August 20, 2021
A sunny trail in New Hampshire
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All of today’s pictures were taken by Janet, the official photographer of the day.
The last few days were rough riding. We received many comments from people offering encouragement to persevere through the difficult days. The comments are greatly appreciated and really helps us make it through some of our challenges.
In contrast from the previous 3 days, today's weather was sunny, hot and humid. Normally this is not good conditions for riding. However, today the ride was really good because most of the day we were on a bike path. This means that there was lots of shade because the path was in the woods a lot. The shade kept the temps cool, even though we sweated a lot, we kept cool while riding.
The first 3 miles we spent getting out of town we crossed 2 bridges and after the second one we entered New Hampshire. There was no state sign so Janet and I did not even realize we were in a new state until the end of the ride. Upon entering New Hampshire we were greeted with a large steep hill, the only one for the day. (As Janet was proof reading she reminded me that there was another steep hill at the end of the day as we entered Concord. My bad. ). After the hill we found the path and stayed on it for 60 miles. The path was crushed gravel and was similar to the one we rode across the state of Michigan. One thing about the rails to trails bike path is that the gradient is very small. It is difficult to tell if you are climbing up hill because you cannot ‘see’ the hill. The first 20 miles were all uphill. We slogged along for 2 hours not making much progress. We had a lot of miles to cover today and we were worried if we could finish the ride at a reasonable time (before dark). We stopped at 20 miles for a sandwich and when we started riding again the gradient turned to downhill for the most of the next 40 miles. This enabled us to pick up the pace and we were able to finish by 5 pm.
We didn’t have many stops today. The railroads in the east were built a little differently than the Midwest. In the Midwest and west the railroad generated little support towns every 6 miles, therefore all the rial to trails bike path go right through the center of town. In the east the towns already existed so the railroad was not necessarily through the center of town. One town the bike path went near town , but there the town was 25 feet down a hill from the trail. There were no obvious way to get down the hill from the path to the town. You would think the stores would try to capture some business from the users of the trail by providing signage and guidance to their stores in the town.
We made it to the end of the trail and had another 10 miles to our hotel. Ross did another excellent job navigating us through the busy town of Concord, NH to get us safely to the hotel.
Tomorrow is our last day. We have 55 miles to get to Kittery, Maine and dip our tires in the ocean to mark the end of the trip. Unfortunately we are also racing hurricane Henry whose leading edge is supposed to make an appearance around 2:30. Hopefully we will beat the storm to our hotel.
Today's ride: 75 miles (121 km)
Total: 3,826 miles (6,157 km)
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