Vermont

Johanna and I went to Vermont this weekend:

This is not Savoy Mountain State Forest. This is some regrettable deforestation in Glover, VT.

On the way up we stopped at Savoy Mountain State Forest. We went for a ride on the fire roads that go through the forest. They were pleasant and it appears that there are more involved trails for mountain biking. Johanna's Lotus, while looking cool with cross tires and having some cyclocross bike characteristics, will never stop being a road bike. Thus, it's tough for it to ride around with rocks and mud. If only the bike we looked at last Friday wasn't so gigantic. The picture below is of Balanced Rock. Johanna is in the process of unbalancing the rock.

Afterwards, we continued on to North Adams to go the opening of Badlands at Mass MoCA. It was pretty awesome, with an even awesomer book designed by Dan McKinley, though the good art definitely helped in the book he made. It was very important for us to stop at the opening. The show is about the contemporary landscape. We spent the entire weekend exploring the landscape.

That evening, after the opening, we soldiered on to Vermont.

I've heard many things about Kingdom Trails in East Burke. The first is that it costs money. That part kind of sucks. The second is that it's really good. It's true. It was very much worth its $10. Look how happy I am after about 90 minutes of riding:

There are lots of nicely banked switchbacks, twisty singletrack, things going up, and things going down. They are also very well maintained trails, in the sense they are technical, but not so technical that there are not a lot of things that would cause one to crash. The hills are bigger in Vermont than they are in Connecticut, so after 4 1/2 hours of riding I was pretty tired:

There was about one more mile of singletrack after the above picture and I spilled out on this road, which had a nice view of where I'd been:

There was a Mountain bike race this weekend in Vermont in West Fairlee, which is about 90 minutes from Johanna's cottage. That would have cost me $25, was shorter, and would have required me to get up at 5am. I'm happy with my decision.