New Jersey---"I wanna make you smile whenever you're sad / Carry you around when your arthritis is bad / All I wanna do is grow old with you / I'll get your medicine when your tummy aches / build you a fire if the furnace breaks..."

Lauren was so gracious...let us basically take over her house...let us take the leftover pizza with us...offered us a book of New Jersey bike routes....thank you so much for your hospitality, Lauren...we'll have to get you out to the Pacific NW one of these days...to check in on the power plants and do some cycling.


Karen and I headed towards Mullica Hill on Highway 45 and in the early morning, it was nice riding. Unfortunately, it was the best riding we had all day. New Jersey has the screwiest network of roads I have ever seen. Hop on Google maps sometime and take a look at Berlin, PA. It's a city transportation planner's nightmare. I should have routed around it, but instead, we spent a lot of time communicating with the sag driver to make sure we were all on the same page. Oh well. :)









We rode through Medford Lakes which we all loved...canoes overturned against shingled cabins with docks stretching out into the water. I loved it. We saw two Russian Orthodox churches near Pemberton, which was also a very cute little community. We ended the day along Highway 528, having had a headwind all the livelong day. It didn't matter...today was the halfway point in my adventure...25 centuries down...25 to go. You start thinking, "Okay...can I do what I have already done...one more time? Why yes...I think I can."


We loaded up the bikes and I called our Warm Showers host for the night, Martin. He had been kind enough to send me Google directions from our endpoint to his home in Fairfield, Connecticut. I was dreading this drive through the tangled web of freeways, highways, turnpikes, and bridges. It wasn't that bad. Yes, we had to sit in some traffic, but the view of the Hudson River and New York was lovely, and the George Washington bridge is pretty spectacular. The drive took us over 4 hours...but we made it!






Martin is no stranger to centuries. He does 10 or so a year. He is from Hamburg and works for a software company out of Los Angeles. He had invited some of his cycling friends and their spouses to his house tonight for a BBQ...it seemed like a celebration on the grandest scale following my 25th century. The food was fantastic...BBQ ribs, chicken, spinach salad, pesto pasta, grilled vegetables, and cheesecake piled high with fresh berries. His cycling buddies were awesome...I loved the banter and kidding that they did in fun. I loved it that they were type A's...and when one said "Let's ride 30 tomorrow at 8" someone else said, "Let's ride 40 at 7". They just got back from a few days of cycling in Vermont and assured me that it was beautiful. They had a lot of questions, and I did my best to answer them, but really, I was a little embarrassed. I am so slow in comparison.





I went to sleep so very content...so very happy.


maybe you can't...because you won't...