| Summary | |
| Owner | Eric Gilbertson |
| Creation Date | 2007-09-30 20:53:37 UTC-0400 |
| Description | Provincetown Century-and-a-half Ride Sept 29
Eric and Matthew Gilbertson Biking distance: 144 miles Hiking distance: 7 miles Max elevation: 274 ft Total elevation gain: 5267 ft Author: Eric This trip had been on our list since freshman year and our efforts thwarted twice, but finally the weather and timing were on our side. We rode out of MIT at 4:40 am Saturday morning giving ourselves extra margin time to cover the 120 miles predicted by google maps. Matthew towed a trailer with the tent and his gear, while I carried a backpack with my sleeping bag and gear. We were hoping to put road tires on our mountain bikes to make us go faster, but had to settle for slightly narrower mtn bike tires, which helped a little. Our grand plan was to find a place to camp out near provincetwon Saturday night, and take the ferry back to boston Sunday morning. The best time to bike through boston definitely has to be 4-6am on a weekend. All the partyers have just gone to sleep and no ones driving in to work early, so the roads are empty. We cruised out of town at a decent pace and took our first break in bridgewater, about 30 miles away. Matthew was carrying our GPS and I was using my bike odometer, and we came out with distances within 0.1 miles. I guess that shows I measured my wheel circumference pretty accurately. After gorging ourselves on food for half an hour we continued south. We were trying to follow this marked Boston to Cape Cod bike route which had road signs and online maps. The route avoids major roads as much as possible and seems like a great idea. Unfortunately a significant portion of the signs point different directions than the corresponding route maps, so the best advice if you follow this route is rely on the maps. After some wrong turns we stopped in Manomet at 9:45 am after the 60-mile mark. There happened to be an ice-cream shop exactly where we stopped, and we couldnt resist having a nice calorie boost of cookies n cream. We passed over the canal soon afterwards and then the roads started getting really hilly. The whole trip our max elevation was only 274 ft (about green building height), but we climbed 5267ft (exactly katahdin height). That basically means roller-coaster roads. Our next break was in Barnstable at the 90-mile mark, and I actually took a 10-minute nap there. That was the last time we could go 30 miles without stopping, because I think after you hit the century mark your body starts getting tired. Luckily soon after mile 100 we hit a rail trail that was almost perfectly flat. Here Matthew started drafting off me because that trailer was starting to feel pretty heavy. We stopped for another ice cream break in Orleans around 4pm and then hit the end of the bike trail at mile 122. We met another group of bikers who said were also on their way to P-town from Boston. I was amazed they were ahead of us until they said theyd taken the T to Plymouth and started from there. I know they biked a long ways, but its still much more impressive to get to P-town completely by your own power (like we were doing). It was starting to get dark at this point and we really wanted to get to P-town before dusk. Now off the rail trail I think the hills made us go faster. We would get up to 30mph going down, and try to maintain that speed going up. At 6:30pm, after 14 hours on the road, we at last crossed the Provincetown city marker. To make the trip complete, though, we decided we had to get to the very tip of the spiral-like peninsula. We stopped long enough to split a pizza in town, then continued on as far as the roads would take us up the peninsula. At this point the odometer read 144 miles. To get to the end we would have to cross a rock break-water and walk along the beach for a while, so we stashed our bikes in the woods and headed out. We saw a sign that said something like Closed, poisonous shellfish, so we decided to be stealthy and not use headlamps. (It turns out there was nothing wrong with hiking out there at night). After 3 or 4 miles of rocks and sand we reached the lighthouse at the end. Too bad we didnt just bring our sleeping bags out there, because Im sure we could have slept there without getting caught. We retraced our steps and got back to the bikes around 9:30. I think we were technically only allowed to camp in official, privately owned, super-expensive campgrounds on the cape, but we decided to find a place in the woods and just not get seen. We ended up getting to bed around 10:30, after nearly 18 hours of physical exertion. Our ferry to boston left at 10am the next morning, and we made it out of the woods into town without getting caught. We were still fortunate, though, to stay out of the Provincetown penitentiary for an even more severe offense changing clothes in the bathroom. Just before the ferry left we decided to jump in the ocean and then change out of our wet clothes in the public restrooms. There was an attendant at the door whose job must have been to defend the citizens of provincetown from clothes-changers. Matthew went in to change first while I guarded the bikes, and apparently the attendant got a little shook up. When I went in I was careful in the stall to make it look like I was doing business other than changing. Apparently the guy was staring through the door crack the whole time, and the verbal exchange was something like, Bathroom Guard: Hey, youre not allowed to change in there!. Theres a law against that. Me: Is it against the law to go to the bathroom in here? Bathroom Guard: (hesitation), You do that again and Ill report you, ya hear? I was pretty sure my case would hold up easily against his in court, so I finished changing, washed my hands (to make it look like I had actually done my business in there), and walked out. The ferry got us back to boston around noon, making for an awesome end to our trip. |