Now, you might look at the title for this post and think, "53 miles -- isn't that a bit off-pace?"
If you know New Hampshire well, you might think, "Wait, Dover is only about 40 miles from Manchester -- what happened?"
You're right, of course -- 53 miles is a bit less than I had planned to do. My initial intention for the day was to get to Greenfield (NH) State Park, and have a chance to use the tent I was carrying around. But Google Maps set me up for trouble, and the weather finished what Google started.

Things started out well enough in Dover. I had checked the weather forecast, and saw that the morning was supposed to be clear with a rainy afternoon. In Greenfield, the morning was going to be rainy with a clear afternoon and evening. It seemed like I would be moving towards a line of storms that was moving towards me. With luck, we'd meet at lunchtime; I'd duck inside for a bite to eat and wait out the storm.

I was also feeling tired from two 70+ mile days, with luggage. I looked at back-up plans for a more restful day: if I felt like I couldn't make it to Greenfield State Park (a 68 mile ride), I could stop at the Friendly Beaver campground in New Boston, around 55 miles in.

And then came Google Maps -- as processed via RidesWithGPS -- and the Rockingham Recreational Trail. The trail I had been on to get to Dover was wide, level, dry, and covered in small-chip gravel. Someone running 23mm tires might have had problems, but I was running 32mm and thought it was great. The Rockingham trail, in contrast, was wet and sandy, with frequent half-buried stones, and lovingly dusted with pine needles. Right away, I found myself wanting knobby mountain bike tires. After a few miles, I thought I'd do well with a Pugsley-style bike. And when I saw that the state of New Hampshire cared enough about the trail to do maintenance:

(yes, that's a tunnel with an active backhoe on the other side), well, that's when I started looking for alternate routes. 20 miles along the Rockingham Trail just didn't seem worth the cost of being car-free. I was having to work to keep the bike on a straight line, and if it rained while I was on the trail, there weren't exactly a lot of convenience stores to duck into.

So after about 8 miles, I decided I had had enough bucolic splendor and would move onto roads. At the next crossing, my GPS showed Rt 101 about a half-mile from the trail. I rode over to have a look -- and discovered that Rt 101 was a major multilane highway. It didn't intersect the road I was on, it went under it instead. It was a measure of how frustrated I was with the trail that the wide shoulder looked inviting, and I was seriously considering carrying my bike down the embankment to the highway.

After a few more moments, I asked my GPS for a course to Manchester. It routed me on local roads, not on Rt 101 -- resolutely, determinedly, not on Rt 101. I surfaced in a town called Candia, which had an intersection or two with a pizza place. The skies were threatening, but it hadn't started raining yet, so I deferred lunch and kept rolling. Once I got past the intersection that seemed to be more or less all of Candia, I found myself on a road with rolling hills. Every time I passed a church, or a house with a shed, or a farmstand, I made a mental note of my odometer reading -- where could I find shelter if the sky opened and I decided to double back? The winds kicked up, the temperature dropped 10 degrees, and I kept moving.

Soon, the small country road got a bit wider as I got closer to Manchester. It grew road signs, and stores on the side of the road. There had never been a shoulder, but an extra lane sprouted up and I found myself in the slow lane of a small highway. Anxious to get out of traffic, I looked around as I rode, hoping to see a smaller parallel road or maybe a sidewalk. With cars honking at me, I finally spotted a rutted stretch of broken asphalt in the weeds to my right. I didn't want to stop the bike, dismount, and hustle the bike over the curb; instead, I waiting until I saw a road-ramp curving to my right, and a wheelchair-ramp connecting the road to the asphalt sidewalk.

It was only after I completed the maneuver, road to ramp to sidewalk, that I realized the ramp in question was the entrance ramp for Interstate 93. Adrenaline! Better than coffee!

Safely on the sidewalk, I walked for a few blocks until the traffic dissipated and I was on a "normal" city street. (I live and ride in Philadelphia, so I have a fairly high-traffic definition of "normal".) I munched on a granola bar while considering my next move: on to the Friendly Beaver, or wait in Manchester for the storm? I had been lucky up to that point, and New Boston was only supposed to be about 15 miles away, so I kept moving.

At first, I was directed onto the Piscataquog Trail. Asphalt-paved, about 5 feet wide, smooth and flat -- this was what I expect from a bike trail. And then, after about a mile, I had the directions: "Turn left; go 0.2 miles, then turn right toward Agnes Street; go 0.2 miles, then turn right onto Agnes Street." I turned left and found myself at a dead-end within about 30 feet. Well, not exactly a dead end; I was in some sort of municipal park. Confused, I called up the map on RidesWithGPS to see exactly what it wanted me to do, and found something like this for an image:

(The red line is my meandering path, which unfortunately covers most of the "go this way" line.)

Yes, what the directions should have said for maximum clarity would have been more like:

• Turn left
• Go around both baseball diamonds to the far corner of the park
• Find the path
• Head downhill, and away from Manchester, until you find the bridge
• Go over the bridge
• Find the correct "right turn" path of the multiple paths there. Avoid the tent by the creek, which may or may not be someone's home.
• Scramble up the embankment, with the bike. This is either practice for cyclocross season, or a way to determine whether or not poison ivy grows in the neighborhood
• Realize that the previous steps constitute a powerful rain dance. Continue to scramble up the now-muddy embankment in the pouring rain.
• Hey, wait! I wasn't done!

It may not have been done, but I was. I had somehow lost interest in trying to navigate "pathways" that looked like this:


Back downhill, back across the bridge, back to the baseball diamonds -- and the well-covered dugouts. With myself and the bike under cover, I drank some Gatorade, munched on some cheese, and watched the rain come down. My hour or so there was time enough to realize that the storms were only supposed to get worse over the next few hours. Sadly, I wouldn't be making it all the way to the Friendly Beaver that night. Instead, it was time for another web special -- a night at the Econolodge, only a few miles behind me.