The Wheels of Chance

Last Friday I took the day off work and because the weather forecast was good I decided to go on an over night camping trip. I searched for a suitable MA state camp ground that had opened for the season. Otter State park was open, but I’ve been there before, so I chose Wompatuck State Park, down in Hingham, to the South of Boston. I decided to take a round about route from Watertown to avoid the South Boston roads and make the day’s distance around 60 miles.

I started off up the Minuteman Bikepath and at Lexington turned south towards Wellesley. A morning of gentle pedaling got me into Wellesley around 12:00 and I stopped for pizza. I ordered a couple of slices that turned out to be ridiculously large, so I ate one and saved the other, wrapping it up in brown paper and packing it under the flap of my saddlebag. I also filled my water bottles. I use two, one litre Smartwater bottles as they fit in standard bottle cages, but carry more that the regular cycling water bottles.
After lunch I rode through Dedham and the hills of the Blue Hills Reservation. There were a few steep gradients and I was rewarded with a nice view of downtown Boston to the North.

Once out of the Blue Hills Reservation I had to contend with the roads through Braintree and Weymouth which seem to have very little rhyme or reason. It’s almost as if the urban planners simply threw some string down on a map to decide where the roads should go. There’s no direct route anywhere, but after some back tracking and adventures on 3 lane rotaries I left the urban spaghetti and rode into the town of Hingham and found Wompatuck State Park by mid afternoon.

I pitched my tent, blew up the sleeping pad and laid my quilt out and then made for the shower blocks for a well deserved wash.

The evening was spent eating my pizza, making tea, and listening to the radio while I watched my campfire and the little red beacons of my neighbours fires through the woods. Around 9:00 I slid into my tent and pulled the quilt around me.

I woke at 7:00 and make quick work of a shower and a few fig newtons. By 8:00 I was on the road back to Boston. I decided to take a direct route home through Weymouth, Quincy, Milton, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain and Brookline. It would be a very urban route with lots of traffic. I had breakfast at a Weymouth diner and then tackled the traffic. One thing I love about cycling is that it takes me places that I wouldn’t go in the car, because the journey is the thing on a bike. Cars are made to eliminate as much of the experience as possible between a journey’s start and end points. On a bike the road in between is the whole point. So it was that in the late morning I stopped in Dorchester for a fantastic jerk chicken sandwich. Dorchester is one of those neighbourhoods that every city has that is the focus of some fear and appears on the news for all the wrong reasons, so it was all due to my bike that I found a great little cafe with good food and a very friendly atmosphere. I think people generally take a shine to a weary traveler.

After Dorchester it was a quick ride through Jamaica Plain, Brookline and back to Watertown, but my adventure wasn’t quite finished. As I rode into my driveway I had the awful realization that I didn’t have my wallet, I’d stuffed it into my map case on the top of my handlebar bag after lunch and it must have fallen out……”.************” I said. I canceled my cards and went down to the bank to get an emergency debit card. The lady there assured me that 90% of people who loose a wallet have it returned, I was skeptical. But when I got home there was an email for me form a woman who’d found my wallet in Brookline. Phew, was I happy!!
So I finished the day by meeting her at a Starbucks in Brookline. She gave me my wallet and I gave her a bunch of flowers and a Wholefoods chocolate ganache cake that were the very first purchases on my emergency debit card.

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