The day started out ok, aside from some minor wrong turns getting out of Rockport. (route not planned thoroughly through here as I figured we knew the neighborhoods well enough. ha.) We did get held up briefly by a drawbridge, which is an uncommon experience for us, but by and large, the section through Massachusetts was enjoyable despite the fact that we were sharing roads with cars on a Saturday.
We stopped in Newburyport to look for something Chad wanted from a bike shop (again, I can't remember exactly what) and for a quick lunch. We thought about ice cream, but figured that could wait for one of those little beach towns in New Hampshire.
As we passed into New Hampshire, I noticed two things. (1) The tailwind I was expecting never materialized, and (2) the pavement got noticeably worse at the state line. Oh, and (3), the kid's energy started to flag, which we interpreted as a sign that her low ice cream indicator light was on. No problem, Google says there is ice cream in Hampton Beach! Surely that will be a cute little beach town...
Not.
As we crossed the state line, the pavement got worse, as I mentioned. People got grouchy about who was and wasn't pointing out pavement hazards, as the road surface quickly became more hazard than pavement. We also entered the outskirts of relatively high density of relatively ugly beach houses all crammed together on top of each other blocking the view of the ocean. Then the traffic started.
At first, I thought there was just a backup at a stop light where there was a bridge. If we could just get over the bridge (nasty bridge surface of course), it would get better...
It didn't. The traffic was almost at a standstill, and it soon became clear that this was the Saturday backup of people all going to the beach.
The beach was still several *miles* down the road. Traffic stopped. Kid needs ice cream. Adults on high dumbheaded-car alert. You see, while we could ride along the shoulder of the miles-long parking lot of a road to the beach, the poor drivers were stuck stopped in line. And it was hot. Naturally, more than a few of them took umbrage of the fact that we cyclists were moving and they weren't, resulting in some particularly bad behaviors. Honking, hollering, actively moving over to block the shoulder when they saw us coming. Ugh. All we were trying to do was to get through -- dude, I'm not going to take a parking place, or a spot on the beach, or even any ice cream at this point, so please don't try to run me over with your fat-ass truck. I'm not slowing you down -- it's the other cars that are doing that. And swearing at me doesn't change your situation any. Even the hungry kid agreed that we should just batten down the hatches and batter our way through and away from the mess.
As we got into town proper, one could not help but notice the extremely large, extremely tacky boardwalk area, the lack of parking and resultant bad driving choices, the crowded boring flat beach, the innumerable sunburnt folks with questionable taste in clothing darting everywhere across the road like it was a slow-motion game of Frogger. Long lines snaked out of food establishments that didn't even look that appealing. And the noise! Oh, the noise. We continued our focussed peloton-of-three progression up the bike lane, wondering why anyone would think it was fun to go here on a summer Saturday. I would have ridden miles out of the way to avoid this, had I but known.
After what seemed like forever, we got to the far side of town, traffic eased up, and we stopped to breathe. The shared focus needed to get through that miserable beach town had erased all of the minor disagreements of earlier in the day and honed us back into a working team. A somewhat shell-shocked team, but a team nonetheless.
Several miles out of town, we spotted an ice cream shop, where we promptly stopped to cool down and have a snack. It was 90 degrees out, and the large ice creams were sorely needed -- and enjoyed!
The coast picked up some rocks, which made it slightly more scenic than the earlier flat sand.
We got into the vicinity of Portsmouth in the late afternoon, and stopped at a non-crowded beach state park. It was way better than the tourist zone further south, and was quite pretty in the late-afternoon low-angle light. Their visitor center was closed, but we peeked in the windows to see the giant whale skeleton inside, and also looked at the bones outside. The general impression of a whale skeleton is not so different than that of a dinosaur skeleton, after all! It was just a few easy miles to our hotel for the night, where we appreciated the quiet and were able to laugh at the unexpected horribleness of tacky beach boardwalk towns.
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