Well girls, we had a great trip. We even beat the rain home today. The first day was the longest. We did 50 miles with 3700 feet of climbing. Not a lot of miles but a lot of climbing (for me anyway). It was so wonderful to ride and smell the daffodils and magnolias which are all blooming now and it was actually warm in the low 70's. We stayed in the Park Place B&B in Belchertown. Very nice sort of Victorian. Very New England. Friday we left Belchertown and headed to the Quabbin. It is gorgeous. We rode up Quabbin Mountain to the Observation tower. Not to bad of a climb, but the stairs in the tower let me know I was abusing my knees. From there we rode on and took a detour on a dirt road. Since 911 they don't let you in a lot of the Quabbin which is kind of to bad. Since the trail didn't say we couldn't walk, we walked the bikes through to paved road, which saved many miles of going around. I kept telling DH the Marshalls would be waiting with guns for us at the end and we'd spend the next few days in jail but all was well.
Then we stopped at the Hardwick winery and vinyard and had our own private wine tasting. I highly recommend the Massachusetts cranberry wine. From here the girl told us we could take a shortcut. The bridge was out but we could probably cross on bikes. This meant deviating from our GPS route. Big mistake! Most of the road was dirt with some pavement, and uphill, and my little skinny tires did not like that. I did some hiking for a lot of that. And we couldn't stop for long or the darn black flies just swarmed around us. Lesson learned, stick to the route we planned. We finally found a general store and had lunch around 2:00. We decided we were pretty beat after that and decided to head for Barre. Poor Finn was lugging the trailer which weighed 45 pounds with everything in it. He is my hero. The BOB trailer works great by the way. I can say that since I wasn't pulling the thing.
We finally made it to Barre and stayed at the Jenkins B&B. Also very nice and the gentlemen who run it also have a restaurant in the house which was fantastic. They even cooked us a full breakfast this morning. It was chilly, only in the 40's and no sun. We took some main roads home today. A bunch on 122 and then 56 and more back roads. More traffic than we like but better pavement. We were also trying to beat the rain. My good son even had the hot tub all fired up for us so when we got here it was all ready. Boy was that nice!! So not a long adventure but it was nice to spend some time with my honey. 110 miles and 8400 feet of climbing. I'll try to post some pictures later.