Not a Recovery Ride! Hair of the Dog

Fear Rothar teases me about my choice of routes for the day after various Big Event™ rides. He likes to call them Recovery Rides - with a big dose of sarcasm. I prefer to think of them more as Hair of the Dog that Bit Ya. In reality, I am just taking advantage of the great terrain in whatever place we happen to be. Since most of our Big Event™ rides take in lots of climbing and dirt roads, most of our day-after-the-day-before rides tend to do the same. Recovery rides do not happen on weekends!

For the day after the Irreverent Road Ride, I had looked around on RideWithGPS for rides near Montpelier with the word "dirt" in the name and stumbled upon the Central Vermont Cycling Tour. Struggling with the idea that Montpelier is not what I consider Central Vermont, I almost discounted this one. Thank goodness I did not. This route was brutiful, and I now have it starred as one of my favorites. 

We barely saw a car all day. What we did see was lots of short steep climbs and descents, a barn that spanned the road, a truck straight out of the Flintstones, some very tempting lakes, amazing mountain vistas and gorgeous rolling fields of green. The altimeter on my GPS got a serious workout. Maybe we were worn out from our activities the day before, but the climbing on this route got my attention!

It turns out the route is from an organized ride, which despite being in Northern Vermont is indeed called the Central Vermont Cycling Tour. It is held in June every year as a fundraiser for the Cross Vermont Trail Association, a very worthy cause. We will definitely add the actual event to our must-do list for next year.

Vermont does dirt right!