Unexpected Traffic

If you want some quiet flat roads to ride in the pinelands then you can head towards Chatsworth NJ... unless it is the third weekend in October since the town hosts one of the largest cranberry festivals in NJ that weekend. This was a fact that I was not aware of when Laura asked me for a route from Mansfield for her Saturday ride. I gave her a route we did back in July when it was 90 +. After looking over the route I made a couple of tweaks one to check out Chatworths lake and two to shorten the ride a little.

After 3 weekends of riding in or with the threat of rain we had a sunny forecast. It was a cold 45 degrees but was going to warm up quick.  Laura had a good group of people show up including one new face. Since the last time we did a ride out of here we had a crash I did the holy kickstand thing. I don't know if it helps but it can't hurt. I decided to try out the new bike trail in the park to get to Island Rd. It was wide nicely paved and cuts out half of the bumpy Island Rd so I would use it again the next time I'm down this way.

I decided not to wear a jacket so for the first 10 miles it was a little cold. We maintained a good pace as we wound through Browns Mill and on to Lebanon State forest. After a quick break at the ranger station we headed towards Chatsworth. As we headed down towards town I thought it must be garage sale day for the town since there were a lot houses with stuff for sale in their driveways.

As we got closer to town there was more and more traffic. It became obvious that some kind of festival was going on. There were cars parked along the road a least a mile from town and the road had bumper to bumper traffic. There had to be a least 10,000 people walking around the different tents and food stand set up. It took us 10 minutes to get through the middle of town and back to riding again.

Nine miles later we were at Nixons General store. There was a dog rescue charity selling food so I bought a brownie from them which was really good.

From Nixons we made our way through Vincetown as we headed our way back to Mansfield. Along the way Jim's chain started skipping so we stopped and found that one of the follow wheels on his derailleur was stuck. A loosing of the screw of the wheel fixed the problem but as Jim found out later the bearings on the follow wheels were totally shot.  

Regardless of the traffic in Chatsworth or the slight derailleur problem it ended up being a good ride as we got in 62 miles at a 16.8 pace.