No, it wasn't REALLY the Icicle Metric; it was the Bloomin' Metric. But, it could have been, in terms of the weather. High 40s and RAIN. In late May.
We did it, though, on Sunday, May 22nd. And it didn't rain the whole time, fortunately. It wasn't windy, either . . . that helped a lot.
We took a 3-day weekend to do this ride. We drove up to Cherry Hill Friday evening, had dinner with friends, then headed for Westchester County on Saturday. We went through some little towns, like Chappaqua (found some GREAT scones at Susan Lawrence), then headed over to Stamford. It rained Saturday evening, and the Weather Channel said it was supposed to rain Sunday, too.
It did.
Fortunately, though, it only really rained hard for miles 12 through 17 (up to the first rest stop). I had dressed in shorts, a short sleeve jersey, a windstop jacket, and an orange rain overjacket. My hands got wet and cold, and I got cold during the hard downpour, but other than that, I was relatively comfortable. I wore a motel shower cap over my helmet -- cheap insurance against a soaked head. Hubby wasn't quite as warmly dressed, and I had to remind him to put on HIS shower cap. During the hardest part of the downpour, we stopped under a tree.
Hubby also got a flat, rear tire, 3 miles into the ride. The sag wagon showed up in 15 SECONDS -- no lie! I had just started casting about for my tire tools when he drove up. That was great, as it turned out the spare tube we were carrying for hubby's bike had a hole in it. (He uses 700c tubes, while my smaller bike takes 650s.)
Other than the rain and the flat, we had a great ride -- really. I had taped my knee before we started, and I think it helped somewhat. I did start hurting about 15 miles into the ride, but the pain was light and never really got worse. We made a decision, at the first rest stop, to cut out the nearly 10-mile loop that stretched the ride to 45 miles. We turned right out of the rest stop, rather than left, and finished out the rest of the ride, for a total of 36.5 miles. My knee felt relatively fine for the remainder of the ride; it hurt some but not bad enough to make me want to stop riding.
Overall, I felt good on this ride. There were hills, but they didn't feel very effort-ful. When the ride ended, I was sorry; I could have continued, and no doubt would have felt good after 45 miles. I didn't want to push it with my knee, though . . . I've only just started therapy, and this was my first ride with my knee taped.
After we finished up, we skipped the post-ride sandwiches (they were small and unappetizing-looking). We wanted to do Vietnamese, but couldn't find any V. restaurants in the phone book. We ended up going to Greenwich. We stopped at a local tratteur and ordered up some crab cakes and veggies. Then we had drinks at a local bar, then dinner at Figaro Bistro. THAT was yummy. I had spring vegetable soup, cod cooked with North African spices, and tiny pasta cooked with couscous spices. I had 1/2 a bottle of wine on top of the cocktail I had at the bar.
I slept pretty well, after all that.
Monday we lucked out -- though there were periods of cloudiness, we didn't get rained on for the trip back. We went back through Westchester county (stopping again at Susan Lawrence for another scone), then through NYC to New Jersey. We visited a Dominican bakery in West New York, NJ (I had a guava pastry), then we beat it back down to the Philly area. We found a really wonderful little Asian restaurant in Cherry Hill, Sakura Spring. I had sushi, Vietnamese spring rolls, and sauteed veggies with brown rice.
All in all, it was a very successful weekend.
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