by Hunter P
I followed the progress of the ride last year and was eager to join up with the crew for a couple of days this year. So I skipped the weekend of training crit races and set off for Harftord early Saturday morning to leave with the group at 7:45.
SATURDAY
I was there in enough time to hear Allen Lim, founder of Skratch Labs, talk about the drink mix that would provided to the riders. It’s good stuff. After countless bottles of the stuff over the 2 days of full riding, my stomach was happy and not upset.
Once we got riding, we slowly made progress thru New Britain and toward Waterbury. The group was attentive to obey traffic lights and stop signs when needed. Tim would bounce back and forth from the front to the back, talking to the follow cars or to one of the 2 ride leaders with the GPS route in their Garmin. Everyone in the group rode 2 abreast and there was little rotation changing up front, so there was plenty of time to get to know the rider alongside you. I had a chance to talk at length with Nick Legan from Velonews, Zellman from SRAM, Molly Cameron aka: The Girl with the Cowbell Tattoo and several other cycling personalities from all over. I had a chance to pull up front before the lunchtime break. “Slow on the uphills, bomb the downhills” were the marching orders. We took just enough food breaks and pee breaks. There were 3 support cars for the group, carrying food, water and everyone’s gear. The lunch stop on Saturday was at Bethel Cycle. Pictures and video of Tim and the group were taken and after about 40 minutes, we headed out toward NY.
Once we got past the NY Stateline, it was surprising how long we were able to stay on multi-use bike paths. People were out enjoying the paths on the nice day. Even so, it was not so crowded that the group of 30 couldn’t cruise down the path. After a couple of rad miles of smooth dirt path in between a couple of golf courses, we popped out in the Bronx. It took a looooong time to navigate thru the city with all the riders, but we eventually got to the hotel RIGHT in Times Square. No sooner did we got there was it realized we were riding toward the wrong Marriot Hotel. Back out onto the road for another 10 blocks to the right one.
SUNDAY
Sunday started with a long ferry ride to the NJ shore. North Jersey along the I95 corridor is not the place you want to ride your bike, so by ferrying more south, we were able to cut diagonally thru beautiful NJ flat countryside. It was another good day to ride for 7 hours. The pace was decent. Not quite slow. Only had a couple of flat tires to deal with. The ride into North East Philly was delayed by a couple of wrong turns. The group did have to deal with a stoplight crash were 2 braking riders bumped and went down. No big deal though.
The weekend was a cool change from the early race season. It was definitely an eye-opener to be around a handful of successful cyclists caring so much about bike advocacy. It was great to cheers from people of all sorts as the group rolled through numerous different types of neighborhoods. It was awesome to get an impromptu police escort out of town from the Waterbury Police.
If you care about safe bike riding, you should think about riding at least a portion of the “Ride on Washington” route next year.
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