Dist 43.0
Ride Time 4:17h
Avg Speed 10.0
Max Speed 27.7
Trip 257
Rain sprinkles overnight - I lay inside my tent debating whether to get up in the night and put on the waterproof rain fly. Finally the cautionary side of me won out and I did, even though it seemed the rain might not amount to much. Boy am I glad I did! It ended up raining heavily an hour later.
The maple leaf landed in my cooking pot lid overnight:
A slow start to the day, the campground was so nice, I spent some time plotting my route across the remainder of NY. Finally was walking aback down the hill at noon.
Right knee started lancing pain around mile 13 after leaving the town of Walton, lowered my seat about 1 centimeter and that helped but I could still feel it weak on the uphills. I think Day 3 going through the Catskills I pushed perhaps too hard and strained it on those long uphills. Rear wheel has a couple spokes that started clicking today, spinning it on the frame I don’t see that it’s out of true but the shop in Great Barrington must not have had the proper tools to re-tension all the spokes evenly. Sigh.
Around mile 15 I stopped for lunch and sat under the highway bridge as it crosssed over a river, saw some fascinating dried insect carapaces on the rocks there.
In the afternoons I sometimes listen to my iPod to provide some diversion from the annoyance of vehicles regularly zooming past at 55 MPH - before I left Mass. I loaded all the episodes of This American Life, Radio Lab, and The Moth podcast.
Miles 30-40 were alongside the Cannonsville Reservoir, one of the seven (I think?) reservoirs that serve New York City.
(Lacking a polarizing filter to enhance the color of clouds and sky, I really like the effect of under exposing by 1 to 1 1/2 stops to achieve nearly the same blue color saturation.)
Similar to the Quabbin, there were several townships and about 2,000 graves relocated when the reservoir was constructed in the ‘50s and ‘60s. From the sign I read there was even a Supreme Court ruling to grant the eminent domain for the construction of the reservoir - and from there the water still flows ~150 miles to NYC! There was a remarkable diagram showing all the underground tunnel/canals and the series of reservoirs for water settling. 1.3 billion gallons a day, for 9 million people in and around the City!
Saw several motor boats rip-roaring around the lake, so odd to think that folks ride around in boats, mixing oil & gasoline into the water, in other city folks’ drinking water. Camped overnight in a field of weeds beneath a powerline, just west of Deposit, NY.
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