Fairmount Ride

Another great ride today with Steve - John was busy. I wanted to go to Fairmount, because I have lots of memories of going through there with my brother when we used to ride together back in the day. (WAY back in the day.) We started from the Far Hills train station again, and headed down Lamington Road to Larger Cross Road. This turned out to be dirt the whole way, about 2.5 miles. There are beautiful homes and farms along the way, and we ran into 3 groups of horse riders. At one intersection, we weren't sure which way to go, and there were a couple of guys on motorcycles and two women on horseback there. We asked them how to get to Pottersville Road, but none of them were sure. But it turned out that the horse riders had a GPS! That was ironic - we had three levels of locomotion technology (horses, bicycles, and motorcycles), yet only the oldest level had the modern GPS technology. Alas, they couldn't figure out how to make it work, so we figured it out with a harder look at our map. After getting to Pottersville Road, we had a long downhill to the Pottersville store, then nearly constant uphill to Fairmount. Once there, I called my brother to tell him where I was and, I hoped, reminisce - but he had no recollection of the place. Oh well - I can't say it was a waste, because it was a great ride.

From Fairmount, we took several back roads over toward Hacklebarney State Park. The views and vistas were magnificent - you wouldn't have known we were in the Parkway State. There was still some spectacular color in some of the trees. The roads were rolling up and down hill, with perhaps a tad more up than down.

The next leg took us down a dirt road on the edge of the park. At the bottom of a hill, there was an old mill structure next to the Black River. The river was rushing under a stone bridge, making all sorts of great river sounds.

After a while on the dirt road, we decided we were ready for some pavement, so we headed over Lamerson Road, across 206, to Old Chester Road. Old Chester Road was downhill almost the whole way into Peapack, which was a blessing after the rest of the ride, which was mostly climbing. From Peapack, we just stayed on Main Street down to 202 then over to the Far Hills train station.

Here's a map of the ride:



Here's another version of the map, with topography and tickmarks every 2.5 miles:

Which is the more useful? Or should I use both?

Finally, here's the climbing profile:

Swamp Ride

Well, 2 years later and no posts in between. My bad. There have been quite a few rides during that time, though not as many as I'd like to be able to claim. Health issues and motivational issues were the main problems.

I took a nice ride today with friends John and Steve around and through the Great Swamp. It was a fantastic day for a ride - even though it's November, the temperature got up into the low seventies. I played with my Garmin again, and used the excellent GPS Visualizer site to create a climb profile, a Google map, and a Google Earth file. Here's the climb profile:

Pretty cool app, eh? I haven't figured out how to place a Google map on the blog, or how to attach a Google Earth kmz file. But here's a screen shot of the map, showing the route:

We started on Valley Road, heading west, then went up through Basking Ridge, behind the Verizon headquarters, and finally down Long Hill Road through the Great Swamp - about 22 miles in all. We took a detour on Whitebridge Road to visit the Raptor Trust; John had never been there. They take in injured raptors (owls, hawks, eagles, and so forth) and care for them. The birds are wonderful to look at.