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Having gotten down to Northampton, we now had to get back on route. In the end, we didn't intersect the official route until we arrived at the hotel, to the extent that we arrived from the opposite direction. We got off course a couple times, because the GPS display is black and white, and the route (a heavy dotted line) is sometimes hard to make out when you're barrelling down a hill, trying to stay alive. So there were a couple unnecessary miles where we had to backtrack. We rode out through the farm country of the Connecticut River valley, affectionately (or sometimes disparagingly) referred to as the "Happy Valley." Large-scale agriculture disappeared from New England when railroads made it easy to import food from the flatter and more fertile midwest and west. But a lot of local agriculture remains - dairy, sweet corn, and other market produce. There used to be a significant amount of broad-leaf tobacco, for cigar wrappers, but I gather that's mostly disappeared.
Along the way, we also found a covered bridge, and a sucession of abandoned textile mills. At the top of the biggest hill of the day (see yesterday), in the town of Rutland, we found excellent lunch at Lisa's Center Diner. Grilled ham and cheese on rye never tasted so good. I hadn't consciously planned it that way, but I got to show Andy another bit of my past. We went through Littleton, where my wife Francie grew up, and right past the church where we were married, almost 15 years ago. As we approached the hotel, we got into some kind of gnarly traffic and road construction. But on the whole, it was another Fine Day. Francie and Kylie came up to meet me. After dinner (at the Ground Round - oh boy), there was an awards ceremony, and I went home for the night. Home to my own bed, and my own dog, and everything, for the first time in almost two months. |
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We stopped at the