Zero Days

When you are leaving home, it is always good to remember where you came from. We will miss the sweet corn they have coming in a few weeks...

Summer Food

One of the great joys in life are long summer evenings in New England when the humidity is low and there is a slight breeze to chase any bugs away. Those are the nights when the summer roadside stands offer up that beautiful of all treats, the New England fried clam roll. (And that would be the whole belly clam roll fresh from the nearby ocean.  You eat strips you're just fooling yourself,)

It is hard to get the fried clam roll right. It takes the perfect combination of clam, batter, oil, fryolater, split-sided buttered and toasted bun, tartar sauce, and wedge of lemon to achieve that magical bite of crunchy, briny, chewy goodness. Sitting at the picnic table, hot from the fryolater, on a summer eve described above, you are halfway to heaven.

Not everybody can do it. Most in fact don't and can only deliver a sodden mess of greasy dough clinging to something akin to a rubber band. When you find one that can deliver it consistently, you make pilgrimages.

We do have several summer roadside places that serve up great fried clam rolls nearby. Hanks in Plainfield, Harry's Place in Colchester, and Deary's Stand in Putnam. Tonight collecting the bikes from the bike shop, it was Harry's turn to step up on the ride home and they did not disappoint. It was a farewell to summertime food in New England as we are T-minus 2 days.

Ode to Joy

We did a 30 mile ride on this beautiful late spring morning. There is poetry in Woodstock when you turn right onto Joy Road. I am blessed to live in a very pretty place of hayfields, stonewalls, and curvy roads of rolling hills. Of all of places Joy Road is always true to it's name. Your heart leaps as you know you have over a mile of swooping curves and rolling breakers. You finish one hill with speed and power up and over the next to settle back in for the next part of the roller coaster. And at the bottom, Sweet Evalina's Stand with tempting treats as you mark the halfway point of the ride.  We found joy, patriotic cows and a stone mile marker in Abington. Great ride, and the back problems I have been suffering were not a problem for most of the ride.

Airline Trail Pomfret

Newly constructed section of Airline Trail in Pomfret looks like a super highway.  Hoping that they add one more layer of stone dust but this will work if need be. Rode in from the rail trail where it crosses the road in the Natchaug Forest. They are moving along with the trail construction but have a ways to go. Encountered mud and traprock and did a lot of walking. It will be great when done.

The Coming of Spring

After a too long winter and a late, late arrival, spring is finally digging in to transition our world from gray to green. We are in that special week or so where budding trees paint the hillsides with subtle pale pastels of red, green, and yellow. It is the counterpoint of that short brilliant week in autumn where the trees are in a blaze of glory and then when you look around you realize it is gone. The spring week is just as time precious but the show is sneaky and slower on the eye. It is a sideways glance in the early morning light that makes you notice the hillside dabbed with brush strokes of faint paint. A pixelated impressionist landscape of almost imperceptibly different hues of green mixed with the reds of the maples all against a mat of gray tree trunks and blue sky. It will be gone in days but it is glorious to behold.  The picture of a local beaver pond taken on a mundane early morning weekend dump run does not do things justice but I hope it conveys some of the glory.