days go by
These days, the weekend commuter rail crowd for Rockport is fairly heavy. Even at 8:30 on a Sunday morning, the platform is teeming with families and couples, fleeing the inland humidity for the cooler breezes of the North Shore. They bear the trappings of summer crowds, beach chairs and towels, paperbacks tucked underneath their arms with spines still crisp and uncracked. In some cases, you could still see the Borders receipt tucked beneath the front cover. There are cyclists, too, as the MBTA allows bikes on their trains so long as it isn't during the weekday commuter rush. For a Boston road rider, the commuter rail is an easy way to get out of the city limits, and break out of the humdrum circuit of riding the Minuteman bike path and the Concord crush.
At least that's the point of view of Earl, a middle aged rider with a slick, sleek Litespeed under his palm. I had gone up to him to ask about procedure, since I'd never ridden the train with my bike, and I wasn't sure if we were supposed to place them anywhere, but wound up listening to him expounding on his theory on the migratory patterns of New England cyclist culture.
"It's like, you start off in May doing a few rides to Walden, maybe explore Lincoln and Carlisle a bit. By June, Rt. 62's full of spandex, and you feel like puking if you have to go through Concord Center again. So, in July, you start taking the commuter rail out to P-town or the North Shore. keep it up in August. Do the Berkshires in September and October so you could watch the leaves get all pretty and shit, then go inside for the winter. Then after spending six months on the exercise bike, going out to Walden Pond doesn't seem so bad. So you start the cycle ... no pun intended, heh-heh-heh ... you start it all over again. It's like that movie with the penguins that I saw with my wife the other day."
"Except with spandex."
"yeah, and fatter asses, in some cases. heh-heh-heh."
He got in the first car on the train. I went in the last one.
I didn't look out the window much on the ride up. I'd seen most of it before, on a trip to Salem with analog_vector a couple of years ago; and I'd wanted to keep some of the terrain a surprise. So I kept to my book1 until Rockport.
The ostensible reason for the trip was that I've been planning on doing a double-century weekend ride with jasonlizard, crystain and tegin that is all about visiting friends in the outer 'burbs2. We were originally thinking of turning it into a Team Tsuru fundraising opportunity, but we're all a little too busy to canvas, so it's just going to be a social thing. But that still meant that we needed to sort out routes and directions -- which meant riding down the gorgeous North Shore coastline on a Saturday morning; trying to figure out where the most scenic beaches were, and which places had the best ice cream. These are the sacrifices that we make for friends.
In general, the ride was fine, except that I made a couple of wrong turns that added ten miles to the forty that I was budgeting. My legs could handle the extra pedaling, but the added time was somehow enough to get me suburned.
A couple of months ago, as the long heat of summer began to stretch out over our nights, I was asking tegin what it was like to be sunburnt. For all of my life to that point, sunburns were exotic foreign things that only white people had, like freckles and a choice of hair colors. I had spent innumerable summer afternoons in my youth swimming and playing outside, my skin turning into darker shades of chocolate without ever feeling that tender, raw sensation that she tried to describe. In proudly declaiming my immunity, I had probably set myself up for some kind of karmic retribution, as hubris frequently does. So, I got my shoulders fried by four hours in the midday sun; and it's only been today that I could sit back in a chair without wincing in pain. Boy, does this sort of thing suck.
Still doesn't stop me from trying to map out the Sutton route, though.
1 re-reading parts of A Peace to End All Peace, which I was planning on loaning to jasonlizard if he was going to ride with me, but we somehow crossed plans and missed each other. Which is fine. I needed to remind myself of how daft Winston Churchill was when he was young. Though, as an aside, it's frightfully depressing how many parallels you can draw between the British experience in the Middle East and the current American adventure -- like all that confidence that Iraq could be re-made in the same fashion as Germany and Japan post WW-II? Do a find-replace on "Germany and Japan post WWII" with "India" and you have most of the British telegrams circa-1916.
