DROVES - Day 1

A few friends joined us in East Burke over Memorial Day weekend for the 2012 version of DROVES - Dirt Roads of Vermont Epic Sojourn. As noted in the previous blog entry, DROVES is an informal gathering of friends who like exploring Vermont's dirt roads. The crowd this year included several past participants, Jake Kassen, Emily O'Brien, Dominique Codere, Cristine Lamoureux, David Lafferty, Emily Searles Lafferty, David Wilcox, Ted Lapinski, and first-timers Matt Roy and Mo Bruno-Roy. Brian and Andreas joined us for half the day on Sunday.

Some folks stayed at the Village Inn, while the rest of the gang stayed at the Bike Barn. We met each morning in front of the general store for our rides.

The gang on Day 1

DROVES - Dirt Roads of Vermont Epic Sojourn

Updated for 2013 -

For the past several years, John and I have spent Memorial Day weekend climbing and descending some of the finest dirt roads Vermont has to offer. Over the years, friends have found links to our routes, guessed our starting times, and ridden the same roads at the same time. We love riding with other dirt-road loving folks.

We will be staying in East Burke, and starting rides at 8AM in front of the General Store. We usually ride as a social group and regroup at the top and bottom of the big climbs.

Misguided Angels - Flèche

Warning: It was a long ride. This is a long post! But it is mostly photos...

Last month I blogged that my favorite randonneuring event is the Flèche Vélocio. This past weekend, The Misguided Angels had an awesome flèche ride. The team this year included members from several previous teams. Dena and I have now done 4 flèche rides together. Norm and David had each been on one flèche (with me) prior to this one. This meant that everyone was quite familiar with the drill. Although it would be a first meeting for Norm and David, which means they would have plenty to talk about over the 24 hours!

This route had some striking differences from my previous routes. First, it had some complicated travel and logistics. It was much more urban, and it was much flatter than any previous route.

So many rides, so little time to blog!

When I started this blog a few months back, I wondered if I would find enough interesting things to write about in the winter to keep a blog going. Well I managed to come up with enough to write about for a few months and had enough time to keep it pretty current. But ironically, as the riding season has kicked into full gear, I am finding that there just aren't enough hours in the day to blog about all the rides!

Regular readers know I kept myself busy with some climbing in March and April. 

Here's some of the other stuff I've been up to.

Just after we returned from our all too brief vacation in California, we had the Ride Studio Cafe Brevet Season kickoff party and 100km ride.  Despite a dire forecast, we had a big crowd on the ride out to Lost Lake. Rob and Patria even took time away from the Studio to join us for the ride!

Gargantuan Bragging Rights

Just back from massage, where Morgan had to spend considerable time working on my shoulder that I likely strained while patting myself on the back!!!

This email arrived in my inbox a few days ago...

Thank you for participating! Congratulations on your Specialized Challenge effort - and what a challenge it was! Specialized and Strava tasked you to put in 47 days of relentless climbing and suffering and that you did. Nearly 11,000 global participants climbed close to 420 million feet of elevation in just six weeks. What amazing results! Without a doubt the most difficult challenge yet, just over 700 riders completed the goal. An extra round of applause goes out to these die-hard riders. A Classic Climbing Challenge from Specialized highlighted a few extraordinary riders who are, apparently, born to climb. In the end, Brian Toone of Hoover, Alabama and Jeremy Philippe of Grenoble, France pushed one another near the 500,000 feet of elevation mark, blowing away the challenge goal in only a few weeks. Ultimately, Toone took top honors, climbing 468,661 feet in 96 rides for an average of 4,881 feet per ride. Not to be outdone, top female riders kept the competition strong as Pamela Blalock of Watertown, Massachusetts and Virginia Vaquero Casey of Morgan Hill, California traded off the lead on their way to over 200,000 feet of vertical ascent throughout the challenge. In the end, the two finished just 4,516 feet apart with Casey inching ahead. She climbed a total of 216, 206 feet over just 34 rides for an astounding average of 6,359 feet per ride. Congratulations again to all the competitors around the world who made this challenge so fun, motivational and truly extraordinary! Keep it up, Strava and Specialized

Purgatory To Pack Monadnock - from Milford, NH

I like riding off the beaten track, looking for new and interesting roads and cafes.

Over the years I have mapped out loads of different rides all of which could qualify as a favorite ride on any given day. I have now created a page with links to RideWithGPS maps for many of these rides. As I go back out and do the rides again, I will add links to posts with photos to help entice folks to try a ride. This is the first!

This ride starts in Milford, NH. Due to a very rough descent, I decided it is better in the opposite direction than I rode yesterday (map link below is in the recommended direction). I'd rather climb a rough road than descend one. Either direction has stupendous views. As with most of my rides, there are a couple sections of dirt.

Flèche Vélocio

My favorite randonneuring event is the Flèche Vélocio. This is a team event where all members of the team work and ride and finish together. Traditionally the event is scheduled for Easter weekend, but in northern climates, a bit of leeway is granted to accommodate for less than pleasant riding conditions at that time of year. In France, there is a single destination, but in the US, we are allowed regional destinations. The date (a range of start/finish times) and actual destination is set by the regional organizer, but the team members select their own starting point, actual start time, and route.

There are some basic rules - 24 hours, covering at least 360km, with at least 25km done in the last two hours and no stop more than 2 hours. You can do a large loop, but not repeated small loops. The team consists of between 3 and 5 cycles - so a tandem or triplet counts as one team member. At least 3 members must finish to be granted credit. Complete RUSA rules can be found here.

Grace, Finally Achieved!

