CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
The recorded total and the leg detail need reconciliation. Inspect the leg notes before using this record for timing or navigation. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A progressive ride from Boston's western fringe into orchard country and the Wachusett foothills. The road: MA-117, MA-62 and local roads. Distance and riding time are estimates from the checkpoints until the road is measured on this page.
Boston is a compact old city with an unusually long memory. It was founded in 1630 by Puritan settlers on a small peninsula, and by the 1770s it was the centre of the colonial protest against British rule, with the Tea Party, the Massacre and the first battles of the Revolutionary War all taking place within a few days' ride. The Freedom Trail, a red line painted on the pavement, links sixteen historic sites, from the Old State House to the Old North Church, and it is a simple way to see the old core on foot.
Concord is a town where history is on every corner, and where the great American stories of revolution and literature happen to share a few square kilometres. On the morning of 19 April 1775, colonial militia met British regulars at the North Bridge, an arched wooden footbridge over the Concord River, and fired what Ralph Waldo Emerson later called the shot heard round the world. The bridge, rebuilt, still stands in a quiet park, with a statue of a minuteman, and walking across it on a calm morning is oddly moving. About seventeen thousand people live in the town, with West Concord, a lively village with its own shops and cafes, a short ride away.
Harvard, Massachusetts, has nothing to do with the university of the same name except that both were named for the same seventeenth-century minister, John Harvard, and this town is a very different place: a small, hilly community of orchards, stone walls and meeting houses, about an hour west of Boston, with a population of about six thousand. Boxborough, a neighbour of about five thousand, lies a short ride to the east. The town centre is a classic New England common, with a white church, a library and a general store, and on a quiet morning it feels unchanged.
Princeton sits high in central Massachusetts, in the hills below Mount Wachusett, and it feels farther from Boston than the forty-odd miles of the map. The town is a scattering of old farms, stone walls, white churches and woods, and at around three hundred metres it is cooler than the lowlands, with an early autumn and snow that comes sooner and stays longer. A well-known ski area and a state reservation share the mountain, and in autumn the hillsides are among the brightest in the region.