Day 51 (day 52 to follow), Manchester, NH, 82 miles

Today shouldn’t have been so hard. On our next to last day, shouldn’t we be allowed to coast into the finish? No such luck. The day was overcast at best, and soggy at its worst. There were lots of hills, and steep ones, 12-14% climbs. It felt like just another day of grinding it out. New England is beautiful, even in the rain and fog which render the mountains muted shades of green and give rise to mist off the ponds and lakes. For the West Coast folks, that was novelty enough to make up for the weather. For me, I’d seen it before, but then again, I’d also seen hills like these before; I scoffed at them. When all was said and done, it was probably one of the five hardest riding days of the trip.

But, as with that long climb up a mountain, the hovering at the crest, and then the very rapid finish on the other side, our trip was rapidly coming to an end. We could feel it. We had a banquet that night. Rosanne (who lives in NH) arrived with beer, cheese and crackers, and munchies. Before you knew it, we were having a pre-dinner reception (I guess you’d call it a cocktail hour if it were cocktails, but I’ve never heard it called a beer hour). She knew a lot of my friends from her visit in St. Joe’s. As is our custom during dinners on the rode, we introduced our guests. Some spouses had flown in, a few mom and dads. Mike and Greg, who work with me at Rutgers (and are also cyclists) drove up from NJ so they could ride in with me on the last day. It was just so neat to them meet my friends at dinner. Gary had his vineyard (yes, Gary had a vineyard, just a few thousand bottles a year for family and friends…) ship a case of wine to the hotel. It was far better than anything we’d drunk as we’d crossed the country. The dinner was a BBQ, the pulled pork was better than Kansas’, the chicken, sausage, corn bread and fixings were all most excellent, inarguably the best dinner of the trip (take that, Golden Corral!). The after dinner festivities were moving. Gerard, in addition to being our mechanic, was our videographer. He’d taken thousands of pictures as we moved across the county and put the very best together into a video that chronicled the journey. It brought home the reality; seeing that first dip of the wheels in the Pacific, the cresting of Monarch Pass, Lake Tahoe, cowboys, gorges, steer, happy faces, flats, sweaty faces, the SAG wagon, goofy faces, laundry hanging by the pool, faces that grimaced with effort, arm-in-arm cyclists, more faces, cyclists riding down the highway, cyclists riding off into the sunset…. Had we really done all this? Indeed. Then the most moving part, each rider had the chance to say a few words about the trip. Most of those words were about friendship, tributes to fellow riders, gratitude to our tour guides, appreciation to friends and families back home, attempts to articulate a fifty two day journey with words that did not exist. An underlying theme was what a remarkable group of ordinary people we are. And not remarkable because we could ride long distances on two wheels. What was remarkable, dare I say, “grace-full” was that forty people who had never met before could endure illness, heat, rain, boredom, bad food, flat tires, and dehydration; what we could share mountain summits, deep gorges, magnificent desert parks, and pie, lots of pie. We could share the very hard, the mundane, the very beautiful, and that every one loved each other. I do not say that lightly. Imagine (a word I used a lot early in the blog) living in close quarters with 40 strangers for 52 days under very physically and mentally challenging conditions, and never once, was there a public argument, never once a word said in anger, never once a raised voice. Never once. It sounds trite, but the 40 people who were strangers in San Francisco are the very best of friends in New Hampshire. That, my friends, is Grace.