June 6, 2023 – Keep Calm and Pedal On

Riding Stats: 1st 2nd

Singing birds woke us up at 5:20 this morning and when we got out of our tent, we found our long distance touring buddy Marianne had already packed up and gone making nary a sound. We saw later on her Strava account she stopped in and toured the Eleanor Roosevelt museum and put in more miles than we did.😂

Surprisingly just outside of Gardiner, NY the trail turned to single track and it unexpectedly began raining.

And then it started thunderstorming so we ducked into Kacey’s for some breaky burritos, wifi and a new game plan for the day.

We had a 70 miler planned with 10 miles already in. As I was trying to decide what kind of peppers were in the burrito so I could replicate the recipe at home Tom looked up after checking his phone and said, “You know, Goshen is actually only 20 miles away.” I immediately stopped thinking about the recipe and how much time riding in the rain that shortcut would save us. Using Google bike routes and Ride With GPS he’d found a 40 mile shortcut (that’s right a 40 mile shortcut) on semi bike-friendly roads.

Sometimes ya change the game plan. I think they call it a pivot. 😂

So bad news is we missed some of the Hudson Valley scenery we were looking forward to seeing. Good news is we finished early at our intended destination, got laundry done for the first time in a week and ate a couple of Angus hamburgers that were some of the best we’ve ever tasted.

When we were walking into town we kept noticing the haze. Surely this wasn’t pollution from NYC. It reminded Tom of when we cycled through the forest fires out in Montana when riding the Great Divide. It’s a peculiar blanket over the sun. Sure enough our friend Dan enlightened us… forest fires in Canada are throwing smoke our way.

More good news is without camping options the next few days, we won’t be exposed to poor air quality at night as we cycle through NYC, Philly and the Delmarva Peninsula during the day.