If you've been reading the blog from the beginning (not that long ago), you may recall that last December, Fear Rothar and I took part in Rapha's Ride to Redemption. Actually, if you read yesterday's entry, you may be aware of this as well! But for those who don't know, and just want the Reader's Digest condensed version, or those with short memories...

Last December Rapha ran this little challenge to do 500km in the last 9 days of 2011.  They called it the Ride to Redemption. Fear Rothar and I decided to have some fun with the theme and came up with all sorts of irreverent redemption themed rides. We planned a ride to Redemption Rock, Purgatory Chasm, Purgatory Falls, Mt Grace, Paradise Lost Lake, Pagan Hill, Brimstone Lane, and World's End, along with a few short local rides to nearby redemption centers. We both managed to get well over the 500km, and do most of the rides, but uncooperative weather caused us to replace two of the themed rides with others with lower elevation, or in the case of the final one, when we were just exhausted, with a much less ambitious one.

Well, the arrival of our patches last week prompted me to think about those two rides. That and my new challenge which involves accumulating altitude...

A Heavenly Ride to Purgatory Chasm

According to my very extensive research on Wikipedia, Purgatory is the condition of purification or temporary punishment by which those who die in a state of grace are believed to be made ready for Heaven. We mapped out this ride last December as our final ride in the Rapha Ride to Redemption challenge. However by the time the final day came around, we were already fully redeemed - and the weather was pretty miserable, and we ended up bailing on the temporary punishment that day.

Well we finally got our Festive 500 patches last week, and it reminded me that I should go do this ride.

Unlike December 31, it was certainly a heavenly day today, as seven of us rolled out for this hellishly hilly (the temporary punishment) ride to Purgatory Chasm.

 

Done and Dusted

Last week I mentioned that I was taking part in a climbing challenge through the Strava website. Those who know me well know that this sort of challenge suits me to a T, since it has nothing to do with speed at all. I could ride along smelling the flowers, stopping to take photos and sampling the offerings of cafes along the way. All that said, a few of my riding buddies have been surprised by some of the gratuitous climbs I've thrown in on recent rides.

The challenge has been a bit ...ummm... challenging to do in this area, because it's so far to get to real mountains. What we do have nearby is plenty of short steep little hills, which can actually be much more painful than a long climb up a proper mountain. It's not too hard to create a route with 50 feet per mile of climbing, but it does take all day to get 3-4,000 feet of climbing! Those lucky folks out in California can easily get two or three times that climbing in a day ride :-)

Brown and Grey

As the road rose up to meet me, I became aware of all the grey and brown. As I climbed along slowly, I noticed all the various shades of grey in the rough aggregate surface. I felt I could see all the individual pebbles and pieces of broken asphalt that made up this ribbon of grey. The edge of the road was littered with the crispy brown leaves that had come down last autumn, with the occasional green tuft of grass poking through that bed of leaves.  Along one side of the road, the wooden posts anchoring the rusty cable fence were grey and weathered. The other side was lined with the ubiquitous, in New England at least, rock wall. These walls are thick, solid and sturdy in places, scattered in others. Some of these rock walls are centuries old and reflect great care and skill from the original craftsman. The rocky soil here provides a seemingly endless source of material for these walls. All through the woods, the color was still brown and grey. There were no buds on these trees, and no wildflowers sprouting here yet. In the areas devoid of houses, there were no early spring flowers like crocuses or daffodils, and no wildflowers either. Looking up, the sky was a deep brilliant blue, and clearly visible with no canopy of leaves that in the summer shelters this road from the sun. I love this shade of blue, one that seems unique to winter and early spring. Maybe it's the contrast between barren branches and the sky, or maybe it is a special shade of blue just for winter.

Occidental, I think that I just fell in love with you

After spending several days doing some climbs around Napa, we finally checked out of our motel in downtown Napa, loaded up our panniers, and headed west, aiming for the tiny community of Occidental. We only discovered after returning to Boston that Tom Waits now calls Occidental home.

Ice Whine in Napa

So just a few days after I post a picture of a 100 ml tube of sunscreen that was being rapidly used up in New England, I head off to the airport to fly to California where TSA threatened to take it away from me! In some wicked twist of fate, John had some vacation time to use up before April 1st, and we decided to head off the Northern California to do some early season hill climbing in nice weather. We booked our trip long before realizing that the world had flipped and Boston was now in the tropics. In the week before our departure, we starting crying over the forecasts, as Boston was to be 80F and sunny while Napa and Sonoma were to be 50s and rainy, as it should be in Boston at this time of year. We packed up warm clothes, but optimistically threw the sunscreen in anyway.

Signs of Spring

It's about 40 F and raining here today, a pretty typical spring day in the greater Boston area. Fear Rothar calls March the cruelest month. We start to see signs of spring. We get warm days with sunshine, and then, it seems on our days off, we get the dreary rainy days! Well I can't really complain. It's been a mild winter, although with some pretty good swings in temperature. But we are seeing lots of indications now of spring...

Emily and I were having a mid-ride lunch at Verrill Farm recently where they are starting to sell some seedlings.

 

Mud in yer eye!

A combination of too much work and fine weather have kept me away from the (non-work) computer this week. However, last weekend's weather led me to write the following:

The unusually mild and dry winter we have experienced in New England this year was book-ended (although it may be a little early to use that term yet!) by snow storms in October and on Leap Year Day. The latter was followed by a day of rain and, for some reason, that seemed to suggest a spin on dirt roads to your truly. The idea must have had some merit, as David Lafferty was happy to accompany me into southern New Hampshire. Perhaps, though, he was just trying to maximise culture shock, as he and wife Emily were planning to fly to Mallorca the following weekend. Have fun, you two!

But I digress, we tried to establish the theme of our ride early on.