Ride # 19: An Unanticipated Circumstance

March 6, 3:33 PM, 30 Degrees

Gorgeous! All day a bright blue sky lit up by an unfettered sun. No gauzy overlay. No gray intimations of dourness. Instead, sharp light, clarity, angles and shadows.

My back porch thermometer reads 35 degrees, "an optimistic 35" I think to myself, and sure enough, riding out of town through the neighborhood called "The Bowery" and passing the aforementioned Landmark Storage, their time/temp sign indicates 30 degrees (-1 C).

Snapped on the fly

Decide to ride in the lower elevations today, in the small towns of Shirley and Lunenburg, towns of rolling landscapes and nothing like the Princeton hills. That's the good thing. Over here the terrain is not so pitilessly challenging. There are plenty of flats and gentle rolls, occasionally a good climb, really nice.

Cruising in the flat lands

The drawback, however, is traffic, especially during prime commuting hours. There are a lot more cars to contend with. The ideal time to ride over in these towns is weekend mornings.  But today was not a weekend morning. Still, the result was a fantastic two hour ride of considerable pleasure, difficulty, zen awareness, and challenge.

The unanticipated circumstance was this. The bright sun, clear day and above freezing temperatures (at midday and early afternoon the temperature approached the upper 30s) caused some melting of the snowbanks. That runoff, of course, ran into the road. When the sun descended past a certain point and the warmth disappeared, the temperature dropped. That caused the runoff areas to freeze. Thankfully, because the runoff spots were still damp, the freezing or frozen sections all appeared as a silvery glaze rather than the dreaded "black ice."

But I found myself having to pay extra close attention. These conditions persisted the entire way home. Compounding this, many of the roadsides when shaded in a particular way were edged by a thick crust of gray ice. You had to stay away from this. If your wheel so much as glanced against it, down you'd go. So many times today I found myself riding further out into the road than I normally would, at least on the Crux. But I feared that roadside ice lip, and I feared those car-splashed splotches of silvery fresh ice across the tarmac.

Ride Stats: 28.96 miles (46.5 k), 14 mph, 2 hours astride. No road kill today. No particular bird sightings.

Parting Glance: Shad Rides

Sun!