Day #2: Fort Devins to Monadnock (35 miles)

Day #2: sometimes as I ride I'm watching the scenery roll by, sometimes I'm staring down at the road right in front of me as I labor up a hill, and sometimes I'm blind to the world, engaged in some internal dialog, argument or rumination... today was a little of all three. It was a shorter trip, only 35 miles, but it was also more solitary... no Charlie :-( and also more hilly.

The ride started leaving Fort Devins, which like all US Army bases that I've seen, has a touch of the 1950's. Then the terrain became rolling...

and beautiful...

I passed very few places to buy food... I asked at the one gas station I passed if they had bananas... no, but they did have ice cream :-). Then the cashier suggested, "we do have chocalate covered, frozen bananas..." That checks all the boxes :-) It was delicious!

A bunch of climbing in my easiest gear and zigzagging back and forth across the road to make it less steep and I got to New Hampshire, which was even more beautiful:

By the time I got close to Peterborough, I had run out of my two water bottles and was a bit parched. This was fixed by a trip to Subway in the Peterborough Plaza, and a Gatorade, a Coke and two water bottles :-)

There was also a laundromat where I could wash and dry my riding gear...

And finally, I had a lovely dinner at the Riverhouse Restaurant, where I had another candid discussion, this time with the hostess. When she heard about my ride, we started talking about our kids and she told me she had three kids on the autism spectrum: two very high functioning (one just graduating from Dartmouth in Math and Physics) and one more seriously handicapped. We talked about the parents' job being simple: just love your kids, and she ended by saying, "congratulations on getting to the stage of doing things you've wanted to do since you were twenty" :-)

The ride snapshot, started around 8:20am, finished by 1pm: