resisting any urge to get more ice cream just for something to do.

Then my savior arrived!

😀   I had texted John, so he knew he didn’t have to come back to get me.  I got to ride home in air conditioned comfort!  Thanks Mom!  John had only gotten home about 15 minutes before we arrived, so that did save me a *lot* of waiting.

John got in 67 miles and the best part of the ride – the big down hills and the tail wind.  Booo!  I did the hardest of all the miles, not to mention the extra work of the soft tires.

Ride Stats

Total miles:  51.18

Top speed:  32.4  (hills!!!)

Average speed 12.4 mph – not bad with the tire issues and wind

Calories burned 1550 – and I earned every one of those today.

I did get all happy and cleaned up, though:

You can’t keep me down long!  Now we are off to make some S’mores with my folks!