Exploring Norwich One Street at a Time — David Watts’ “Tour de Norwich”

You can live in a town for ten years, but sometimes you need to break routine to notice it in a whole new way. Resident David Watts realized this when he challenged himself to bike every maintained public road — not including major highways or Class IV roads (roads not maintained by the town or state) — in Norwich. What Watts dubs the “Tour de Norwich” took about a month and a half. In nine rides, he biked 149 miles and climbed 15,407 vertical feet.

Bike riding has been a part of Watts’ life for a long time. He bought his first road bike when he was 26 and has been biking for over 25 years. However, recently, he was looking for a change. Selling his road bike for an easier ride in rougher terrain, he created a challenge to “go all in” with his new gravel bike. His goal? To have fun exploring Norwich in a fresh way that not many do.

An unusual sight of a skeleton riding a rooster on Tigertown Road.

To undertake this challenge, Watts needed to map it out. He purchased the last available Norwich road map from Dan and Whit’s and highlighted routes. The tactile method, he says, was simpler than using Google Maps, while also making it easier to share his journeys with his family. Each ride was tracked on his smart watch through a fitness app and later logged into a notebook.

Watts started his “Tour de Norwich” on April 9 this year with a local ride in the Pompanoosuc section of town near Union Village Road, and he ended the challenge on May 30 on Kerwin Hill Road. Watts confirmed this hit his pre-established deadline of finishing before beginning work on his new HR consultancy business, WattsUp Human Resource Solutions.

Watts’ family was generally supportive during the challenge. Though Watts said his daughter in college thought “it was nuts,” his seven-year-old son loved it. Every day, Watts said, his son would ask where Watts rode and where he was going to go tomorrow. Watts said his wife was “really happy for me because I’ve been in the corporate world for 25 years and for the first time ever, I’ve been able to take a break and just do something fun for a period of time.”

Watts completed the challenge alone. Although his wife also bikes, as a schoolteacher she couldn’t accompany Watts on his day trips. Typically, before one of his adventures, Watts would drop his son at school, then park at Huntley Meadows before beginning to ride. Watts refers to the place as his “staging area for exploration,” and he chose it for its central location to downtown Norwich.

Throughout the challenge, Watts noticed several things about Norwich. One was that the town is hillier than he expected. If a road has a hill in its name, it’s “definitely a hill,” Watts stated. He found some roads like Bradley Hill and Kerwin Hill had particularly challenging parts and were “pretty intense.”

Additionally, he expected Norwich to look a little different. He rode out to Beaver Meadow and West Norwich, which he described as having “more whimsy,” but when comparing these areas to the rest of the town, he found Norwich “fairly uniform in the way we express ourselves through our property.”

A photo from the top of often-overlooked Overlook Drive, towards Mt Ascutney.

Another aspect Watts discovered about Norwich was that there are two small parts of town you can’t access easily — there’s only a quarter-mile section of maintained public roads on both Joshua Road and Podunk Road, with only a few houses on each. Here, because the rest of the stretch of road is Class IV, Watts had to access these roads through Hartford, where he would park and ride a small section before returning home.

For each road, Watts explained, he drove up Route 14 from Hartford village and parked at a turnaround space at the town line between Hartford and Norwich. He accessed Podunk Road via Tigertown Road and Joshua Road through Jericho Street. After he finished Joshua Road, he recounted, “a couple of landscapers saw me park, bike for five minutes, and then drive away. They must have thought I was a little crazy.” Though Watts admits that some could have found this part of the challenge silly, he was determined to “make sure he was doing the whole thing.”

Though Watts said he doesn’t “have anything profound to say” about the experience, he is glad he undertook it. The challenge allowed him to see the town differently, ride some difficult roads, and enjoy biking in a whole new way. Additionally, the rides were a source of fun, allowing him to get out of his head before the next challenge — hitting the ground running with his new job.