Will and I decided to drive up early Sunday morning for Parent's Weekend at Camp Chimney Corners in Becket, MA to ride some gravel roads. Both our daughters go to camp there and our wives were already up for Mom's weekend. Sunday is when Fathers and the rest of the family can visit and we were supposed to be a the camp around 12 noon.
Getting there around 8 AM would give us 4 hours of riding a 50 mile Gravel Grinder I planned out with the help of a friend at the Berkshire Cycling Association, who is also putting on a the
Fall Foliage Gravel Grinder or F2G2 this fall. Unfortunately, we arrived around 8:15 am and didn't start riding until 8:40 which meant we needed to cut out some of the original course and trim it down to 40 miles. The original course is marked in the map below in green and what we rode is in red.
When Will came up a few years ago for Parent's weekend he was exploring around and found a gravel road that went all the way to Lee, MA, so when we came out on Route 8 our route turned west just after the Otis Poultry Farm, instead we headed north and picked up Tyringham Road, which was dirt, and then took George Cannon, also dirt, which has a fantastic dirt road descent.
George Cannon from
Mark on
Vimeo.
The video is a little long, 4 minutes, because we are still climbing but starting at 1 minute 50 seconds we start descending and it's a wild ride! At the end of this road is where things got really confusing because the Garmin kept trying to re-route us back on to the original course which at this point was the other direction. While this ride was not as long as a Populaire or even close to a true Randoneer, with all the course changes made it almost seem like we were wandering in the Berkshires by bike. In German this would be called a Radwanderung (pronouced rat - vahnderung).
