Bike Diary #1 sent Sunday, June 24, 2001

Small group gathered in front of my apartment on the morning of departure Saturday June 23, 2001

The starting point for this trip, my apartment on Highland Avenue in Somerville, is at latitude 42 degrees 23 minutes 16 seconds north, longitude 71 degrees 6 minutes 3 seconds west. You'll have to wait and see to find out the coordinates of the ending point.

"An inauspicious beginning"

I think it was Kate Courteau who used the expression quoted above in reference to the weather as a small group of friends gathered in front of my apartment this morning to give me a sendoff on my trip. My departure had been postponed so many times already that I was pretty determined to get going for real this morning. "Damn the forecast, full speed ahead," or something similar.

The ride itself went pretty smoothly. We left about on time, and some folks even escorted me out of town. Jono, in his determination to get the perfect departure photo despite the dead battery in his camera, even stuck it out beyond Concord (the others, Max & Co., were en route to Hartford, Conneticut, and split off in Belmont). I really appreciate the escorts; a little moral support at the beginning of a great and daunting enterprise such as this makes a big difference.

The night before depating I weighed myself and the bicycle. It seems like we're both getting a little heavy; I was 180 pounds and the loaded bicycle 104 (34 pounds unloaded). The weight of the load seemed awfully high to me, as my recollection from previous tours was that it should be about 45 pounds, not 70. I have a few frivolities with me this time that are adding weight to the load (such as the handheld PC that I am writing the on), but the certainly don't add up to 25 pounds. Nonetheless, repeated careful measurements always came up with the same result.

At any rate, the weight of the load was the major factor in setting the pace for today, it forced me to slow to creep (8-9 mph) going uphill, of which there was plenty on today's ride. Nonetheless, I managed a respectable overall moving average speed, 12.8 mph shown in the table above. When you're riding a 100 pound machine, you're pround of 12 mph and not ashamed of 10.

I went through a number of old industrial towns, notably Gardner, Athol and Orange (all in Massachuetts, of course) with beautiful old water powered brick factories left over from the days when we actually built things in this country. Most of these towns had made some efforts at preservation (a la Lowell).

When I arrived at Erving State Forest in the midafternoon (my final destination for the day and where I sit now as I am writing this), Kate's prophecy of bad weather started violently to come true. I barely had time to pitch my tent and get my gear inside before a Wagnerian storm broke and sheets of water started pouring from the sky. Unfortunately, the campsite I was assigned was not well designed: it was built on a slope insead of the preferred way of having a peak (on which you pitch the tent) surrounded by lower ground. This means that the water which runs off the tent on the uphill side then runs under it and soaks through the floor.

I actually think the guys here were trying to be nice to me by giving me this since it is the closest to the water supply and the head, but in reality they did me a bit of a disservice. I was forced to crouch in my tent cursing while water seeped through the floor and everything started getting damp.

Once the rains did finally stop; everything was a sea of mud because instead of grass the campsite has bare dirt.

Oh well, it will all dry out again in another day or two.

Day	2
Date	Sunday June 24, 2001
Distance	93 miles
Moving Average Speed	11.4 mph
Left at	7:30 AM
Arrived at	6:00 PM
Overnight in	Austerlitz, NY
Latitude	42 d 17 m 8 s N
Longitude	73 d 29 m 57 s W
Cumulative Distance	183 miles

The moving average speed for today tells it all: I crossed the Berkshires at a snail's pace. It is my opinion that the Berkshires are by far more difficult to cross than the average Rocky Mountain pass. As I was struggling up one of the steeper grades on route 20 west of Huntington, MA that it would be very easy to prove that opinion is a fact if I had one of those fancy bicycle computers that include an altimeter and use it to tell how far you've climbed.

I decided to cross the Connecticut River on the bike path that connects Belchertown to Northampton, the first time in all the times that I have bicycled across Massachusetts that I have tried this path. This meant starting the day on nearly a due south trajectory, riding from Erving to Amherst, where I stopped for a pastry and coffee. At the coffee shop, I met Frank Tripoli, who lives in Ware and bicycles the path from Belchertown to Northampton and return for exercise. It was a lucky chance; he gave me good directions to the path, and when I caught up to him on it, we had a long conversation. He seems to have a habit of encountering cross-country adventurers on that bike path, the last one was a guy walking his dog from San Diego to Boston. Frank has a younger brother, Steve, who works as a reporter for WBUR, one of the NPR affiliates in Boston. I've heard that voice thousands of times.

Frank Tripoli with his wheels in Northampton, MA

Tonight I'm staying at my aunt's house in Austerlitz. It's a welcome chance to lay out all my soaked gear to dry and sleep in a warm bed.

Crossing the Massachusetts/New York state line.