| Key: | Yellow = ridden; Orange = planned route I missed a turn towards the end and decided not to backtrack |
| Bike: | 1972 Peugeot PX-10 |
| Direction: | Clockwise |
| Miles: | 68.42 |
| Cities, Towns & Neighborhoods: | Boston, Cambridge, Watertown, Belmont, Waltham, Lincoln, Concord, Acton, Littleton, Westford, Carlisle, Bedford, Lexington, Arlington, Somerville |
| Weather: | Absolutely perfect. Crystal blue sky, temperature in the mid 70s, a bit breezy |
| Sites: | DeCordova Sculpture Park, Walden Pond, Thoreau Cabin, Oak Hill & Tophet Chasm, Kimball Farm Ice Cream |
| Notes: | As soon as I hit the Esplanade along the Charles, perched on the fence along Storrow Drive was a hawk. Just sitting there, surveying. I took a bunch of pictures and got within about 10 feet of it. The roads in this area are very well maintained for the most part, and it seems to be very popular with cyclists, so the cars are used to watching out for them and are pretty good at sharing the road. Except for some suburban home boi in a grey and blue Charger who thought it would be fun to see if he could run me off the road. You know, you'd think they'd think twice. I'm carrying a five pound Kryptonite lock which can easily reduce any window, mirror, or headlight to rubble with very little effort. I stopped for quite a while at the DeCordova Sculpture Park in Lincoln. I've never been there before. I will definately go back when I have more time, there is some interesting stuff there. There must have been an organized ride somewhere, because here were lots of riders going the other direction. I'd like to know who they were; they looked like they were having fun. While it would be sometimes nice to ride with someone else, I'm not much of a group rider. I missed a turn and ended up a bit farther east than I had planned. I had already gone more than 40 miles, so I decided not to backtrack the five miles or so to Oak Hill. I'd hunted for information about Tophet Chasm on the web, and it didn't really look like a good place for a bike anyway, much more of a hiking type place. I ended up in that awful intersection in Littleton where 2A, 119, 110 and I495 all meet and had a quick lunch. A very short ride up 110 to Westford ended at Kimball Farm! Yay! Best ice cream in the world. Bar none. Since ice cream is generally off limits to me now, I was a little reluctant to get any, but it's just /so/ good and then I spotted sugar free maple walnut. MMmmm. MMmmm. My absolute favorite is cherry vanilla chip, but maple walnut is good, too. So I had some. It was delish! They were having some sort of concert that afternoon, and as I was there muching away, Gary "Dreamweaver" Wright walked by. He looks a lot like Michael Bolton, only shorter. If there is one song from the 70s that I absolutely hated it was "Dreamweaver" and now it's stuck in my head again. The rest of the ride was pretty uneventful. The hills weren't as intense as the Scituate trip, but there were more of them. There really is some very pretty scenery out that way and most of the towns have some pretty little town squares. Route 225 back to Bedford to the Minuteman Rail Trail, which was, by far, the most crowded and difficult to navigate stretch for the entire ride. |
| Computer stats: |
I accidentally reset the computer again at about mile 13, but this was pretty early on in the ride, so all the numbers should be correct. That reset button on the computer is not well placed. It was reset when I leaned the bike against a tree (to make like a bear) and the brake cable rested against the button and reset the device. |
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