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Trial by fire part 1

PETE GLADDEN
Pete’s World

Published: July 15, 2019

With summer getting closer and me spending more time doing the prep and planning work for this season’s adventures, I started thinking about the endless lessons I learned during my first few treks, what I refer to as my “misadventures.” And while strolling down memory lane there’s one trip which really stands out in my mind, my very first cycling trip, Ohio to the East Coast.

That voyage contained enough silly lessons to fill two hours worth of a Best of TV Bloopers episode.

And it’s funny to remember how I was light years away from being as fastidious in my planning and strategizing back then compared to today. Which is precisely the point of this column––how we tend to look back at our missteps, follies and lessons with a sense of comedic if not romantic nostalgia.

Now I have to admit that this particular misadventure wasn’t some grand bucket-list idea I’d harbored for years. Nope, it was directly related to the fact that my dad had kicked me out of the house for “borrowing” the family car when he and my mom were on vacation. Lesson learned: Dads check odometer readings just like they mark whiskey bottles and count beer cans.

Well, what with that unceremonious eviction order, I hadn’t a clue as to what to do with my life. Yet at age 18 I was naive enough to convince myself that such an occasion was the perfect opportunity to show my pop just what a tough cookie I was…by getting on my old 30 pound 10-speed and pedaling that cast-iron sucker across the Appalachian, Green and White mountains all the way to the coast of Maine.

Now prior to starting that trip my only real cycling fitness entailed causally pedaling around town kind of rediscovering that old high school bicycle which I’d rescued from years of dormancy. And my only real strategizing involved looking at an American Automobile Association paper roadmap of the Eastern U.S. and kind of eyeballing the several state routes that seemed to link Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont and New Hampshire. Maine? Well, figured I’d work that one out once I got near the state line.

So I hastily bought some cheap front and rear panniers, and I gathered together what I thought would be the necessary clothing and camping gear for a cross-country cycling trip. What I lacked in proper gear––and I lacked a lot––I more than made up for with a pot potpourri of cooking gear ––a cast iron frying pan and enough of my mom’s castaway kitchen utensils to stock a small country diner.

Departure day turned out to be glorious and sunny with the temp pushing 80 degrees. I pedaled north thru downtown Hudson on Route 91, and not even four miles down the road lay something I’d never experienced before––a hill I’d have to climb on a fully loaded bicycle.

Ironically, I happened to have a friend who was housesitting that day at a residence which was situated on said hill. Well, Andrew saw me struggling, and I mean I was pumping those pedals like a madman, in and out of the saddle, with that god awful eight-pound cast iron frying skillet swinging back and forth like a gigantic metronome. To this day we still joke about my cartoon character climb out of Hudson on a bike with enough cooking gear to supply a Boy Scout camping trip.

So having climbed what felt like Pikes Peak, I did what any cross-country cyclist would do four miles into the first day,at the top of a climb, on a hot summer day. I stopped at the local grocery store and bought a 25-ounce can of ice cold Foster’s Lager.

Not water, not Gatorade, heck, and not even out of town for goodness sake, yet there I was knocking down an Aussie “oil can,” as if rewarding myself for some kind of monumental biking achievement. Needless to say, the ensuing several hours after that rookie move still seem pretty foggy. Lesson learned: Heat, cold beer and cycling make for odd bedfellows.

I’ll conclude this two-part misadventure in next week’s column.

For the time being, try to picture some dipstick on a bicycle somewhere out in the hinterlands of East Farmington, Ohio riding off a Fosters Lager buzz amidst the clippity-clop of Amish horse and buggy traffic.


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