A Lovely Day in Massachusetts (June 4)

Back on the bikes today after a rest day in Sturbridge.  We stayed in a hotel that seems to cater to the conference crowd.  It was right on a little lake, which was nice, but really not much to do in town.  Walked the main drag for a bit, cleaned my bike of all the grit collected from two days of riding in the rain, out for a nice seafood dinner plus a bit of relaxing.

Today was a bit cool (13C to 18C) but no rain.  Pretty good riding conditions, actually.  It was a lovely ride today.  Lots of very quiet roads.  Most had pretty decent surfaces, which makes the downhills a lot more fun.  Hilly, but not rude hills in excess of 15%.  Fun hills, I thought.  Some cottage country, some rural suburbia, many small professional buildings, some small towns (Southbridge, Oxford, Manchaug, Whitinsville, Upton) and a pretty sizable outpost of civilization - Westborough.

Here's an example of one of our early quiet roads.

And a lake in cottage country

I found some interesting old buildings in Whitinsville.  The Whitin Mill complex was in operation for 133 years.  For a time it was the world's largest producer of textile spindles.  A local proclaimed it to be the world's largest mill during WW1 at over 1 million square feet.  It now seems to be home to small entrepreneurial and high tech enterprises.

Here are some other old buildings in town.  The population today is under 7000 so I'm sure there were more folks here when some of these were built.

The library.........

On one of the quiet roads this afternoon there was a Canada Goose family out for a stroll - mama, papa and about 6 goslings.  I slowed down thinking a family portrait might be nice but one of the adults went into attack mode.  Thus no picture.

Nice old bridge.

A quiet road from the afternoon.

Our c(l)ue sheet mentioned an ice cream shop worth a stop at 51 miles.  With that in mind I bypassed the inviting-looking one about 5 miles earlier.  Oops - cue sheet error, and no ice cream; yes, we should have stopped at the first one we saw.  Because of almost daily errors on the cue sheet in one way or another we have started calling them clue sheets.

We had a real treat for dinner tonight.  A woman who some of our riders had traveled with on previous epic tours invited us all to her place.  She has a lovely old home with a large yard and gardens.  She prepped lots of food and drink for us.  So kind of her.  This trip has been a bit of a rolling reunion tour.  Not too many days go by that we don't meet or ride with someone who has done a previous epic with one or more of this year's riders.

Stats for the day:
101 km from Sturbridge MA to Boxborough MA.  3700 feet of climbing.  Temps 13C to 19C.  Mostly overcast with a bit of sun.