2015 princeton freewheelers spring fling

The Excellent Wife (TEW) and I decided that, for my first real ride after my crash, we'd go to the Princeton Freewheeler bike club Spring Fling and do a ride together. She had thought to do the C ride, but found it was to be a towpath ride instead of a road ride, and didn't think she wanted to try to keep a C pace on the towpath on a less-than-ideal hybrid (and she was right to think so; a report from a person who had done part of that ride confirmed her suspicion about the pace). So we decided to do the D+ ride to be led by Max F.

The spring fling is an all-paces-ride event, so we get to see people whom we seldom see, or seldom see together, so I made a point of getting pictures; I'll post a few here, but you'll really want to see my 2015 Spring Fling Album to get all of them. (Even that won't be all; I edited out the ones with the worst yawning-faces and whatnot.)

We started off with five: Max, TEW and I, and Donna and Kathy. We went up the Canal Road from the Kingston Masonic Lodge where the event started, but we were only a few miles along when Max noticed that his rear derailleur was stuck on the big gear. It seemed to be a problem in the shifter, which I could not fix on the road (or maybe at all). We were at a stop, and Max decided to ride ahead; we could catch up. We turned the curve where Suydam connects with Canal, and saw Max fall over. I didn't see any injury and Max didn't complain of any, but he decided to go back and gave the list to me to lead the rest of the ride. Shortly thereafter, Kathy remembers she'd left her lock under Max's car, and went to find him.

TEW, Donna, and I continued. We went up Canal, into Millstone, and over to Colonial Park, then (because this was NOW a Plain Jim ride), we went back by exactly the same route we'd gone up. When we got back, we saw Kathy, who said Max was OK, but he'd left (probably to take his bike to be serviced).

So TEW and I sat down to lunch and saw some old friends, and met some new people. I was sorry to see some folks (Joe M, John P) not riding. But we had a good lunch... and when the awards were to be given out, I was all for sneaking away, but TEW bade me stay. It turned out I won an award for leading the most D rides for 2014 (which only proved that there weren't many!

Some pics below as a teaser...

... but check out the rest on the 2015 Spring Fling Album.