December in Glouster

We had a relatively good weather day for a Saturday in early December.  Temps started low with 30F but warmed quickly in the sunshine to hit 50 by Noon.  I threw my cross bike in the van and dashed down to New Lexington to explore some dirt and gravel in that area.  I ended up spending about 3-4 hours (3 hours of ride time, 4 hours of clock time) exploring the triangle framed by New Lex, Glouster and Murray City.  There is obviously a whole lot more to this area than I had time to touch today.  I'll need to come back another day.

It is the start of hunting season and I must have seen 50+ hunters today.  If you aren't driving a pick up truck and dressed in deer-kill orange, then you definitely stand out.  Put a guy in spandex, plop him on a bicycle and stick him out in this area ... well, I got a lot of stares today.  This is definitely rural Appalachia.  It has a certain feel or characteristic to it that differs from other part of rural Ohio.  Poverty is widespread here too and lots of folks scratching out a living just above the poverty line.  There just isn't a lot of opportunity down here.  Trailers and "less" are everywhere.

But the region is gloriously scenic.  It is laced with backroads galore and is rather hilly.  Occasionally you'll luck out with a road that follows a drainage valley, but mostly you are going up or going down.  The dirt lacks maintenance gravel and was firm in the cold, but got squishy in the warm sun.   

I didn't map out a route ahead of time.  Busy morning with walking the dog and the kidos got up at 6am today too.  So I didn't get my 30 minutes of quiet time to pour over maps and plot a route for the GPS.  Actually I decided to head down to this area at the very last minute anyway, so it wouldn't have done any good to plan ahead.  Plus, quite a few roads that show up on the map, don't appear on the GPS and even more that show up on both the map and GPS don't exist in real life.  This last picture here is a perfect example of a road that actually doesn't exist.  It starts off fair enough as a low-grade dirt road (see pic), but just around the corner it is a gated dead end with some kind of wilderness hiking path leading forth.  I might have been tempted under other circumstances, but I just didn't want to meet the wrong end of a hunting rifle today.  Must have cost me 30 minutes of backtracking and rerouting to get around this detour.  And the main problem with not mapping a route ahead of time, is that I stop too often to skootch the GPS around to see where I need to go next.  Cost me a lot of time in the beginning of the ride, so I was late with my timeline and spent the second half of the ride sticking to main paved roads to make up lost time.  

I've been down here on my motorcycle and managed to find a whole mess of dirt roads that I wasn't on today.  So I know there is a lot more to the area than I found today.  I can't wait to go back.  I felt kind of sluggish at the start.  Maybe something to do with the cold weather.  I admit to having a hard time getting started with the freezing temps outside.  This is the time of the year when that temp is a shock to the system.  But I was never too cold and probably slightly overdressed.  Oh well, it was easy to shed layers as the day heated up.  When I finally got to Glouster I realized I had only about 1:20 left on the clock (about a third of my time) and still half the distance to go.  So I dug deep and pounded out 26 miles at an average of 18 mph on mostly paved roads.  It was nice to get my legs under me for the end of the ride.