Monday December 25 2006

Details
End of Season

I rolled Bonnie out of the Castle at noon on Christmas day with the air temp registering 36 degrees F. After deftly negociating The Gravel, or in this case, The Mud, I made the pavement with fairly minimal collateral spatter.

Rolled through a very quiet Ayer's Cliff on my way to Burrough's Falls where I took on 4.6 litres of high-test before heading south on 143.

Nearly delerious with the joy at being out on Bonnie on the twenty- fifth of September, I settled into the vibrations as I took in the vista to the south and west of 143 and began planning a route.

First of all I needed a witness. I settled on crashing in on Kevin, which would take me up Nelson Hill.

Now, the pavement and The Gravel make a bit of a convoluted dotted line out of Nelson Hill Road and it's also pretty high, so I figured I was headed for some interesting road surfaces and I was right.

Passing the trailer on the left just before the top, I waved to three guys, all in shirt sleeves and one of them wearing a santa hat. Right after that, there's a little hollow and it presented me with a hundred yards of thick, solid ice, it's surface slushy from the effects of the sun. No sand, no gravel. Whoooooweee! It was so exhiliating that I circled back to Santa's, making two more passes at the ice before going over the hill and pulling into Kevin's, where he was out in the driveway taking advantage of the nice weather.

I had hoped to entice Kevin into joining me on a jaunt around Lake Memphremagog, but he reminded of that quaint tradition known as Christmas day dinner. Jeeze, in my euphoria I had managed to put that completely out of mind.

Obtaining a rain check (actually a dinner check, I suppose) from Kevin I continued on my way and seeing as how circumventing Memphre was probably not a good option, I pointed Bonnie towards Seymour Lake.

Made the Lake and turning around at Toad Pond Road I headed home by a less than direct route that took me from Morgan to West Charleston to Derby Center; from there to Beebe Plain by Darling Hill Road and over to Derby Line where I jumped on the autoroute and blew out the carbon, making it home just as the fire was being lit beneath the brocolli.

A double hot shampoo and rinse for Bonnie after dinner and back to the castle where I performed the ritual end-of-season seat removal. What a great way to end the season!