Annual Circling Wachusett Foliage Ride - October 16, 2024

 RIDE REPORT

Wednesday, 16 October 2024, Annual Circling Wachusett Foliage Ride

Ride Leader:  Clyde Kessel

37.6 miles, 10:00 am start from Sterling, MA [remote start, 61.7 miles, from Bolton, MA]

Riders – core ride (11):  Clyde, Aiko Pinkoski, Barbara Martin, David Goldberg, Ed Hill, Greg Stathis, Judith McMichael, Julie Dodd, Simon Lingard, Tim Dodd, and Wing Chow.
Riders - remote start (1):  Marc Baskin.
Summitted the mountain:  no-one.
Present at lunch:  Elizabeth Wicks.

Yet another beautiful day for riding (every day is a good day to ride - some are beautiful).  It was chilly, but the full sun was warm and there were no complaints.  Riders started to arrive at the start point at 9:30 am.  Pickleball was in progress at the park.

Shortly before 10:00, we proceeded to set the ground rules for the ride.  The leader rides a recumbent and tends to be pretty slow on the climbs, so he made it clear that faster riders should feel free to go ahead and not arrow and not wait.

Barbara and Greg volunteered to be joint sweeps (and as the ride progressed, they traded off being at the back).  Hot on everyone’s mind was the question:  “will we be using arrows?”  The leader said “Yes, of course” and was immediately threatened with mutiny.  The group unanimously wanted to dispense with arrows, since everyone had a navigation device and no one wanted to stand around in the cold to pointlessly arrow a turn.
So, we happily settled on a simple ride format:  let’s just ride and regroup at the lunch stop.

 

Now we were ready to leave and someone said they had seen Marc riding from the remote start.  However, he was riding the wrong way and seemed to be lost.  Not being sure if and when he would show up, we just (virtually) wished him good luck and launched into our ride.

We immediately and informally broke up into an A-group, a B-group, and a C-group.  The A-group blasted off up the initial hill and was never seen again (except that Tim was patiently waiting in the parking lot at the end of the ride because he couldn’t really abandon his wife, Julie).  Before long, the B-group and the C-group melded back into a single group and stayed mostly together for most of the ride.  Marc was, again, spotted behind us on the correct route and he eventually caught up with us, just as we rolled into the lunch stop.

During the ride, it clouded up and several riders remarked that it was getting colder.  However, the sun came back just in time for our climb up Mountain Road - it was not entirely welcome at that juncture, but was great to have during our lunch stop.

This is a lovely ride, mostly on back roads with little traffic.  However, it does not work so well with the arrow system because people really do climb at such different speeds.  Also, arrowing at a turn in the middle of a climb or descent can be a problem.

Thanks to everyone who came and made it an enjoyable ride.

 

Report by Clyde Kessel.