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Day’s Verse:
Flee the evil desires of youth, and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart
2 Tim 2:22
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Please help me raise money for the MS Bike Tour Cape Cod Getaway. Donate today on my MS Participant page.
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Today’s route:

The elevation profile:

In words: 3,628 feet of climbing on an 80°F day, with >50% humidity and intermittent thunderstorms. I did have a good 12-mph or so tailwind and averaged 14.9 miles an hour, maxing out at 38 mph down one hill or another. All that going up meant that I did get to go down often, too; home is lower than church, so all church-to-home rides end with a net loss of elevation. Unfortunately church is in a remarkably hilly area, so those rides also always entail loads of climbing anyway. So now I am very tired, having ridden the requisite 140 weekend miles, plus a bit over 100 commuting miles. Good thing I have tomorrow off. My legs might go on strike otherwise.

Click under the fold for more bike ride details. Events on the ride not related to going up and down big hills endlessly: A lady in a very small, very decrepit old RV-thing passed me as I was turning left off of Route 9 (not my favorite road by a long shot). She honked and then informed me, “You’re not very smart.” I’ve never had anybody insult my intelligence while I was biking before and honestly I had to agree — riding on Route 9 and turning left to leave it really didn’t feel all that smart. But I just follow the GPS arrow. It made me do it. Then, with about 5 miles left, a Jeep full of young men drove by and one shouted very angrily, “GET OFF MY ROAD!” which, frankly, seemed pretty presumptuous of him since that was Route 85, which I’m pretty sure belongs to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and not one of the massholes driving on it.

Good things did happen though: I rode on a truly gorgeous stretch of road sequestered not far from where our life group meets. It was quite dazzling and the water looked beautiful even if somebody had prosaically named them Holden Reservoir Nos. 1 and 2. I visited the Buffumville Reservoir, which aside from having a name that made me snicker also featured pretty decent bathrooms, a stiff breeze off the water to cool me down, huge crowds of people, and a pretty nice look in general. They charge money for cars but let me in free when I asked if I could please just use the bathroom. The old people who run these parks seem awfully nice. Other people were nice to me too, notable a trio of bored firefighters standing around in their garage in downtown Millford. They gave me a nice cool bottle of water, which kept me hydrated for the remaining 15 miles.

In unbike-related news (I know, you probably thought my life revolved around my bike, which would be true, but other things intrude occasionally), we found out that leaving the car lights on for around 3 hours will cause the 12-volt battery to die. That, excitingly enough, means that you can’t unlock the car, thanks to the amazing keyless entry system; you can’t push-start it; and you can’t even try to get it going again because it gives all sorts of wild and crazy errors (including, but not limited to, continuous beeping, the blinker indicator lights going off, the displays flashing, the car refusing to turn on [it must have been in zombie mode at that point or something, since it wasn’t on but also wasn’t off]). Fortunately the car key comes with a back-up real key, the kind you turn in a lock, which let us into the car. Then we read diligently about how to jump the car and learned that we can RECEIVE a jump, but we can’t GIVE a jump, which seems awfully greedy of us. Then we rounded up some friends who had jumper cables and gave the car juice. This didn’t take very long and was way less exciting than I had hoped — no sparks or flashes of electricity, just standing around in the hot humid weather holding jumper cables to the terminal. We majorly owe our friends. Ian drove home and reported to me later that the car has returned to normal operation, which is a big relief.