Sunday, We Raced The Train

A handful of riders were polled.  What makes a good group road ride?  They answered: a steady pace, the “best” riders in town, a challenging route.  Obviously those 5 riders skewed the results by having Bath Salts in their water bottles.  I’d answer with road rarity, pleasant conversation, good friends, animal sightings, blue skies, temperature in the mid 70’s, low humidity, great views, and a small general store.  If you said average speed, few stops or anything having to do with physically riding the bike, you need to stop treating your bathroom as a pantry. 

Rolling To Visalia on Decoursey Pike in Kenton Co. KY

“Looks like I missed a good one yesterday,” Mitch, the owner of BioWheels bike shop, said to me Monday night.  “Yeah.  Great route.  Nice pace.” I tossed back too quickly.  Before my Bath Salt brain could dig for specifics, the phone rang.  Mitch answered.  I finished the conversation in my head as I concentrated on wrapping my wife’s handlebars with new tape and getting the spacing just right, no visible logos.  I’m thinking maybe it was the chat at the Visalia convenience store’s picnic table that made the ride so special.  I’m not sure what it was about, but it was light hearted, definitely not politics or even a hint of negativity.  Then I remembered the turn off the beaten path up a road called Moffett in rural Kenton County Kentucky.  To date, there are only 4 people on the Moffett Strava Segment KOM list, all of them on Sunday’s ride.  The climb crested at a farm with two horses at the fence, one umbrella tree an infinite amount of green rolling hills.

In Cincinnati, people rave about the Hyde Park Kroger grocery store with an in-house Starbucks, Sushi chef and wine tasting bar.  While the price tag of the designer jeans and shades of Eastside shoppers may rival the carbon fashion show I see on the Wednesday night ride, the best cycling food stops have no aisles.  There’s nothing better than leaning your bike under a hand painted sign that reads “General Store” and hearing your cleats clop across boot-worn splintering hardwood floors.  You better bring cash.  They make change from a lock box.  If they do take credit cards, the scanner is the analog beep-booop-beee type.  Better yet, they don’t sell gas.  In our area I’m partial to the Claysville and Rabbit Hash General Stores.  It’s a well earned 2 hour ride to either.  Third on my list is the store we stopped at Sunday in Visalia where 536 crosses the Licking River.  While it’s not as historic, far away or nostalgic, it has a picnic table out front.  If you approach from the South, it comes as a nice highlight at the end of a two mile one lane road that parallels the railroad tracks called “Vises Trail.”  Sunday, we took the turn off under the bridge and raced the train as its whistle screamed loud enough to raise goose bumps on my legs.

Technically, it is a barn.

Even after living here for 12 years, a former cheesehead, Kentucky horse farms still hold a mystique for me.  The horse farm on Sunday’s ride was small compared to those outside of Lexington.  There you’ll see horses along the white roadside fence with gorgeous shiny brass bridals, some even with their name on them.  In the distance, the freshly painted wooden fencing leads to an exquisite barn that makes your suburban home look like a refrigerator box under an overpass.  Periodically, you’ll see horses with hoods over their heads, ghost horses.  At first glance it seems a little cruel their eyes are covered up.  Yesterday the horses didn’t have hoods and their whole heads were swarming with flies.  I learn something every time.  The two, one brown one black, were grazing under a tree near the top of the Moffett Road climb.  It was the only patch of shade in their corral.  I felt bad our presence made them shy away and saunter into the sun.  Still it was gorgeous.  We were on top of a ridgeline, horses in the foreground and a sea of soft green hills and valleys in every direction.

What were we talking about again?

