[Bike] Wachusett, Wachusett

After an hour on the train chatting with Conductor Bob about biking and heat restrictions and explaining to narya about welded rail and the delay-in-block rule, we rode from Worcester to Fitchburg, with an explicit goal of getting some hills in. It took 10 miles or so to get out of ( Worcester )

We rode past Wachusett Reservoir, then turned left and started heading through the hills. Hills are...hilly; we discovered that narya can climb faster and for longer, but neither of us was really successful at climbing hills of any length. Descending is somehow much easier. We wandered through ( back roads )

a bit, and appeared at the top of a nastyish hill in Princeton Center. No food there made us sad. We rested for about half an hour or so, then headed north to the entrance to Wachusett Mountain State Park. Stopped there for a short bit, then rode downhill (mmm, hot rims) and mostly coasted most of the way into Fitchburg.

In all, 35 miles. (narya had originally thought 40ish, and when we were at 23 at the side of Wachusett Mountain she was a little worried about time. Then when we crossed from Westminster into Fitchburg I explained that, no, my estimate was just an estimate, and I thought it was two more miles to the train station, so we'd barely clear 30. Mmm, accuracy...though we still showed up with enough time to find lunch, going with the stylish Fitchburg Jade [which puts bread in with your take-out Chinese order] over their neighbor [who would let you substitute French fries for rice].) (route)

Slash-and-burn subdivisions

One thing I've noticed biking recently is a tendency to build new housing developments by finding a tract of wooded land in eastern Massachusetts, cutting down all the trees, and then building houses on large open undivided lots on a dead-end road and giving it some kind of scenic-sounding name that tries to make it sound like you didn't just totally change the character of the area. We ran across a couple of these in the Reading/Middleton/Topsfield area last week, and yesterday there was one off of Mason Road in Holden (northwest of Worcester). The latter one was kind of impressive, because most of the other houses in the area had done a reasonable job trying to fit in with their surroundings, so you saw houses set off from the road a bit with some trees, and then there was this side street that was completely open and didn't look like the area at all.

I don't understand why this happens. For the developer it's probably somewhat easier to start from bare ground, and easier to design pretty marketing brochures without all those nasty trees in the way. For the town, the increased tax revenues must be enough to keep them from trying to impose sanity via zoning rules. Still, I should remember to not to live somewhere like that.