Hello from the Motel 6 in Salisbury, MD! It's the end of the first day of the Spring 2015 bike tour, in which JIm and I ride to North Carolina to hear banjo music.
Today was warm, up to 70 outside, and mostly light rain all day, with some heavy showers in the late afternoon.
Suzanne is driving along more or less with us with a minivan, so we are traveling light. I'm riding the Z-Bone, and I only have 20 lbs. of stuff. That is the lightest I've ever toured.
The first leg of today's ride was from home to the west end of the Bay Bridge. Jim rode with me. He says he can't remember when ridden more than an hour and a half. He is slow, especially on hills. And he was 40 minutes late getting started. We got to my favorite deli, Caroline's Gourmet, at noon, where I ate. Jim met Suzanne at the McDonalds. Suzanne ferried us over the Bay Bridge.
Jim decided to shorten his day by starting at 404 and 50. So they dropped me off at the Valero in Stevensville, and continued on. I headed out on the Kent Island bike trail. At the end of the trail there was a big problem.
The old Kent Narrows bridge is closed and under construction. I was completely unsuccessful trying to talk the construction workers into letting me go through the construction site on my bike. The only other way off the island is US 50, which is a limited access freeway. Here is what it looks like from the east end of the new Kent Narrows bridge.
Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. I had to pretend not to notice two different "No Bicycles Allowed" signs. 50 has a nice shoulder, but it still was horrible.
The thing about the Eastern Shore most people don't realize is it's all chicken farms. It's 50 miles of stinking chicken manure. I like to think of this as the "Larry Hogan Bike Route", after our new governor who has made Maryland "Open For Business". Every single new pro-business policy he has come up with can be described as "Let Polluters Pollute".
I hammered it out and caught up with Jim around Federalsburg. Somehow I passed him without seeing him and got to the Woodland Ferry first. I had to wait here for about 20 minutes. Luckily there was a gap between rain showers.
18 miles later, we are in to the Motel 6, just after sundown. Dinner was the Golden Corral next door. You don't get many choices by the 6 in Salisbury.
It was 106 miles for me, and 87 heroic miles for Jim.
Here are the tracks on Strava:
No comments:
Post a Comment