Friends,
All of this all comes under the heading of
Very Good News™. I will have to admit to being a bit nervous for our 3
tightwad frugal Canuckian friends, those apparently belonging to the Ancient Order of the Bald Tire. I won't name names, but it appears that all the AOBT members have safely hydroplaned back home.
And I'm really glad that you guys having the "close calls" (or as they like to call them now in industry safety these days: "near misses" :blink: ) kept 'em that way.
I'm way pleased that you all had a good time (or at least are willing to pretend that you did
). That's what makes it worthwhile to me. As I told you all at the beginning of Saturday's ride, this is my
only rule:
You must have fun!, and there will be
no breaking the rule. :nono:
As usual in these things, there were a few new lessons learned for me:
For one thing, next year we will definitely have to do Tom's Greens ride first on Saturday, (or maybe even Friday?) so if we have another mid-weekend washout it won't get cut. Although the repairs made on NH 118 do make it more tolerable, Vermont has even better roads than NH.
I thought the chairlift lunch at Bretton Woods was a keeper. :thumbsup: Those of you who opted out of that missed perhaps the best scenery of the day. And the lunch was not that bad at all. We did chew up some time up there, so maybe next year we'll get the kickstands up a half hour earlier in the AM, so we won't be rushed getting back.
As a side note - we weren't quite as rushed as I thought we were. GPS Jill had a brain fart when I powered her on after lunch and was lying about our arrival time, saying we would get back after 7PM, which was our scheduled dinner time. After dumping and reloading the route (while on I93 @ 80mph) she gave me a new arrival time of 6PM. <_< GPSes... What a total PITA. :glare: But what the hell would we do without 'em?
With the help of Bungie and Roadrunner, I figured out some things about the GPS routing. Things that I will employ in future group rides. It seems that, if you loaded my routes from the *.gpx file, every intersection point gets announced, which over rides the announcement of turn directions. If you loaded them from *.gdb (Garmin proprietary format) then the intersections do NOT get announced at all, which is nice if you don't want to hear from Jill quite so much. So the new trick will be to have two different files for the two formats, with the *.gpx file having the viapoints moved to just
after the intersections. Not huge, but makes following the routes on GPS nicer.
The only time that we got split up (unintentionally) was when I was trying to make up some time on I93 because I thought we were behind schedule. Yeah, yeah... I was going a little more than the "10 over" I had promised, and a few folks in the back ended up missing the exit to Woodstock. Which was too bad because some of the funnerest roads on the loop were the ones on the way back.
I think I will try harder to shanghai (at least) a second ride-group leader, even if isn't for a "faster group", just to split things up. Although it was kind of fun to see such a long line of FJRs sweeping through the countryside behind us, it makes things a bit difficult in the towns getting everyone through the traffic lights. And it eliminates any chance of passing the slow cages, even when a wide open opportunity presents itself. No way everyone was getting around that rolling roadblock of 6 cars (led by a sightseeing Masshole!) going up the west side of the Kank Pass.
side note: If you haven't already, come back and run the whole Kank (and Bear Notch Rd) mid week sometime. It is a lot more fun at 50-60mph than the pace we were forced into due to the traffic.
Although it was a really nice place, and the staff was ultra accommodating, I don't think I would bring a group back to Jesse's again. The food was only "OK". I know that if you walked in off the street and ordered from the menu it is much better. I've had two independent reports, from people whose taste buds I respect greatly, say they had top rate dinners at Jesse's. What we got wasn't.
Perhaps next year I'll see if I can get a dinner catered in one of the Hotel's meeting rooms. Make it BYOB? Yeah, that's the ticket...
Sure wish I'd thought of that earlier. Oh well, live and learn.
So, we'll do it again next year, weather permitting
, and next time it'll be even mo' bettah!!
