tour de pomme

bike tour done! It was quite fun, although colder, way more crowded, and certainly windier than I would have liked. Wind damned near blew me off the queensboro and verrazano bridges.

It was also majorly crowded. I knew it would be, but I had no idea. It was really really slow, stop and go riding until we got to central park, and then it was open enough to start speeding up a bit. By the time I hit queens, the road was pretty well opened up, and the ride from queens thru bklyn, down to the verrazano was open enough to bike hard when I wanted to, and ease off when I wanted to. It was nice. I had enough in me to spin up the bridge, although it was hard, because it's a mile or so of incline, and can be daunting after biking 40 miles. But, I made decent time. My legendary bridge phobia helped out by making me terribly uncomfortable to be on the bridges any longer than necessary. So i tended to concentrate on getting over them quickly...

all in all, I had a good time, and learned a lot about maneuvering bikes in extremely crowded conditions, and about drafting off of the person in front of me. AND about how nice it feels to suddenly have an open road in front of you and nothing to stop you from just biking...until the next rest stop...