I’m up at 6:00 again this morning after a night of not sleeping especially well. I woke up a bunch of times in the middle of the night, and I cannot say for sure why that is. There’s a dehumidifier in the room and it goes on & off. I may be waking up when it turns off because the white noise machine is off.
I get up and do some work early because I have clients in the UK that are waiting on some stuff and it makes my life easier to just get it taken care of.
D gets up shortly after and does some work while I relax. We won’t be here long as we’re meeting a different set of teammates today at 10:00 at the Green Woodlands Foundation for what is the culmination of something I’ve been trying to do for nearly 2 years now. You can even call this a bucket list item. We came up here last year but they closed the park to non-locals and we wanted to respect the rules of engagement.
When we get to the lot it is huge. There’s parking for 50 or more cars in 2 lots. It is not that crowded but there are a good number of people here for sure. It’s kind of exciting finally getting out here after a few years of anticipation.
The first part of the ride is a long, slow climb up Norris Hill which is entirely machine built. The trails are excellent, and despite climbing for 3 miles it’s not really that much of an effort. We get to the clearing which is the top of the 1st of the major climbs.
From here we bomb downhill for 2.2 miles. This is where we would see the most water on the whole day. A good number of puddles which made the descent a tad sketchier than it might normally be. That said it is a great downhill and worth the big climb up.
At the bottom we see 2 parents asking if we saw their kids.
We finish out the side of the first loop then hit the connector to the upper loop. The ride is basically 2 loops connected by 1 trail in the middle which we will hit both ways.
We find some more machine-built stuff and at the far end D and I take off to do an extra extended loop while Joy & Steve take a break. We’re gone about 30 minutes before hooking back up with them. Here we stop and eat our lunch. This may be the greatest PBJ sandwich ever in my life. I was starving at this point and it very well may have saved the ride for me.
We climb out of this, then finish out the loop. We head over to the original loop and climb back out of that one as well then roll out to the bottom to the end of the ride to the lot.
In all we did just under 21 miles in just under 3 hours. I would say this was 80-90% machine built. The Strava link can be found here.
From here we head back to the apartment to take a shower then get ready to head back out to enjoy the nice day. After a few days of raining this is nice to see.
We head down to Plymouth to burn some time before dinner. We’d actually been here before years ago as we were coming through on our way to a different KT trip. We walk around town a bit and D decides we should do the local geocaches which I am up for.
The first is a fake rock that was in this rock wall behind the town library. These rock walls are great places to stow a geocache, for those looking to get into the game.
The second is sort of under this bridge and was just a small container that was not really out of the elements and so was full of water. Both were relatively easy finds and gave us a reason to walk around town.
Dinner is at Covered Bridge Farm Table just up the road. Joy & Steve meet us there as well. They are staying just up the road from this so it was close enough to in between. The menu looked interesting so this seemed a good choice.
We started with the special which was fried oysters which may be a bit of a hack, but I totally love. After today I earned this meal so I’m having at it. Then I got the green curry with pork belly and D got the tuna ahi bowl. Mine was absolutely fantastic and hers was good but maybe not quite enough food. So she topped it off with chocolate tort which I ended up eating half of.
After that we drove back to the apartment with a quick stop at the market for a few food items. With that we wrap up day 4 of the 10 day trip and the main part of the bike vacation hasn’t even started yet. Much more good stuff to come!
Traveling Normandy 