Touring the East Coast Greenway (Boston to Portland)+ : June 2020
Plans in the past year have been sparse and in flux has it has been for many other folks. So I’d been training for nothing in particular for a few months coincidentally ended up being mostly indoor cycling on our wahoo kickr, which we were gifted during the holiday season luckily before the shortage of home equipment began. Not wanting to waste the summer, the training efforts of the last few months, and wanting to maintain some semblance of social distance, I invited my marathon fit friend, Larry, to join me on a short-ish bike tour along the East Coast Greenway (https://map.greenway.org/) from our house in the metrowest of Boston to Portland. Since I had never done any distance comparable to the plan including multiple days in a row, I was really quite unsure of how much time we would need for an out and back bike adventure of this length and duration.
Our first day was a blast, we took pictures on the go and the diversity of path covered everything from roads, to bike paths and bike lanes and graveled rail trails. Not too much to say regarding the riding, but riding from suburbs to city and then back into the country-side was incredible for a single day’s worth of travel.
Larry and I decided hotels for the trip were better than carrying more gear (i.e. camping gear+) for the distances we were covering and I was glad for that since after 40 miles of riding with my backpack, I was halfway to crampville and was glad that Larry could take my pack on his front rack for the rest of the way. I notably left my pack more and more empty as I did feel quite strong with a solid night’s rest.
The rest of the way from Amesbury to Portland was mostly country roads in quiet forested neighborhoods and rail trails, not too much to write home about but it was really fun to push the limits of both our bike setups and bodies. I was riding Shimano Sora 2x9 with tubeless 700x32c Roubaix tires with a Raleigh Willard 1 which has a pretty slack geometry in general. Larry was riding a Surly Midnight Special (considered a Road Plus bike) with 650b slick tubed tires with SRAM Rival 11x42T I think. I think Larry will go tubeless after this trip considering he randomly got a flat just 10 miles from Portland.
What essentially became 2 centuries back to back with gear felt tough and my respect for the professionals absolutely deepened.
With a few choices and days left, we decided to day trip north of Portland without all our gear to see what more of the ECG had to offer as well as check out Cousin Island. We found some neat dirt track that really was fun on our groadie bikes, made it to Yarmouth for a brewery lunch and my tired legs made it back to Portland for us to rest.
Feeling the drain of speed and distance, I decided that we should head back south and we did it just in time. I moderate nor’easter was headed to the coast and riding against a 15mph headwind for a century wasn’t particularly pleasant if it was going to thunder too.
We road back to Amesbury in a single push from Portland and were righteously tired.
We had a large breakfast at Becky’s Diner with coffee and charged on southbound. My legs were really feeling the strain against the hills and the headwind after nearly 300 miles in 4 days. Thankfully we made it back to Amesbury just as the rain hit us 50k from our hotel and it really cooled us off, granted the headwind didn’t really cool us down most of the way. On the last leg of our day 4 ride, I ran inside a CVS to use the bathroom just 1 mile from our hotel and ended up getting my hose from my bladder inside my frame bag entangled around the front wheel on the disc brake side and ended up shredding the hose. Without the extra 2 L capacity and my legs begging me to stop riding and the rain getting beach and road sand everywhere, we rolled up to the hotel as our last day of riding concluded.
Total mileage was 320~ in 24.7hrs of riding over 4 days mostly with gear.
We took the commuter train back into Boston from Newburyport and got a ride from Deb back to the house just as the thunder and rain began to churn again. Great ride and great company to be had on the short journey exploring the backcountry roads of New England.
