By Jake Bleggi
12:00 Day Three: It’s rainy, it’s cold and we are over it. We rolled into a gas station that barely looks like it’s still standing. We grab the basics… pizza, chocolate milk, a Gatorade along with some trail mix. The gas station clerk looks at us and says, “I didn’t expect to see any more bikers this year. The last group rolled through about two weeks ago.” We definitely understood why.
(Five days earlier)
Sitting in Burke’s garage, less than 48 hours before we are set to hop on a plane, we still with no idea what we were getting ourselves into. To say that we are a tad nervous is an understatement. “This is different. Never brought this much gear before. Never biked this many miles before. Never flown with a bike”, just a few last thoughts Burke rambled off. I am sure we were forgetting something or something was going to go wrong in our foreseeable future.
The morning of the flight we threw a few final things in our bike boxes (we had nowhere to stash a suitcase so all our gear went in the bike box). As we continued on, most of our major worries subsided, our gear and bikes made it safely to Boston. We spent the night cruising the concrete jungle. You’d have thought nobody in inner city Boston had seen a gravel bike loaded down with gear. The night was filled with strange looks and questions. As two Utahns, we are accustomed to open land and dirt roads. Boston was very foreign to us. The only dirt road we found, we were kicked off in less than 30 seconds.
We left the inner city and headed back towards the airport where we found a comfy looking bush and stashed our bikes, pulled out our sleeping pads and called it a night.
We had arranged a ride to the trailhead via a friend of a friend whom we’ve never met. He showed up right at 7:30 as planned and we were off. On the car ride up it was instantly apparent to me that we were not going to make it anywhere fast. There was way too much beauty, old buildings and landscape to take in.
In the planning process of this trip, I was trying to wrap my head around how there was 30k vert on a ride with a max elevation of 2,700 feet. The first few climbs made me realize how such a thing was possible. Day one was everything you could hope for in gravel biking, smooth roads, winding hills and beautiful scenery. We finished the day in the small town of Island Pond. A quaint small town with a few old churches and buildings. We stopped in the local bar and snagged some food and watched some live music. Then took off into the dark to find a place to rest our heads for the night.
“That’s a big hill, good news is there’s a down hill on the other side”
Day 2 was unexplainable. We passed through farms so perfect they didn’t seem real. As we descended into the small town of Burke, we passed a lady doing her daily chores walking her dog and pushing her wheelbarrow down the middle of the street. She kindly smiled and waved and we knew we were somewhere special. Going into Burke we had no idea we were in such a bike central town. We stopped by a local bike cabin and they pointed us in the direction of some single track that would take us into town. We snagged some food and checked out the local bike shop and took off. We were hoping we’d luck onto a piece of public land as we did on night one but as we ventured down the road the no trespassing signs got thicker. Finally, we made it into town and hopped on WiFi and with GPS, found a campground that was just over a mile away. We called the owner, but she informed us that their last night was the night before and they are closed for the season. But she kindly offered for us to stay in the campground anyways. This was one of many kind acts from the people of Vermont on our journey. My biggest take away from this trip is how pure hearted and kind the people along the route are.
Every road name in Vermont ends with the name “hill”. The morning of day 3 we woke up to cold temperatures and heavy fog. The hills seemed steeper and the frigid temps made the downhill as unenjoyable as the uphill. About 2pm, the rain rolled in and that’s when morale hit an all time low for the trip, we were spent and sad. We rerouted to hit a local store and it sent us around a hill and on to a long stretch of paved road, it was our saving grace. We rolled into town and grabbed some fish and chips from the Cross Track Diner. We then headed off for a lean to shed we had read about as a place to sleep. Again we were biking way later into the night than we had expected. Being mid-October, the sun didn’t stick around for long. We rolled in a ways after dark but the lean to shed was more of a cabin and more than anything we could have expected.
Waking up on day four with a good night’s sleep in our new found cabin and some warm Vermont apple cider, we had a new, positive outlook on the day. We started in an overwhelming vert position so the downhill went on for miles! We biked through some of the most beautiful sections of the VTXL and incredibly smooth roads (I don’t think washboards exist in Vermont and if they do we didn’t find any). We ripped into a midday stop town and grabbed some famous chili from our new gas station friend. She wasn’t very excited about making it every day, as she explained to us, but she knew it was good. With many miles to cover and no legs to do it we rerouted once again and caught some fast pavement miles, a much enjoyed change. Rolling into the Horseshoe Canyon just before dark, we were greeted by the host. It was supposed to get well below freezing on this night and looking at our condition she offered for us to stay in the warm community game room. Without hesitation we took her up on the offer (another act of kindness from the people of Vermont). This was the night that we found out our plan was flawed. We were planning on finding a route from the bottom of the VTXL to Boston via public transportation. We quickly learned that that didn’t exist. We sat on our phone for hours and shot back and forth options until finally we found a way! There was a train out of Fitchburg that straight lined into Boston, the only problem… Fitchburg was over 87 miles away and our biggest day to this point was just below 70. Five days into a bike packing trip this did not sound like the most enjoyable option, but it was our only option.
We woke up the next day to find frost on everything in sight. The downhill coming out of the campground was freezing. But after a few solid hours of biking on and off dirt roads through incredible covered bridges and across waterfalls, we learned that you didn’t have to be on the VTXL to experience Vermont’s beauty. It was everywhere. The route we had created the night prior was absolutely beautiful. We rolled into a small river town at about noon and grabbed some incredible breakfast with kind staff. We then headed off into New Hampshire. We had a few hours of fun ups and downs and we ran into an old bikepacker who sent us in the direction of some roads he had enjoyed riding. After a good few hours we had hit the Massachusetts state line. Incredibly burnt out by this point we pushed on. As we were riding through a small town, I got a phone call from a local number so I answered it. It was Erik (the guy who gave us a ride up) he had just seen us pass him. It was a crazy experience, because we had no idea where he lived and were not originally planning on riding that way at all. After one more painstaking hour of riding, we finally made it to our hotel. It was over, we could finally look back at the good times. That’s how second hand fun works right?
After a long overdue good night’s sleep, we hopped on the train to Boston where we met a new friend Joann. She was 87 and had lived on the East coast all her life. She was incredibly excited to hear about our story and tell some of her own. We swapped numbers so we could send her the video we had worked on when it was finished. Getting off the train we headed toward Community Cycles where the kind staff hooked us up with new bike boxes. We biked with them on our backs to the airport through downtown Boston. The looks and comments people gave us were some of the high points of the trip.
Bikes disassembled and on the plane, all the worries of the trip are behind us. It was a remarkable experience and quite incredible that everything worked out as well as it did with as minimal planning as we put into it.
So don’t stress the small stuff hop on your bike, take off and the rest will work itself out. That’s half the fun.
