I had a few hills in the database that I had found by browsing Google Maps in terrain mode, but never gotten out to try them out. It never really seemed worth it, given that getting there from Providence would make for at least a 70 mile ride, and it would be mostly busy annoying roads to get out there. Today gave me the perfect opportunity to explore the area, however. I had to drive to Dayville to hand Jude off to his grandmother (so he’s off playing with clocks for the day…), and I brought my bike and worked out a ride to hit some of those hills and a few others. There were even some nice dirt roads, so it’s good practice for Batten…er, yeah, I already did that race. So, in addition to North Road and Ross Hill Road, which were already in the database with the wrong names (N Road and Roth Road, respectively), there were about 4 other hills big enough to be worth putting in. Nothing mind-blowing, but all hills that would be very nice if we could move them a little closer. Hence, I’ll keep the descriptions short and sweet.

  1. Cook Hill Road – Leaving Dayville, I headed south on Cook Hill Road. Not a bad hill, but nothing too special either.
  2. Cooper Hill Road – Next up, this one starts out really steep. It’s a little anticlimactic however, because there’s no real sense of finishing it, because it keeps going up very gradually for a while after the steep part and you’re pretty much fully recovered by the time you hit the actual top of the hill.
  3. Aspinock – this is another steep one that I wasn’t really expecting, but a nice hill nonetheless.
  4. At the top of Aspinock, I saw a nice looking hill going down the other side, so I took that road, turned around, and came back up. Hurry Hill Road might have been the hardest one on the ride. The bottom is really steep.
  5. Then there was Ross Hill Road, and other steep climb. After the top, there’s a stretch of unpaved road until you get to Tucker District Road.
  6. Last up was North Road (labelled on google maps as “N Road”), a long nice climb.
  7. And just over the top, I saw another descent that I decided to take and ride back up. That was Quinns Hill Road. At the bottom of the pavement, the pavement ends, but because I didn’t actually take the road, I don’t know how long the dirt section last.

And this is probably a good time to mention that I destroyed the database about a week ago. Word to the wise, before doing stuff with the SQL server, you should really make a backup, no matter what a small task you’re doing. I was about to start working on the new pavé module (It’ll be cool, whenever I finish it…I’m going to start cataloging dirt and cobble sectors) and was going to delete some garbage entries in that table. So I did what anyone would do and wrote “DELETE FROM [main_hill_table]” (I obviously meant “DELETE FROM [pave_table]“)…”425 entries affected.” Oh, fuck. And since I had switched over to ridewithgps for all new hills, I had two options…convert all my previous veloroutes to ridewithgps, or fart around in the code. I opted for the former. I remade some of them, and some I just downloaded and then re-uploaded to ridwithgps and then re-downloaded them and uploaded them to brentacol. Very tedious, and I lost a few hills, but I’m back to 416, with a few new additions, so only about 15 missing, and some of those were probably obsolete or test entries.