Note the absence of a tedious Maine pun here

[ornoth_cycling]

This past weekend was Labor Day, the official end of summer in Maine, and I took the opportunity to undertake an adventure that I’ve dreamed about for several years: I biked to Augusta and back.

Now, Augusta is 180 miles from Boston, and that’s just a little too much for a one-day ride, so really I had two options. I could get a hotel room in southern Maine and try to ride the entire 360-mile round trip, which is significantly more than I’ve ever done in one three-day stretch. Of course, that would also entail using a vacation day to make it a four-day weekend. Or I could take my bike on the train to Portland and ride up from there, which is what I did.

When I was in grammar school and high school in Augusta, the distance to Portland was always our yardstick. Being the biggest city in Maine, and one we’d lived in previously, it was often a destination, and its 60-mile distance made for a handy measurement of an hour’s drive. If you were going to Lewiston, Brunswick, or Waterville, you’d get there in half the time it took to drive to Portland; Bangor was one and a half times as long.

The route I took from Portland to Augusta, which I’d already scouted out a couple times, is 70 miles each way, which is still a very respectable ride, especially considering the hills. So that’s what I did, following Maine Route 9 most of the way, then cutting across the Litchfield Road before entering Augusta on the Whitten Road.

Although it was only 70 miles each way, it was definitely a challenge. Unlike Boston, where you have to seek out hilly terrain, Maine is constant hills. Most of them weren’t large (rarely more and 100-200 feet), but a constant, unending stream of rollers with a few spikers thrown in. Of particular note were the ridges around Bradbury Mountain in Pownal, climbing out of the deep valley of Lisbon Falls, and the Litchfield Road, but the real difficulty was that there just wasn’t any flat.

The wind, too, was a big factor, at least on Saturday, when it was blowing steadily either into my face or across my route. Still, I made the northbound trip in 5 hours, and the southbound, which was with a lighter wind mostly at my back, was about half an hour quicker. All tolled, I rode 140 miles and averaged 16.5 MPH, which is my normal fast pace, with no mechanicals.

There weren’t too many particular items to note along the way, but I’ll relate a couple. The first thing I did after getting off the train was actually to ride around my old neighborhood. We lived in Portland until 1973, which comprised my childhood up to about age nine. The old house is still very much there, complete with the garage that we used to play (the *real* form of) dodgeball against. Seeley Pond has been filled in and built upon, and Patches candy store is now a coffee shop. But it seemed a quiet, pleasant little neighborhood of stately, turreted old New England homes.

At one point I was riding through Cumberland or Yarmouth when I flushed something big out of the margins of the road. It was a huge bird that leapt into flight right in front of me. My guess is that it was some sort of turkey vulture or something, because it had a wingspan of about five feet and that characteristic ugly, misshapen head. Kinda startled me a bit!

But other than that, the trip was pretty uneventful. The rolling Maine farmland was scenic, although it left the wind with more fetch than I’d’ve liked. Sabbatus Pond, the Tacoma Lakes, the Androscoggin River at Lisbon Falls, and Cobbossee Stream all provided nice scenery. But above all, I accomplished a long-held dream of riding home, which was definitely an adventure, and a fun and memorable one, at that.