Day 7: Home!

Short ride today, only 20 miles or so. A lot of it was on roads- good for me, everybody else panics!

We stopped for lunch at the museum of wherever the hell we were and admired dinosaur bones and modern art. We loaded our bikes onto the trucks (again, dangit) and went to the train that would take us back to Camden and our cars.

We got lost after getting our car- we couldn’t find the parking lot that contained our bikes and luggage! PANIC!

Pack, scavenge, drive towards home, eat at some pizzeria somewhere after Princeton, continue home, arrive in good order before it got too dark, SLEEP.

And sleep.

All in all, a good ride. I like road riding because it’s easier. Nobody else does because there are CARS and THINGS on the road and they are DANGEROUS. But hey.

Day 6: Bull Island

7/23/10

The ride today was horrific. Too much of it was  on medium gravel- hard to ride on a ‘bent, harder to ride on any road equipped bike, and the mountain bike guys were complaining. Nobody liked it. The scenery was nice (in places). For a stretch there was bamboo with stalks about the diameter of my wrists and after that was an old rusted out steel factory that must have been a mile long. The last 10 miles were on a fine gravel that everybody liked. We got ice cream!

We ate lunch at an old lock and canal diversion/overflow building. More accurately, we ate on its lawn and admired the scenery. I sat by the railing of the overflow and watched people go by. There was one guy- ragged but not scruffy- who was there the entire time I was, spoke to no-one, and stared off into space. I nicknamed him the guardian sprite because he might have been the caretaker of the park and it was the sort of park that has sprites.

Went swimming in the river after we made camp. If you start upstream, you can float down to the dam. If you start at the dam, you can take the current right around the edge of the wing (it’s a wing dam) and then swim for your life to get out of the current. If you don’t, you can get washed all the way down to the bridge (and if you forgot your shoes, it’s a brutal walk back).

Dinner was the usual slightly too much. The servers are beginning to recognize me. About sleep time it got really hot and humid which made it really hard to sleep.

Day 2: The Cornfield

Wake up too early, get foods, try to not eat too much even with exotic (to me) foods in abundance all around. Go back to tent, start packing. Find toothbrush, go to sinks, wander back. The trees are dripping? huh? get out to the field in which the tents are, it’s definitely raining. Sprint for the tents. It’s raining, it’s raining! No, no it isn’t. This Is Rain. And I put my rainfly up properly and we proceed to lightning pack into my tent and thence to the truck.

We take our bikes to the pavilion to huddle out the rain. Some people have left but it’s raining fit to drown. We wait. It stops, eventually.

The ride was uneventful except, my diary notes, that yesterday I paced a yellow camaro across Philadelphia. I also got burns on my legs (today) from wearing bike shorts (I don’t do that ever) and not putting enough sunscreen on. I don’t remember how long the ride was, 30 miles or so.

Tonight we sleep in a cornfield, accessible by a grassy lane that is nigh impossible to ride. Oddly enough, the cornfield has a swimming pool in a nice rock grotto. Strangest thing,that. I went swimming.

My diary reports that “After dinner Armageddon didn’t happen and a rainbow did.” The winds had come up and were sending huge black clouds overhead- a few miles to the north? east? northeast? of us and blowing tents around.

Day 1: the Audubon Estate

I have decided that I will name the days after where we sleep.

We set forth from the battleship after another impersonally served meal, this time with frozen orange juice. Or rather, we set forth at 0800 or so, got speeched at by Mr. Sexton (he was inaudible. I struck up conversation with the unicyclist.) and then set forth TO THE BRIDGE. Which was only accessible by way of a staircase which we got to portage our bikes up. Mind the freewheel in the middle! *crunch* I could hear a bit of Dad’s soul breaking when the guy carrying one of our bikes didn’t pay attention. Needless to say, we Don’t Like Staircases.

To clarify: a boat is a vessel that can be transported atop another vessel. A ship is a vessel that can not be transported atop another vessel.

The ride to the estate was rather shortish. Only twenty miles or so, I did not record the number. On the way there, we (people on the ride, not just my family and I) looted a way station left for us by a previous event. I stocked up on gummy bears. I discovered that I could stick them to a piece of paper and peel them off and they’d leave no mark. (ick!)

This is the first day we have the caterers for the rest of the trip feeding us. I ask them to serve me as little as possible and still it is almost too much. It makes makes me wonder- do other people always eat so much? How much food is wasted by people who can’t find a serving small enough?

After dinner the shower truck was arrived and filled with water and offering showers. woohoo shower!

I had a minor dispute with my parents over putting the rainfly on my tent. I’m paranoid, the rainfly goes on (partially) even though it is killer hot and humid and everything. My parents didn’t put their rainfly up.

Day 0: Battleship

Pretty much every summer my family and I go on some sort of bicycle vacation. This year, as last year, we went on the Rails to Trails Greenway Sojourn, which is a fully supported bicycle camping trip. The trip started and ended in Camden, New Jersey and ended in the same place. This series of posts is timed to be on the same day as they occurred, just two weeks later.

Saturday, July 17th

We packed the bikes and luggage yesterday so we could leave early today and get to Camden on time. Packing the bikes is like four dimensional tetris with blocks that change shape. (Dad has pictures that show him how to put everything in the van in the right order.) The drive itself was very uneventful except for me driving part of the way.

Unpacking at the battleship was a game of hurry up and wait. Hurry and arrive at the unloading place but wait to be called forward. Hurry and unload your bikes in ~5 minutes (try that with three ‘bents!) but you can’t move your car until the incoming one clears. It was hectic.

There wasn’t much to do once we got to the ship- the tours weren’t until later and the aquarium (on land) had a line around the building. Sitting in the shadow of the ship (huge, dark, grey, can I go climbing on it?) I discover that my parents don’t deal with having nothing to do, nowhere to go, no worries to abuse.

Somewhere between that and dinner we went and bothered the amateur radio guys (NJ2BB) and they talked an ear off of us. Their shack had a small sign in it; slow, deaf, shaky semi-old farts written around a toothless skull. They’re doing a great job restoring the equipment. (When the navy mothballed the ship, they destroyed/salvaged much of the equipment.)

Dinner was early enough, just served with an impersonal coldness. The food was neither good nor bad but a little too much was served (for me). The chap across from me reported that his milk was frozen.

After dinner was a tour of the ship (in excessive detail), a firing of the Very Small Guns on the side of the ship and thence to sleep.

Earlier we had stashed our sleeping bags and pillows (for those of us those who had them- I had the day’s clothes rolled up) and bags in our bunks. Bunks are technically ‘racks’, a set of three (or four) bends arranged vertically like bunk beds. The volume I got to occupy was eensy (and the locker I got was not much bigger). When I rolled over in the night I hit my elbows on the walls/lid on my bed.