Day 5: Jefferson, NH to Monmouth, ME

Maybe I can catch up a bit with shorter posts that I can embellish later...

This was our longest day. I'm not sure if it was meant to be the longest or not, but our route ended up being quite a bit more than planned. I hadn't noticed a dead battery right away, so my Strava record below was missing a bit, which I patched with data from Steve T. Links to Derek's and Steve's more complete records follow.



https://www.strava.com/activities/345482142
https://www.strava.com/activities/345482894

Gary drove to start the day, while the rest of us rode through the White Mountains, past the Presidential Range.

After Rachel won the race to the Maine state line, we met up with Gary in Bethel, and Lindsay, Laura and the kids switched into the van, to carry on to our campground for the night.

Sean won this town sign sprint

The Steves picked a spot for lunch that served neither beer nor meat... We weren't bitter, just hungry...

We'd had some route recommendations from a lady at the Bethel Chamber of Commerce, which we followed out of Bethel. They were indeed good roads for quite a stretch, although route 108 was packed with traffic. Second crash of the trip: I was riding back on to the road from the shoulder, and didn't realize that the carpet of pine needles was concealing a 4 inch height difference between the shoulder and road.

We stopped for dip in the water at Rumford, where there were dire warnings about the dangers of the water, so of course Safety Steve F had to swim.

Shortly after the swim, I got a puncture from a staple on the road. While I was changing the tube (and discovering that one new spare had a hole already) Steve Todd consulted Google Maps and discovered that we had more than the 10k that we expected left to ride. The conversation went something like this:

Steve T: Google Girl says we have 40 miles left to go.

Steve F: Are you serious, we have 40 km left?

Steve T: No, 40 miles.

Steve F: 40 km?

Steve T: No, 40 miles. 64km.

After we stopped laughing, we knuckled down and got on with the ride with a stop for a second lunch of bizarrely coloured hot dogs, then a later stop for cider. We saw some weird-looking insects while we drank our cider - later research identified these as dobsonflies.

We managed one wrong turn riding in to the Beaver Brook campground in North Monmouth, bringing the total to just over 170km for the day. We had a brief stint of hysterical laughter when a poor GPS signal had us thinking we'd ended up on the wrong side of a big lake. We also got a moment of discouragement from a local when we asked if we were going the right way for Beaver Brook and heard "You've got a long ride ahead of you to get there."

Our extended day was rewarded with fine steaks and potatoes that Laura and Lindsay had bought.