Day 1 - 62 miles down!

The day started early; Stephen and I woke up at 5:00 a.m. to finish packing and getting ready to start the third year of Karen’s Ride.

This is the first year we have received a car rental as a donation and we were very excited!  We picked it up last night at about 5:00 p.m. at Enterprise in Westfield, thank you!!  We got a Kia Forte, cute little car with only 5,800 miles on it; it still has a new car smell.

So, we finished packing and loading the car, cared for the dogs and wandered around a little making sure we didn’t forget anything.

We left home around 6:40 a.m. and drove up the MA. Pike and crossed into NY and got off exit B3 in NY and stopped at the first gas station.  We put in the address of our first camping spot and Stephen made sure he had the directions that are on my GPS…when we first bought the bike GPS and on my first ride 2 years ago, we realized that our GPS’s do not always give us the same directions….that was very disappointing and frustrating.  So now Stephen writes down, on paper, the turn by turn directions.  Sometimes his GPS catches up and ends up following the same path, but it takes some time.

Saturday a.m., starting point.

I started riding and we had some technical difficulties right from then…I passed a turn and my GPS had to recalculate, then it took us a different direction than we had originally been going.  So we had to stop and check in with each other several times.  I was on and off the bike and in the first 2 hours I had not done a lot of actual riding.  Plus, we ended up on dirt roads more than once…it was frustrating and not a lot of fun!  Once we got going, we got going!!  We traveled through some nice small towns with rolling hills, some of which were:  Canaan, Nassau, West Sand Lake, New Scotland, Albany and then Voorheesville…I spent some time saying that word in my head, still unsure how it’s pronounced, but it killed some time!  

This is the bridge over the water near (in?) Albany!!

We ended in East Berne at Thompson Lake State Park.  I had some fun riding and did a lot of thinking about Malawi and Educate Malawi’s direction with upcoming events and plans…some exciting stuff!  That will be for another day, though.  I hope to write on my blog more this year than last, we will see how that goes!

We arrived at the campsite around 1:15 p.m., set up camp, ate some lunch, showered and took a quick walk with hopes of getting a photo of the entrance to the park, which we forgot when we came in.  

That was cut short as the thunder was starting…all day the rain held off while I was riding, and it was coming now!!  We got back to the campsite and did not quite make it before the rain.  Stephen got my bike under a tarp on the car and I made sure that none of our bedding was touching the side of the tent and closed the windows.  We have been sitting in the car now for about an hour and a half…hoping that the rain stops so we can cook dinner before retiring to the tent for the night.  Also, hoping that it is not too wet in the tents, since some nice puddles formed around and under the tent…a tarp would have been helpful only if the only problem had been the rain coming down.  But the nice little path that leads to the bathroom that is adjacent to our site turned into a little stream that flowed right down to our tent!!  Uggh!  Oh well…we will survive, I am 100% sure!