Originally Posted by The Historian

Familiarity breeds content or contempt as you wish. Neil and I have two different views of touring. I enjoy going from point A to point B with as few distractions as possible. Neil enjoys getting lost and the impulsiveness that goes with it. He might object to that description, but it seems accurate to me. So while we started out in good spirits, as the day wore on so did my temper. First it was Waterworks Road that turned out to be largely sand and largely unrideable. Then it was the bike trails in Cheesequake Park that became sand and loose gravel, or led into a salt marsh and ended there. Add in a large number of wrong turns, corrections, and other changes that required a cue sheet, two maps, a compass, endless recalculations of mileage, and a lot of daylight, and my frustration became obvious. It took eight and a half hours to ride 50 miles, and we were unable to ride to the beach that day. And I had some swelling in my left knee from all the off-bike hiking.