The Green Angel

The Green Angel was a bike I found at the Easthampton Dump with good ole Stan [the maintenance man]. As we were dumping stuff at the "dump" a beam of light shined in my eye. It was the sun reflecting off a reflector of an old bike. When I investigated a little deeper, I notice an intact bike. The bike's frame was rusted and it had a bannana seat, but, other than that, the bike was solid!!!! I brought it back to camp, spray painted it green, pumped air in the tires and named it "The Green Angel". My thought was to use this bike to get in shape for football. Although I sincerely doubt my football coach would consider 4 times around lake Quacumquasit [in the span of two months] getting in shape ..... :)

My designated Route? ... if you read above you'd know ....... Lake Quacumquasit. Why? ....wherelse could I go? My workout began with a swift [but brisk] ride outside of the camp entrance. I would take left, and ride towards the public beach. Pedal, Pedal .... coast. Pedal, Pedal ..... coast. [it was kinda fun] Anyway, once I passed the Public Beach I encountered a fairly steep hill [great workout by the way]. AND EVERYTIME I "ALMOST" REACHED THE TOP OF THE HILL.... A BLACK LABRADOR RETRIEVER WOULD COME OUT, SNARL HIS TEETH AND CHASE ME! No lie, the 4 times I did this route, the same dog would come after me. Lucky for me I was coasting down the hill by the time the dog almost caught up with me. There's nothing like trying to concentrate on not wiping out while you are laughing and crying as a dog is trying to nip at your toes.

Anyway, whenever I see a bannana seat on a bike, I always think back to the "Green Angel" with a smile ....... Truly good times.

The Five Mile Road Race

On a typical night off at camp, as a counselor, you had a few choices to occupy your time. Besides the obvious, staying in camp and hiding from your campers, you had the option of going out in to "town" for the night. There were basically two directions that you could choose from outside of camp, one that lead to Rte 20 and the other that lead to Rte 9. Each of these destinations had minimal options for young people, especially people under the age of 21.

For us, the most fun was to go to Friendly's which was out on Rte 20. When our little group of friends all got the same night off, we wanted to get there as quick as possible. In order to do this, we had to take a ride on the five mile road. Which, oddly enough, runs exactly five miles from the camp entrance and Rte 20. We would sometimes race in two or three cars to see who could get there first. A lot of times, this was completely reckless and speeds were too high. I remember one time that I swear we made it from camp to Rte 20 in 8 minutes.

One of the things that we did on those rides is get behind a random vehicle that was innocently traveling on the five mile road and shut our lights off. It would really freak the other driver out. Sometimes we would do this to each others cars as well. The road has few lights on it so when you did something like this, the only way to see was to use the lights of the car in front. Sometimes, as a joke, if you were in front, you would shut your lights off too, leaving everyone scrambling for the switch to their headlights before running off the road and smashing in to a tree. We figured out, after doing this many times, that it was almost possible, on a clear night, to ride with your lights off completely and use the tops of the trees as guidelines. Once your eyes got used to it, you could see from the moonlight.

I don't recommend doing this type of thing to anyone. I have no idea what we were thinking but I do know that a lot of times, we ended up laughing our asses off all the way down the five mile road. Seeing as there was almost nothing to do at the end of the road, we at least found some excitement along the way.