In September I biked about 400 miles in Downeast Maine (the “Bold Coast”) as part of the organized Bikemaine tour– here are a few photos.
Similar to three years ago, it’s a week of 50-70 mile days of riding, supported (meaning that while you camp each night, the organizers transport your bag to the next town so you don’t have to carry all your gear on the ride– and they arrange for three meals a day (typically at / through a fire station, grange hall, church, or other civic organization), snack and rehydration stations, and mechanic and medical support if needed).
And it was an amazing, inspiring week that reminded me how much the bike (and solo riding somewhere rural) lift me up.
While I was loosely traveling with / meeting up in the evenings with a good group of people I’d either met 3 years ago or met for the first time on the ride this year, I was mostly there on my own, and decided to get up before 6 most mornings to get on the road before the group– I’d often ride for hours on smooth ribbons of pavement through towns that were just waking up, with only the occasional other person in sight, stopping to look at birds, pick roadside blueberries or blackberries, take photos, or poke my head in to a local general store or ice cream parlor before getting back on the road.
Gradually, the faster riders would overtake me through the day, but I’d roll in to the final town early enough to get a waterfront camp site, grab a beer at a local brewery, and still see the sunset.
I just found a cryptic note (typos and all) I dictated to myself on the phone at a stop at one point “a morning of blissed-out soaring riding on the last day of life in the Country Roads from the mountain now 17 smooth pavement with no traffic”– sounds about right.
This was also another chapter in “the kindness of strangers” as it always seems to apply to my trips– from the man who gave us a ride in his wood bus to show us his elaborate treehouse in the woods, to the farmers who gave us fresh sweet peppers to bite in to as a snack, to the other farm that served us one of the best chicken salad sandwiches of my life (their locally-raised free-range chickens), to the fellow rider who picked up a six-pack to welcome a group of us to camp on an especially grueling day…
