tomless tom ride

Well, come on. If you had a picture like that, wouldn't you lead with it?

Tom H scheduled an invitational ride for today to start at Cocoluxe in Peapack.In the old days, we would stop at Cocoluxe at a break, and then we'd want to bring stuff back, and there was no good way to do it on the bikes... and then Tom had the good idea to START there, so we could either buy stuff before we started (as I did, and left it in a cooler in the car) or after we got back (as some of my fellows did). I don't know much about staying married, but I do know a gift of chocolate has never gone badly with The Excellent Wife (TEW).

Tom's rides commonly include mishaps like closed roads and bridges, poor (or nonexistent) paving, and the like... but the first of today's mishaps was bigger than most. As we were preparing to leave, Tom's bike would not downshift to easier gears in the rear. My diagnosis was that the problem was in the right shifter. We could have set Tom's bike so that he was in an intermediate gear and he could have shifted among the rings on his front triple... but this was a hilly ride, and that would not have been much of a solution. Tom had sent out the route, and several of us had it on our bike GPS, so he deputized me to lead the group (HAH!) and off we went.

Yeah. Take a look at the route and the elevation profile. 3700 feet of climb in 45 miles; not bad for a bunch of old guys.

(Pete's daughter Sarah came along with us to keep us honest. She took the picture at top. Here she is at the break at the QuikCheck.)

After the break, we found a couple of roads that had been milled. We were on 'em long enough to cuss Tom (that pic at the top was at the end of the second milled section).

But when we turned onto Ravine Lake Road, we had a moment: there was a "No Outlet" sign. And when we went to turn onto Pyne Lane:

...there was this imposing gate in the way. Sarah proposed using her feminine wiles to get through, but that would not have worked for the rest of us trolls.

As we were considering whether to climb back out, a neighbor came down the road in his Porsche, and let us know that he didn't know why the gate was up, because it seemed to be just a road in the past. We decided to go through.

There was a gate at the other end that was open, and nobody challenged our progress, and we proceeded. But I think we're gonna havta find another route through if we're going to ride this route again.

Tom frequently takes us on closed roads, but rarely across what looks like private property. (If memory serves, this is not the first time, though...)

I'm sorry he missed it.