ABC Ride: Saturday, July 18 at 10:30 a.m. from Cornell's in Hopkinton

[ABC Riders]

The next Ashland Bike Club ride will be held this Saturday, July 18 at 10:30 a.m.  We’ll meet at Cornell’s Irish Pub which is located at 229 Hayden Rowe St (Route 85) in Hopkinton.

Special Note on Parking:  Please park on the left side of the restaurant!

GPS Address:  229 Hayden Rowe St (Route 85), Hopkinton, Ma

Route Name:  ABC – Eli’s Ramble V (get the right version)

Ride Rating:
Distance:  Moderate (27.8)
Elevation: Moderate-Challenging (46) (Note: calculation = gain in feet / distance in miles)
Total Gain: 1290 feet
Steepest:    7.2%

Weather
Saturday’s forecast promises a cloudy day with temperatures ranging from 78 to 81 degrees. We ALMOST cancelled this ride due to rain but the forecast now suggests we should be able to stay dry until the ride finishes.

Whether we can dine outside in one of our favorite post-ride lunch settings remains to be seen. In the worst-case scenario, we can always eat indoors.

We had been planning our Scituate route for next Wednesday, July 22, but, if the forecast doesn’t improve, that ride is likely to be postponed. Stay tuned for updates …

Saturday’s Ride
This is a route that blends some great country roads with a seven-mile roll on a section of the Upper Charles Trail in Milford.  The base route was designed by ABC’er, the late, great Eli Post. Eli was a close friend and a giant in the world of Massachusetts cycling. Eli passed away last year.  The route he left behind for us offers spectacular scenery throughout the entire ride.

Saturday’s version of the route, version V, adds some new roads and a little extra distance to Eli’s original route.

For those interested, lunch will be available after the ride at Cornell’s where the ride starts and ends.  Here’s a link to their menu:  https://www.cornellsirishpub.net/menus They have a huge fenced-in courtyard right behind the restaurant that provides a great setting for lunch. Please consider joining the club for a late lunch or perhaps just a beer after the ride ends.

If you don’t plan to ride on Saturday but would like to meet the club for lunch, we should arrive back at Cornell’s by roughly 2:00 – 2:15.

Here's a link to a map of Saturday’s route:  https://ridewithgps.com/routes/51975053

You can print our “official cue sheet” for the ride by clicking the link above, then click “More”, then click “Print Map and Cue PDF”, and finally click “Print Official”.

 

Cornell’s in Hopkinton, Ma (43 riders – an ABC record!)

 

Off the Route

Our “Off the Route” feature includes topics we think are worth sharing with the club. Please let us know what you think.

 

Ashland Bike Club Radio

Los Lobos - Donna
Pure Prairie League - Amie

Leonard Cohen - So Long, Marianne (Trivia: harmony vocals by Christina Applegate’s mother)

Bonnie Raitt - Louise

The Everly Brothers - Cathy's Clown

Robert Earl Keen - Jennifer Johnson & Me

Patty Griffin - Sweet Lorraine

 

Charity Rides – We’ve got a bunch this week!!
Please check out the attached charity ride document and give our ABC charity riders a helping hand. It’s not easy to raise all the money these rides often require. Thanks!!!

Louisa Gag – This never should have happened!!
The cycling world lost a real champion last week. I didn’t know her although some of our ABC riders did. Article after article has spoken about how she was a tireless worker with a clear vision to make all of us cyclists safer.

 

Here’s what MassBike wrote:

“Last week, our community lost Louisa Gag, an advocate and transportation professional, a friend of so many, and sister and daughter for her family as a lifelong resident of Boston. Louisa dedicated her career to improving traffic safety, at her time at Livable Streets Alliance and most recently working at the City of Boston, to bring safe and equitable biking to everyone. Louisa shared our overarching mission for transportation justice every day in her work. We honor her life and make our voices heard, and push for the improvements needed to protect vulnerable people on our roads.”

 

Governor Healy, Boston’s Mayor Wu, and the Mass Legislature have all called for safer streets. That’s the problem, though. We get a few more bike lanes. Maybe there’s a little funding for a new off-road bike path. But, let’s be honest, not a week goes by without more cycling injuries and more cycling fatalities. This needs to stop!

 

What’s been done is “nice” but it is painfully inadequate. Cycling safety needs to become one of our state’s highest priorities. Is there anything more important than saving lives?

 

We need a massive overhaul to our roads and cycling infrastructure. The whole process of government’s response needs to change. We’re talking about very real life and death stuff here and we should be way past the piecemeal improvements we’ve been getting.

 

We need everyone to fight for a master plan, one that would be implemented over, say, the next ten years, to overhaul our entire roadway system. It’s time to stop explaining why it can’t happen and to start getting it done. People are dying every day and we should be demanding immediate progress and not the kind of one-bike-lane-at-a-time tokenism we’ve been getting.

 

We can’t bring Louisa back, but we can damn well make sure her death was not in vain and that the priorities she fought for are realized.

 

Without “cyclist involvement and activism”, not much will change. This needs to be more than a “how sad” moment; it needs to be our rallying cry.

 

Would you like me to draw you a map?
On ABC routes, we are able to get great navigation support from RideWithGPS.

 

Did you know, though, that with a really simple tweak or two, you can get better routing from both Google Maps and from Waze? This could save you hours of driving and it should take less than a minute to set up.

Ready?

 

Let’s start with Google Maps …

 

“Maps” has a feature that you can turn on or off in the app’s settings called “prefer fuel-efficient routes”. A recent article suggested that turning this feature off will get you better (faster) routes. I haven’t tried it so, if you’ll pardon the pun, your mileage may vary.

 

To change this setting, click on your “profile icon” in the upper-right corner. Then click “Settings” and then “Navigation”.  Scroll way down until you see “Prefer Fuel-Efficient Routes”. I turned mine off to test the feature.

 

And, just a few days ago, July 13 to be exact, Waze came out with a new feature that “might” have been turned on by default.  The feature is called “Personalization”.

 

Each time you login to Waze, it gives you what it believes is the best route to your destination. Sometimes it even offers several routes and lets you pick one of the ones provided. What it doesn’t offer is your “secret” route on the roads you prefer to use. Personalization, if you activate it, changes that. Waze will “remember” how you like to go to a given destination and include your route as one of the options.

 

One other note – it looks like at least several months of your recent driving history have been used to pre-populate the app. Maybe Waze will offer you your preferred route to your next ABC starting location.

 

To access the Waze personalization setting, start the app and then click the “hamburger menu” (the three horizontal lines) in the upper-left corner.  Then click “Settings”, then “Navigation”, then “Personalization”, and finally “Personalized Navigation”. Both of my switches on this screen were already on. I haven’t tested this feature yet, either.

 

To recap, this Saturday’s ride will meet at Cornell’s in Hopkinton at 10:30 a.m.  Please remember to park on the left side of the parking lot!

 

As always, check your email after 9:00 a.m. on ride days to make sure we didn’t postpone or cancel the ride and … don’t forget those helmets!

 

See you soon.

 

Joel