I have a love/hate relationship with Carlisle. It is the nicest town to cycle through around where I live, but it has the worst roads of any town in the area (Lincoln is a contender, though).
Happens because there are lots of trees. This is a good thing, but in the winter, they keep the roads from ever drying out, so you have the daily melting/freezing cycle. Mostly the holes go untended and grow from little cavities to giant caverns with the passing of time. The early warning signs are bits of rubble strewn all over the road that used to be pavement.
Now other towns have trees and somehow manage to keep their roads in good shape. Carlisle on the other hand, seems to revel in their potholes. Every once in a great while they make an attempt at road repair, which generally replaces the holes with mounds of asphalt in their place (potlumps as Pamela calls them).
I do a variation of the Friday night TGIF ride a lot. There are places where there is nowhere on either side of the road you can avoid some sort of hole, so the best you can do is damage control. One section in particular is a test of skill, since there is about a six inch wide strip of residual pavement between two caverns that you can shoot for, kind of like white water kayaking.
They use a lot of sand in Carlisle, mostly because they don’t seem to use any salt. This is of course an environmentally Good Thing, but the net result is that in winter the condition of most of Carlisle back roads can best be described as packed powder. This is what prompted me to invest in studded tires and mountain bikes a while ago.
I did actually see a sand sweeper one day in Carlisle, I thought I was going to faint dead away. Mostly, though the cars just push it out of the way. The consequence of this is that you will find a pile of sand at just about every corner in Carlisle, year round, pushed out of the car lane into where you try to turn your bike. A moment of inattention and you’ll get a real up close look at that sand.
So, you ask why do I ride in Carlisle? Because it’s a lovely place to ride, and I’m willing to put up with a bit of discomfort for that. Can you say “suspension seatpost?”
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