Longest day: Day 3 (Brattleboro, VT
to Sturbridge, MA) 84.1 miles.
Most climbing: Day 3 (Brattleboro,
VT to Sturbridge, MA) 4054 feet.
Fastest day: Day 15 (Machias, ME to
Lubec, ME) 13.5 mph
Slowest day: Day 7
(Provincetown, MA to Danvers, MA) 10.7 mph
This time
the daily reports were composed on the road on my laptop but only
emailed in and posted if the motel we were staying in had an Internet
connection that I could use. There's more and more of this all the
time. I think we had some kind of Internet access for all but 5 or 6
days. Once I used a USB key to transfer the reports to the hotel's
public computer.
The route
for this trip came from several sources: The New York portion was a
combination of NY Bike Route 5 and whatever I could get out of Street
Atlas USA to get us into Massachusetts. That's why we ended up on a
dirt road for a while.
The
Massachusetts sections came from the commerically available bicycle
route maps from Rubel. These were huge. I also used the satellite
images on GoogleMaps to find back roads around malls, industrial parks,
and schools.
The short Connecticut and Rhode Island portions came from the bicycle route maps posted on the respective states' highway department websites. They provide the same kinds of information as the Massachusetts maps, but are free.
Amazingly,
Vermont has no such maps on its highway department website, nor does it
have printed maps. I found a bicycling suitability map for southeastern
Vermont on somebody's website and the rest of it I just hoped would be
okay.
I think New
Hampshire has a bike map on the web, but I used the Adventure Cycling
maps for the brief section through that state.
The Maine
route came from a combination of the Adventure Cycling maps and the
maps for the Maine section of the East Coast Greenway. That's how we
ended up on that awful dirt section through the blueberry fields on day
14.
All in all
the trip was a success. We got where we were going and got there on
time. We were hot, we were cold, we were dry, we were wet. We were
tormented by insects, we were attacked by dogs. We drank beer for
lunch, we ate lobster for dinner. The roads were good, the roads were
bad. The drivers were unexpectedly courteous. JT and I are still on
speaking terms.
That's the
cycling life.