44.3 mi / 11.0 mph / 1572 ft. climbing
Home: Quality Inn

Last night I rode off in the dark (to let the caretaker know that I wouldn’t be delivering our food to her for storage after all), and I nearly wiped out just as I started because my pedal fell off. Apparently 46 miles worth of pedaling had been enough to “unstick” it from its half-on/half-off position. I just kept going, pedaling on the spindle, and on the return forgot that I would have to look for where it had fallen in the dark. “Clank”, it shouted as I happened to roll directly over it. Great, at least I don’t have to search for it!

It was 7 miles to Woodstock and its bike shop, so hopefully I would be able to continue holding the pedal onto the spindle by kicking it inward every time it started sliding too far out. The shop didn’t open until 11am, so we weren’t in any hurry to get going in the morning. Which made the unexpected 5am sprinkles even more annoying, since they forced me to get out of the tent and bag up the bikes, and then nothing really came of it. Our neighbors set up a shelter over their picnic table, and kindly welcomed us to join them under it if rain began again, but all remained dry.

Despite our best efforts at dawdling, we still made it to the bike shop half an hour before it opened. As we were looking up a cafe for 2nd-breakfast, the owner saw us and invited is in. Awesome! When I asked if “only” 15,000 miles seemed like a premature failure of a pedal, he laughed, and seemed impressed that we had gotten even that many miles out of them (“what, you haven’t been servicing the bearings and regreasing them every couple thousand miles as the manufacturer recommends?!” he asked sarcastically).

We were out the door rolling on 100% working pedals before the shop’s official opening time, which was good because we soon “lost” that gained time back when we hit a bridge-out on Xena Road. Unlike 80% of “road closed” situations, it was clear that we couldn’t find a path through this one, especially with construction workers active in the big pit. A local motorcyclist confirmed that there was no easy detour, and we had to backtrack towards town. It added about two miles and 100 feet of climbing to our day, and had Rett stewing in frustration. Initially the quiet creekside road brought the mood back up, but then more drivers began appearing, continuing the aggressive driving culture we encountered yesterday.

As we completed our descent down the eastern slopes of the Catskills, we had to get on a 5-mile stretch of NY-209, a divided limited-access highway. Half of the stretch is actually part of the state-crossing Empire State Bike Route, so that confirmed it was legal, and the shoulders were Interstate-level wide. The interchanges were annoying, but certainly nothing we haven’t dealt with before.

And then came the main reason we were funneled onto the highway: the George Clinton Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, which was considerably less-funky than its name implies. It’s one of the rare crossings of the Hudson River, which is nearly a mile wide at this point. Unlike the elevation profile, which showed us diving off a cliff to river level and then climbing back out, the bridge deck actually climbed nearly 100 feet, raising us 152 feet over the center of the river. We had mistakenly gotten onto the pedestrian facility for the Empire State Trail, which put a jersey barrier between us and the cars. The problem was that there were drainage grates every 50 feet, and they were pretty brutal to ride over. We gazed longingly at the smooth, well-delineated bike lane on the other side of the barrier, but had no way to cross over.

On our way into Rheinbeck on the eastern side of the Hudson, Rett came to a stop before another steep hill with her arms rhythmically shaking from exhaustion. She refused a proper break, but was willing to east some M&Ms, and the sugar soon had her pedaling again up the hill (now on the sidewalk of the narrow road). As we continued into the town proper, we hopped off the bikes to enjoy the architecture and bustling street scene.

And then appeared Pikachu. A poodle-terrier mix that reminded Rett very much of her beloved Pip, he was one of the stars of an adoption event drawing a crowd on the sidewalk. I won’t say that he was nearly our undoing, because that word implies that it would be inherently undesirable to bring an end to our nomadic life in order to adopt a dog. Instead, I would say that he was incredibly, invaluably informative. If riding our bicycles across New York is making Rett so unhappy that Pikachu could be the trigger that causes us to change our lifestyle, then maybe we should change our lifestyle! We had a serious discussion about it over our falafel lunch, but in the end she realized that the logistics involved in shifting from “nomad” to “settled” likely wouldn’t fit Pikachu’s time-frame. But if they had? This might have been the last post in this journal.

Rett always tells me to not blame myself when I plan a route that pushes beyond “challenging” and into “I want to quit and adopt a dog”. But if she can get serious about wanting to adopt a dog, I can get serious about how bad this route I planned has been for her. We’ve climbed over 2000 feet on each of the last six days. Our previous record for “consecutive days with 2000+ feet of climbing” was…three! We’ve done that twice, around Queenstown in New Zealand, and, two years ago right next door in the Adirondacks. This week we’ve effectively arranged those two previous record-setters back-to-back!

