Not a good day

It really had almost nothing to do with the looming hurricane. I did want to keep moving & try to get to Williamstown before the rain & thunder began, so we did make a point of starting out a little earlier. We had a route sheet that we'd cobbled together and Bruce had gone over it using his iPhone map and we had a not-detailed-enough map of New York state. Sort of Impressionist navigation.

It works for art. Not for navigation.

We made our first wrong turn at about ten miles. We figured it out about 2 1/2 miles later, down a bunch of hills. Ugh. So we've lost five miles and probably close to half an hour. I was not happy. But we got back on track, and the roads were great, and the street signs were kindly agreeing with the route sheet for a change. I cheered up.

Then one well-marked turn showed up almost a mile before we expected it. We took it. Bruce said we'd be on it for quite a while, so I took off. We were meandering along the Hudson River - very peaceful & attractive. I had recalculated our overall distance to 71 miles; with that in mind, we were half way there & we would only arrive about a half hour later than I had hoped. Then my walkie-talkie buzzed & Bruce asked me to wait for him; he was not sure we were on the proper road. We'd been going north along the river for over ten miles. Our destination was southeast of us.

20 more miles added to the route???

We were only a mile or so south of an opportunity to cross the river, so we did it and stopped for lunch and rethinking. I looked at the Doppler radar screen including the animated version. A huge, fierce looking system had moved from the very bottom of the area shown to about 3/4 of the distance it had to cover to reach us. That was it for me. 35 miles out, 60+ of the original 66 hilly miles left to go, a hurricane moving right in.

We started looking for rental cars. No one in that area was willing to do a one way rental. We considered closer places to stop, but we are now on a fairly tight schedule & couldn't quite figure out how to make it work. Tomorrow is supposed to produce gusts up to 70mph, sustained winds of 50+. Rain of several inches is likely. No way can we ride tomorrow. We toyed with riding further and looking for options as we went along, but we were as close to a good-sized town as we were going to be. Actually, we were a lot closer than we were ever supposed to be. That was the problem.

In the end, it was also the very inelegant solution. We got a cab. For an exorbitant fee. The ride was well over an hour at taxi pace. Bruce's GPS claims to have traveled over 100 miles since we left this morning, so I guess we were farther off course than we thought.

I was feeling incredibly frustrated by the whole thing. Definitely the low point of the trip. And it didn't help that the rain held off an extra couple of hours and still (it is 8:00 now) is not very hard rain, or that we drove along the roads we should have ridden & they looked great. Maybe we could have made it. But maybe not. At the rate we were going it might have been dark before we arrived. Who knows what other ways we could have screwed things up?

Anyhow, we are here. A bath made me feel distinctly better; a good dinner followed by a reminiscing walk around Williams brought me back to a reasonably cheerful state - or at least I am now ready to move on.

We have rescheduled the remaining days. We will take three days to get to Natick, will still take a day to wander around Wellesley, and will then ride towards the coast near Boston. Bruce points out that Seattle to Boston sounds good.

Miles today: 37
Total miles so far: 4005 - the high point of the day, passing 4000. Boy, am I glad I didn't stop six miles sooner.