Biking in NJ

I'm sure many people out there would think that biking in New Jersey would be terrible. (as NJ is the butt of so many jokes about industrial pollution and such). My biking experience is pretty limited but I think we've got it pretty nice here in Central Jersey.
Sure there are plenty of roads with fast traffic on them but those are easily avoided. There are tons of side roads that have slower local traffic and the road quality is above average. Because there are so many cyclists in the area, I think many drivers are expecting to see us out there, especially on the weekends. I'd say their patience/respect for us is higher than I've experienced elsewhere.
The other nice part of where we happen to live is that you can choose to go flat, rollers or hills. Riding south of us is quite flat. Going north/north-west you can choose how challenging your hill climbs are going to be. This is one of the rides I'd like to tackle before heading up to Mont-Tremblant.
Check it out.

So we did another 50 mile ride yesterday. I'm definitely encouraged by the fact that I'm covering this distance often. I can't say that I'm feeling powerful or fast on the bike tho'. It could just be the volume of training I suppose. Although there is part of me that wants to adjust my position on the bike. I guess if I find the time to have someone take a look at my position, I'll take it. All in all, I'm feeling like I'm ahead of last year in terms of bike fitness at this point in the season. But as I've said, I'm not sure that equates to speed.

After our ride yesterday, I swapped out the chain on my bike. I bought the bike used so I'm not sure how old it is. I do know that last fall when I was not doing anything, when I started biking on the trainer, I had some frozen links. So this is long overdue. I just wanted to do this myself. So I bought the Chain Tool and an Ultegra Chain and got it done. I had my old stretched chain from my road bike lying around, so I was able to try it once on a bad chain before I went to work on the new one. The whole procedure was very simple. The only thing I didn't think of was that I use a dry lube on the chain. I should have simple greened and scrubbed the new chain before putting it on the bike. Ah well. I'll just ride it as is for a bit. Then when it's time to apply the lube, I'll scrub it clean then.