This was another holiday weekend without an all paces ride. The all paces rides were canceled for memorial day and the 4th and I don't expect that we will have one on Labor Day either. That's okay I decide to do my own with the posse on Friday(as I'm sure some other groups did). We left out of the picnic area of MCP at 8am to beat the heat and did this route.
It was one of the routes I normally do when I lead an all paces rode. Although is was hot the humidity wasn't that high so I wasn't covered in sweat. We made a rest stop at Roy's which is open and has a bathroom we can use. The parking lot was mostly empty however there were a few people using the gym on the end and the hair salon.
On the way back to the park we road by the lake in the Assimpink park. The parking lot was packed with people and boat trailers and there were a lot of boats out on the lake fishing.
I was back home by 11:30am so it was back before it really got hot.
On Saturday I got a few of the posse to join me in Lambertville to do a loop up to Frenchtown. As more things have opened up in NJ we are venturing further and doing some of our normal hillier rides. Although the temperature was lower on Saturday the humidity was close to 100% so I was sweating my ass off from the start.
The first 10-15 miles where mostly uphill as we climbed around 1000 feet to get to the ridge. Even when you are on the ridge there are still a number of annoying little bumps. The only relatively flat part was by Sky Manor which is by one of the airports up here. We ended up passing a couple of others before heading down to Frenchtown.
We stopped at the Bridge Street cafe which had window service only. The parking lot and cafe were busy with lot of bikers and rafters going down the river. Most of us sat on the wall by the river to keep away from the crowd. The humidity really hadn't dropped and the sun was starting to come out.
After the break we had the longest and steepest climb of the day. Since I have not done as much climbing as I do other years I really wanted to see what kind of shape I'm in. We went up Fairview which is about 400 ft in 1.4 miles. The grade is in the 5% to 10% range. I wasn't the fastest one up the hill but I didn't have a problem getting to the top and my legs still had some energy left.
We stayed along the ridge until heading down to the covered bridge. There was one more climb left but I was getting a little tired and a couple others were looking tired so I took a poll and then decided we should had down to 29 instead of doing the last climb. Normally I don't like riding on that part of 29 because it doesn't have much of a shoulder and there can be a lot of traffic but between the holiday weekend and Covid I knew there would be light traffic and it would be safe.
We cruised a few miles along 29 to get back., The ride ended up being about the same about of miles we just did a few hundred feet less climbing. It was still a hilly ride with more climbing that I have done this year and I didn't cramp or feel totally worn out.
So as the weather allows I will probably venturing a little further from home and doing more hilly rides.
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