If we include today (the first sub-2000 ft. day of our week), the 15264 feet of total climbing in that 7-day window also sets a new record, smashing our previous 7-day record by more than 2300 feet! We’ve spent 26h04m in saddle over the last 7 days, which is “only” good for 5th place, but that’s 5th place amongst the 1000+ 7-day windows of our nomadacy.

So while the route has certainly had excellent aspects to it (I still maintain it’s world-class bike-touring country), if a nonstop week of it has Rett seriously considering and end to our travels, it’s clearly been too much. And as much as we can identify other factors unrelated to bike riding, the data shows that the physical challenge must be a significant factor.

On the other hand, she’s done it! She’s faced the challenge, been emotionally and physically drained by it, but is still going! Ideally, I would have designed our days through these mountains in such a way that she wouldn’t have been forced to set new records (or overruled her and taken us on the longer-but-far-easier Empire State Trail route from Skaneateles instead). But, now that we’ve made it through the first clause of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, these are records that she can proudly claim.

Feeling better with some lunch in us, I marveled at how every customer in this crowded, tiny falafel shop felt like a New York City-dweller making an expedition to this “cute country town” for the weekend. Yesterday it was clear that we had crossed the “termination shock” of rural interstellar space and entered the sphere where the cultural winds flaming off the burning sun of New York City spread to the outer reaches of its solar system. But today we were seeing those cultural winds embodied in hundreds of human beings. And it felt strange!

We’re culturally-similar to all these people, former-city-dwellers who find all these shops just as charming as they do (I mean, we spent $26 on four cookies in a candy/cookie shop!) We’ve literally been “FIBs” (“Fucking Illinois Bastards”), who have invaded Wisconsin from Chicago just as these NYCers are invading Rheinbeck. And we learned in New Zealand that the same concept exists there (“JAFAs”). But this time, it felt like we were uniquely encountering this human and cultural outflow from the backside, coming from the silent emptiness of rural interstellar space. So it’s like we were the rural people snarking about the FIBs and the JAFAs, and for the first time I could totally feel where those terms come from! I genuinely felt a mild form of scorn for all these tourists! “Ha, you dumbasses think this is coming out to the country? Well, enjoy your little sanitized Disney version, we’re happy to take your money and keep our real homelands to ourselves.”

After lunch I related these feelings to Rett, but also admitted that I really have no idea who any of these people are, and maybe I’m ascribing homes and backgrounds to them that are completely off-base. So then it was hilariously perfect as we walked in front of a set of boutique shops to overhear a guy outside talking to a friend on his phone: “…when you guys come out here to visit, we’ll have to take you up here with us. It’s an easy train ride!” Ha! It’s all true!

And the “easy train ride” explains some of why this is such a Saturday destination, which is also an additional form of cultural-dissonance I’d been feeling: a strong Monday-Friday in-office workweek culture was somehow emanating from these peoples’ pores. It’s not just our 3.5 years of retirement that’s made that feel alien; the COVID year before that also made it feel like M-F office culture would never be a thing in America again. So I don’t know if it’s a 2024 thing, an East Coast thing, or just a “we’ve been out of work for 3.5 years thing”, but somehow it all came together here in these Rheinbeck tourists and felt jarring.

It’s good that we agreed to continue riding before we left lunch, because Rett’s bike disagreed: her front tire was completely flat when we came out. Ugh, more delay and stress! It was from a hole that had appeared in her tire a long time ago; the tire itself somehow had sharp bits that would eventually work through the patch I had put on the tube, so I had literally laid patches on top of patches, and then even applied a patch to the inside of the tire. But apparently four layers of patches still couldn’t stop the slow boring, so it was time to throw on the spare tire we carry around.

The rest of the day we paralleled the Hudson River, south on NY-9, with many grand historic properties filling the space between the highway and the river, like the Vanderbilt mansion, FDR’s Presidential Library, and Marist College.

Turning into Poughkeepsie eliminated the final vestiges of rural upstate New York. What I thought would be a quiet street between the two arterials heading east through the city turned out to be a wild urban jungle, with people doing deals at car windows, amplified preachers on the street corner, and bumper-to-bumper traffic crawling through the vibrant chaos. Rett had enough and turned off to take the arterial the rest of the way to our motel instead, which was totally the right call. I hauled the bikes and all of our bags up the stairs to the second floor, to give Rett the maximum time of rest and recovery over the next day and a half.