Biking to Hero's Welcome

Sometimes life provides a lot of pressure - such as recently when I was racing to both get in one last really big bike ride and also find a way to get involved in my friend Trish Siplon's 52 New Things before she sells the book/movie rights and retires to Zanzibar. Luckily, I was able to kill two birds with one stone, although I had to sacrifice my bike in the process. A few weeks back my friends Mike and Andy and myself had taken advantage of the bike ferry to cross the gap in the causeway and make it up to South Hero Island (an earlier blog). We made it Town Line Road, despite my pleas to keep going - mainly because this was exactly where Trish and I had stopped last year, and I felt we should at least get a little further. However, it is a logical place to stop, and only partially because it's at the top of a hill. My goal was to make it all the way up to North Hero Island, specifically to a great little coffee/sandwich shop called Hero's Welcome. Trish, who is always up for a challenge (despite all those rumors you might have heard on Entertainment Tonight about how all of those trips flying business class had turned her into Posh Trish), jumped right in and folded it into the 52 New Things. The biggest challenge we were facing was finding time to fit it in - in between rain and injuries and limited bike ferry opportunities we were running out of summer. We scheduled the ride for 29 August and hoped for the best - and things looked good until I remembered that I was scheduled to spend three hours that morning explaining ePortfolios to incoming freshmen. Beyond the incalcuable damage that I did to the students' understanding of ePortfolios even that obstacle was hurtled, and I made it down to meet Trish a little after noon. This meant we had to made it up to Hero's Welcome and back, probably around 45-50 miles round-trip I'm guessing, in time to catch the last ferry at 6:00. We took and made great time, and despite Trish's maddening refusal to bike in the lead (even though she is in freakishly good shape - although she's also a lot smarter than me and was doubtless taking advantage of the wind drafting caused by my bulk), we had a fantastic ride. On the bike ferry - in classic Vermont fashion where everybody knows everybody (and the six degrees of separations is never, ever more than three) - I ran into a new friend of mine, who I initially met through my friend Ericka (the one who just moved to Austin), and who also knows my son, and whose first name is Scudder; that's now two people in Vermont that I know who have Scudder as a first name, the other being Scudder Parker who ran for governor a couple years ago. Anyway, we blew past the dreaded Town Line Road and I was surprised how quickly we made it all the way to Hero's Welcome, although we did stop a couple times and calculate out the chances of making it back for the last ferry. We made it and, even though we knew we didn't have time for one of their great sandwiches, we could at least enjoy some coffee and a quick snack before heading back. And then disaster struck - we walked to the back of the store and my front tire was flat (now, I had just had two flat tires on my rear wheel the week before, so you can imagine my excitement). Oddly, it also began this strange stretch wherein my front tire went flat four times in the space of a week. The folks at Skirack, where I take my bike, were complete mystified by it, and I'm sure it has nothing at all to do with the imposing collection of blow gun darts and knives that Trish has brought back from Tanzania (I'm just saying . . .). All attempts to fix the tire, including a Herculean effort by this great guy who worked at the boat shop to patch the tire, failed. And now the problem - we're stuck twenty-five miles north of Burlington - and while the fellow was trying to patch my tire I was watching our window to make the ferry closing - and, really, even if he had been able to patch it we just wouldn't have had the chance to catch the last ferry. So, I called my excellent friend Mike Kelly, who is the other Faculty in Residence at Quarry Hill, and he, although he was new to Vermont and had no idea where we were - or even where the Lake Champlain Islands were, dropped everything on a Sunday afternoon and came up in his mini-van and saved us. The nice thing was that we then had time to sit down for a sandwich and then some ice cream. So, all in all, despite the misadventures, a marvelous day. And, Trish, being a good soul, decided to include me in her 52 New Things list, despite my abject failure as a riding partner. There's still no word on who will play me in the movie.