A KY Ride Nut For Winter: Kincaid-Claysville-Kincaid

Down here, they get the Sunday paper on Tuesday, one of my buddies joked.  “Claysville Kentucky hello.”  Personally, I pictured Larry King greeting the next caller from Tobacco  Basket, USA not realizing earlier the caller just finished hanging Tobacco to dry in the barn and now settled in for a little T-V.  I rode there yesterday.  Tobacco harvesting season is in full swing in Kentucky.  While some fields were still full of the giant yellowing leaves, others lie bare adjacent to a big black barn packed from floor to ceiling with hanging drying leaves.  While I’m not a fan of smoking, I am a fan of tobacco farming.  With the small black barns and plants with leaves as big as your face, it’s romantic in a way.  I don’t know if it’s true or not, but someone once told me the tobacco barns are black to draw more sunlit heat to the leaves.  While I didn’t smell any yesterday, in just the right conditions late in the summer you can smell the tobacco aroma from the fields and get a tish of a buzz.  Harry, my teammate and longtime Tobacco Basket resident, wrestled unwrapping a Clif Bar outside the Claysville General Store.  “It’s a dying breed,” he said in his soft drawl referring to the store’s genuine dusty boot-carved wooden floorboards which were perfectly unlevel.  Even having to hike around a warshed out bridge (pictured), it was a perfect end of summer ride.

“You know what’s wrong with this ride?”  All together now in staccato, "Not…A…Goddamned…Thing!”  I hate to say it, but the waning daylight doesn’t lie.  It was officially the last ride of the summer.  This blog post is my way of storing a ride nut away for winter.  I’m trying to remember the little details:  Grimes Road- pure Kentucky chip and seal no wider than a bridge of a dozen computer screens, tobacco hanging in little black barns so close to the side of the road you could practically reach inside and rip off a plug, the remarkably friendly farm dogs that just wanted to run with us for a while and drought baked dry creek beds revealing the flat stone underneath.  I like to think of the topography of Kentucky as God’s second draft.  Like he took a map of a flat tree lined beautiful forest, crumpled it up, uncrumpled it, and said, “There…that’s better.”  Then there was that kid on the Huffy.

My friend Tony, who scouted this route south of Kincaid Lake State Park near Falmouth, said the kid, now a young man, was involved in an ATV accident.  As they’d say in rural Kentucky, he’s a little slow.  In a voice that I’ll recall as heartbreaking, he slurred in a drawl, “y’all wanna race?”  My buddy replied, “Naw man, we’re just out for a ride.”  We turned past a house littered with aging old bikes in the front yard.  One of them, a rusted singlespeed with a Schwinn-like curving top tube and an orange panel decal caught our eye, but we didn’t stop and headed down another single lane road toward Claysville.

I don’t know how many hills we climbed, but everyone paid off with a panoramic vista of a creek carved valley.  The ride was a lumpy loop of what seemed like 90% single lane roads which sort of paralleled the Licking River Valley from Kincaid Lake State Park to Claysville touching Pendleton, Harrison and Bracken counties.  Tony brought up his recent trip to North Carolina and Virginia.  While the mountains are nice with their brutally long climbs, heavenly high views and hair raising descents, he reasoned that this was better.  Just off a recent trip to Park City, Utah I knew what he meant.  They payoffs are more frequent in Kentucky, and the price isn’t as high.  In the mountains you might climb up over one or two or three ridges in a long ride, here I literally lost count of the ridgelines, vistas and how many times I said wow.

Before we had left I mentioned the ride to a few friends on FB.  One replied asking, “how far and how fast?”  I had no idea.  Looking back, I seemingly clipped into the ride blind.  Maybe that made it even more enjoyable.  I didn’t care how fast or slow we rode, how much my legs hurt, how long it’d really take, how many miles, or how many climbs there’d be.  I really didn’t know where we were.  Sure I was somewhere around Falmouth, but I didn’t know where the next turn, or climb or sketchy chip and seal descent would be.  I really didn’t care.  I put my trust in two of my Kentucky buddies and like a movie, the ride just played out before my eyes.

Death’s Door to Door

The shipwrecked remains of the J.E. Gilmore, the A.P. Nichols, and the Forest lay in the chilly waters below the chugging diesel propellers of our ferry.  This is Death’s Door, the historic passage between Lake Michigan and Green Bay where the lives of many a Great Lakes sailor were dashed across the rocks.  That’s the Deadliest Catch version.  In reality, with today’s summery blue sky, calm seas and temperatures in the lower 80’s it’s as harmless as a hot tub.  A couple we talked with compared this vacation fishing hamlet to Maine.  However, Maine has lobsters and corn, Door County (the thumb of Wisconsin that juts into Lake Michigan) has perch and everything that can possibly be baked, stirred or stuffed with famous Door County cherries.  In winter, the same gales and ice capped waves that claimed the Edmund Fitzgerald still challenge the heartiest great lake sailor.  Today, the only thing that might kill me is the sound of the screaming kids two benches behind us on the ferry.