2 General itinerary -- 45 miles to thelittlebeast's on Friday. 30 miles to crystain and eeyrg's for lunch, then 70 miles to synaesthesia's on Saturday, then 45 miles back to Boston on Sunday; with folks like liza31337, spriggan and silentq joining us on the final leg. It's going to be awesome ... assuming none of us die from heatstroke.
At least that's the point of view of Earl, a middle aged rider with a slick, sleek Litespeed under his palm. I had gone up to him to ask about procedure, since I'd never ridden the train with my bike, and I wasn't sure if we were supposed to place them anywhere, but wound up listening to him expounding on his theory on the migratory patterns of New England cyclist culture.
"It's like, you start off in May doing a few rides to Walden, maybe explore Lincoln and Carlisle a bit. By June, Rt. 62's full of spandex, and you feel like puking if you have to go through Concord Center again. So, in July, you start taking the commuter rail out to P-town or the North Shore. keep it up in August. Do the Berkshires in September and October so you could watch the leaves get all pretty and shit, then go inside for the winter. Then after spending six months on the exercise bike, going out to Walden Pond doesn't seem so bad. So you start the cycle ... no pun intended, heh-heh-heh ... you start it all over again. It's like that movie with the penguins that I saw with my wife the other day."
"Except with spandex."
"yeah, and fatter asses, in some cases. heh-heh-heh."
He got in the first car on the train. I went in the last one.
I didn't look out the window much on the ride up. I'd seen most of it before, on a trip to Salem with analog_vector a couple of years ago; and I'd wanted to keep some of the terrain a surprise. So I kept to my book1 until Rockport.
The ostensible reason for the trip was that I've been planning on doing a double-century weekend ride with jasonlizard, crystain and tegin that is all about visiting friends in the outer 'burbs2. We were originally thinking of turning it into a Team Tsuru fundraising opportunity, but we're all a little too busy to canvas, so it's just going to be a social thing. But that still meant that we needed to sort out routes and directions -- which meant riding down the gorgeous North Shore coastline on a Saturday morning; trying to figure out where the most scenic beaches were, and which places had the best ice cream. These are the sacrifices that we make for friends.
In general, the ride was fine, except that I made a couple of wrong turns that added ten miles to the forty that I was budgeting. My legs could handle the extra pedaling, but the added time was somehow enough to get me suburned.
A couple of months ago, as the long heat of summer began to stretch out over our nights, I was asking tegin what it was like to be sunburnt. For all of my life to that point, sunburns were exotic foreign things that only white people had, like freckles and a choice of hair colors. I had spent innumerable summer afternoons in my youth swimming and playing outside, my skin turning into darker shades of chocolate without ever feeling that tender, raw sensation that she tried to describe. In proudly declaiming my immunity, I had probably set myself up for some kind of karmic retribution, as hubris frequently does. So, I got my shoulders fried by four hours in the midday sun; and it's only been today that I could sit back in a chair without wincing in pain. Boy, does this sort of thing suck.
Still doesn't stop me from trying to map out the Sutton route, though.
1 re-reading parts of A Peace to End All Peace, which I was planning on loaning to jasonlizard if he was going to ride with me, but we somehow crossed plans and missed each other. Which is fine. I needed to remind myself of how daft Winston Churchill was when he was young. Though, as an aside, it's frightfully depressing how many parallels you can draw between the British experience in the Middle East and the current American adventure -- like all that confidence that Iraq could be re-made in the same fashion as Germany and Japan post WW-II? Do a find-replace on "Germany and Japan post WWII" with "India" and you have most of the British telegrams circa-1916.
2 General itinerary -- 45 miles to thelittlebeast's on Friday. 30 miles to crystain and eeyrg's for lunch, then 70 miles to synaesthesia's on Saturday, then 45 miles back to Boston on Sunday; with folks like liza31337, spriggan and silentq joining us on the final leg. It's going to be awesome ... assuming none of us die from heatstroke.