Home from Maine Day 3 - Portsmouth to Boston

 It was another beautiful day of bike touring. Here we are by the ocean (Atlantic, probably) in New Hampshire.

Actually it was a beautiful afternoon of bike touring. This was a crazy day. The weather forecast said heavy rain all day, and we prepared by buying garbage bags and packing all the stuff we didn't want to get wet into them. But overnight the forecast decided the rain would let up around noon. Our AirBnB host said we could stay there a couple extra hours.

We decided to start riding at noon, after lunch. Then make a game time decision about whether to camp on Cape Ann or push all the way to Boston, where Debra will have an AirBnb waiting for us. But that would be nearly 70 miles, which is a lot (we are still not in great shape) and a challenge to finish before dark.

We made it to Boston.

Here we are, 8:30 PM, out in front of our AirBnB in Back Bay. It's pretty dark. But we did it. We are feeling it now. Good thing we are taking a couple days off.

This AirBnB is a dungeon.

It's in the basement. In the Sprinkler Room. Suggestion for AirBnB hosts: if your unit is in the basement, the description should include the word "basement" somewhere. Also, there should be some coffee. Lodging in Boston is insanely expensive though.

One reason we got in so late was Max needed ice cream for that last push.

It's really cool crossing the Charles River to enter Boston.

Here is the obligatory crossing-the-state-line picture entering Massachusetts.

The route was super scenic in New Hampshire and the first half of Massachusetts, up until Route 128. Inside 128, it's older inner suburbs with rough roads and maybe a bike lane if you are lucky. This is a nice bike trail for a lot of the way, but it's not direct and so we mostly didn't take it because we were trying to beat the darkness. 

It's nice to be here in Boston with Debra for two full days, but splitting this ride into two days, camping in Cape Ann, and taking all the bike trail possible into Boston would have been much more pleasant.

We had some food challenges today. Max wanted breakfast before we left, and he found a breakfast place a couple blocks from our place in Portsmouth, but it was closed. We wound up going to a place with popovers nearby, but the only thing they had that he liked was a bagel and cream cheese. So that's all he ate.

So here is Hangry Max, four hours and 35 miles later waiting for his basket of chicken tenders.

This is at the Clam Box in Ipswich, which has been here since the 1930s. I had a clam box, of course, which was awesome. Max wondered why I was eating clams and not more lobster, and I explained that lobsters are in Maine, and clams are in Massachusetts. Just like crabs are in Maryland.

Max perked right up after gorging himself on chicken and fries.

I got myself a new sports watch for Fathers Day before this trip. It's a super fancy Garmin fenix Sapphire Solar 7x. My old one was a fenix 5x, and I was having problems attaching the charging cable. It was three years old.

The new watch is solar, so you have to charge it less often. Maybe the charging connector will hold up better. It also has many more health tracking features, including this really interesting one called the "Body Battery". 

This is supposed to measure your energy reserves, so you know how much stamina you have left. I seem to always have a dead body battery well before the end of the bike ride. I'm not sure whether this feature accurately measures how tired I am, or whether I look at the graph and I feel really tired because it tells me I am.

It does seem to do a good job providing suggestions on getting restful sleep so the body battery recharges.

Yesterday was a really great day, because we didn't get rained on, and we made it in before dark even though we didn't start until after noon.

Here is the Strava Track for today.