“Should we take the ferry to the island?”  The answer to this question while planning a bike ride, no matter the body of water or the ferry, should always be an unequivocal yes, even if you’d like to throw a few brats overboard. We rode 10 miles of skinny cherry tree back roads from Sister Bay to the Northport Ferry dock.  If you’d like to duplicate this ride, look at a map.  There’s only one way to get to the ferry without riding on Highway 42.  I think I looked at the map four times the whole day. 

As we rolled down Cottage Street near Gills Rock with sneak peeks of Death’s Door between the million dollar lake houses, I asked “You know what’s wrong with this ride?”  “Not a GD thing,” my wife replied with a quirky smile.  Sort of an inside joke, it’s a favorite exchange between us and a few friends when bike rides are perfect.  The ferry to Washington Island takes credit cards and about a half hour to cross Death’s Door.  Till now, I had no idea where the name Door County came from.  Obviously someone was bright enough not to call this beautiful peninsula Death’s Door County.

As the ferry reversed the engines to line up the gate with the dock, Washington Harbor came into view with brightly painted boat houses and work sheds dotting the shoreline.  In architecture, this is still a fishing village.  Bikes are first to roll off.  Hundreds of butterflies danced on the bushes outside the Visitors Center.  Are you kidding me?  We planned a circumnavigation of the island which featured a 10-12 mile route past the house with the Catfish sculpture and up to Jacksonport, which had equally beautiful views of Rock Island, a state park which doesn’t allow any vehicles, not even bikes.  Nearly 45 minutes passed before we saw a single car or another soul.  After snapping a few photos from the Jacksonport pier, we headed the 10 miles or so toward the shops and restaurants on Main Street.  On the way, and on foot, we climbed the 200 slippery algae covered steps of the Mountain Park fire tower for a 360 view of the island.  The brochure said 184 steps.  I counted 200 even.  Maybe my cycling shoes threw me off.  We grabbed a delicious deli lunch at the Danish Mill before taking the ferry back to the mainland and another 10 miles back to Sister Bay.

Even on high end race bikes and only a 45 or so mile pancake flat ride, it still took us more than six hours door to door.  When you knock on Death’s Door there’s no reason to push the pace.

Hungry Covered Bridge Chows Down Another Cyclist in 2009

I dare not venture underneath the Covered Bridge, but curiosity may get the best of this cat next time through. Last night the Covered Bridge tallied another victim. The 2^nd I’ve been party to this year. The rider made it through thankfully with all his teeth and parts intact. A severely bent Easton rim was the only toll the bridge exacted from him for trying to ride the tire-width gapped planks of the bridge deck. (For more on the history of the bridge and past victims, see previous articles here)

While he was relatively lucky, I can only imagine in the years of the bridge's existence, others may not have fared as well losing bottles, keys, seat bags, deraileurs, even whole bikes to the bridge. I’m convinced that underneath the Covered Bridge lies not a peaceful Clermont County creek with buzzing dragonflies and flowered lily pads, but a gaping purgatory of cycling history. A pile of bent chromed fork steel bikes with Mafac and Suntour serve the base for a mountain of dented aluminum Cannondales and despoked Mavic Open Pro’s dangling from Shimano hubs. These days the Covered Bridge hunger growls for carbon frames, Kyseriums, Sram Red and Campy 11.

Thankfully the rider, my teammate TJ, managed to stay upright and ride through the bridge's jaws. However, upon inspection at the exit of the bridge, the wheel was bent enough to hit the brake pads and stop on both sides when spun up. A secondary danger of the bridge is that it is about twenty miles from Cincinnati, a long walk or miserable wait to call and get a ride home. Without anyone in the group carrying a spoke wrench, the wheel was passed to Mitch, an expert mechanic and owner of BioWheels in Madeira. Mitch carefully found the bent area on the wheel, double checked his precise diagnosis and BANG! With a single resounding whomp against a tree, like a blacksmith he hammered it straight enough to ride home on. He added, that this was not the first time he wonked a wheel into shape at the Covered Bridge. It certainly won’t be the last.