39 miles
Madbury to Manchester, NH
We didn't get started until after 2:30 in the afternoon. Our plan was to stay in Manchester, about 40 miles away, at the art studio where I'd been studying drawing and painting for the past three months. When we stopped to take a break after just 10 miles I felt nauseous, hot, and miserable.
We had tickets to a AA baseball game in Manchester that night. Around mile twenty we approached Pawtuckaway State Park and I thought, forget the game, let's stop and see if there's a campsite available. But the state park was two miles off the highway and it was a Saturday night so there probably weren't any sites available and I needed to save my energy to get to Manchester.
How nice it would have been if we had gotten an earlier start and had time to duck into the state park for a swim on this hot day. And we would have if I hadn't woken up that morning to a tick stuck in my neck.
Rob tried to take it out. "All I could get were the legs." Off I went to the nearby walk-in clinic.
Every time I am hooked up to one of those automatic blood pressure cuffs, I have this irrational fear that the nurse will leave the room while the cuff keeps filling up with air, cutting off the circulation in my arm until something dire happens, like my arm falling off. And this time the cuff really did keep expanding until I finally said to the nurse, who thankfully hadn't left the room, "I don't think it's going to stop." He stopped the machine and took my blood pressure the old-fashioned way, and escorted me to an exam room.
The doctor came in with a very business-like attitude and started asking me all sorts of medical questions that had nothing to do with the tick in my neck. She worried over my vital signs - pulse 48, blood pressure 80 over 50. I've always had low blood pressure. This low? I can't really say. I felt fine. Can you just take the tick out of my neck?
She got it out easily with tweezers and then suggested I get a tetanus booster and an EKG. Yes to the tetanus booster, why do I need an EKG? She went into some medical explanation about what was concerning about my low blood pressure and what it could mean for my heart but I wasn't listening. Forget the EKG. I just wanted to get home and finish packing so we could get on the road.
When the nurse came in for the tetanus shot, I said, "The doctor was certainly worried about my low blood pressure."
He checked to make sure the door was shut. He said, "She was annoyed with me for not getting her right away when I told her about your low vital signs. But you seemed fine."
All that fuss. Maybe we should just buy some better tweezers.
We had tickets to a AA baseball game in Manchester that night. Around mile twenty we approached Pawtuckaway State Park and I thought, forget the game, let's stop and see if there's a campsite available. But the state park was two miles off the highway and it was a Saturday night so there probably weren't any sites available and I needed to save my energy to get to Manchester.
How nice it would have been if we had gotten an earlier start and had time to duck into the state park for a swim on this hot day. And we would have if I hadn't woken up that morning to a tick stuck in my neck.
Rob tried to take it out. "All I could get were the legs." Off I went to the nearby walk-in clinic.
Every time I am hooked up to one of those automatic blood pressure cuffs, I have this irrational fear that the nurse will leave the room while the cuff keeps filling up with air, cutting off the circulation in my arm until something dire happens, like my arm falling off. And this time the cuff really did keep expanding until I finally said to the nurse, who thankfully hadn't left the room, "I don't think it's going to stop." He stopped the machine and took my blood pressure the old-fashioned way, and escorted me to an exam room.
The doctor came in with a very business-like attitude and started asking me all sorts of medical questions that had nothing to do with the tick in my neck. She worried over my vital signs - pulse 48, blood pressure 80 over 50. I've always had low blood pressure. This low? I can't really say. I felt fine. Can you just take the tick out of my neck?
She got it out easily with tweezers and then suggested I get a tetanus booster and an EKG. Yes to the tetanus booster, why do I need an EKG? She went into some medical explanation about what was concerning about my low blood pressure and what it could mean for my heart but I wasn't listening. Forget the EKG. I just wanted to get home and finish packing so we could get on the road.
When the nurse came in for the tetanus shot, I said, "The doctor was certainly worried about my low blood pressure."
He checked to make sure the door was shut. He said, "She was annoyed with me for not getting her right away when I told her about your low vital signs. But you seemed fine."
All that fuss. Maybe we should just buy some better tweezers.
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My low vitals got me to Manchester around 7 o'clock. I still felt crappy, mostly just exhausted.
When we planned this first day, I had the idea that, in addition to stopping for a swim at the state park, we would arrive in Manchester with enough time to explore the downtown area and find dinner at a decent restaurant. Instead dinner was going to be ballpark food. Yuck.
We cleaned up as best we could without a shower and headed over to the baseball stadium, next door to the art studio, arriving just as the first game of a double header was in its last inning. Before finding our seats we settled into the Sam Adams Brewhouse located right there in the stadium and ordered cheeseburgers, which thankfully were a higher standard than your usual ballpark fare. Even better than the cheeseburgers were the accompanying homemade potato chips. We shared a Caesars salad. No beer tonight; I still felt crappy and Rob didn't want to drink alone.
The second game didn't start until 9 o'clock. I was too tired to enjoy it - all I wanted to do was sleep - but I knew that Rob would be disappointed if we left early. He did enjoy the game. And there were fireworks after.
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| I recently began studying with Paul Ingbretson in a traditional atelier inside this old mill building. You can find old mill buildings like this in many New England towns. They serve very well as art studios. |
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| You can get an idea from this picture how large the studio is. That's Rob off in the distance fiddling with his bike. There is room for about 20 students, with the individual work spaces to the left and a large space for figure drawing and demonstrations straight ahead. Only natural light is used, so it can feel rather dark. This picture was taken on Sunday morning. |
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| We spent the night sleeping on the couches in the community room of the studio. The building has no air-conditioning. It was very hot, but much cheaper than a hotel. |
A combination of a late night at the ballgame, exhaustion from the trip preparation, and sleeping poorly from the heat all contributed to a late start the next morning. We didn't hit the road until 11:30, with about 40 miles ahead of us to Rindge, New Hampshire.
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| We crossed the Merrimac River as we were leaving Manchester. |
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| We had good riding on quiet country roads until we hit Route 27 which had too much traffic for any fun so we popped onto some local roads as we approached Manchester. We rode 39 miles in all. |
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| This elevation profile comes from the MapMyRide.com website. All climb scores are based on distance, grade/elevation change, and maximum elevation, with HC (French for "Hors Categorie") being the hardest, then 1 through 6, with a higher number indicating an easier climb. Today's climbs were rated 4 and 5, so not an especially difficult day and enough hills to keep it interesting. |
I supposed that's a measure of a person: how they react when greatly disappointed.
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