I woke up today at 5.30 am to get an early start and after a
brief shower and getting stuff together I was ready to leave around 7.15 am.
Just before leaving camp, Jack had a flat tire and I stayed back with him.
After fixing the first and second flat and finding a big hole in tire and
changing the tire ultimately we left camp at 7.50 am.
We had headwinds for a while so Jack and I formed a pace
line and pulled eachother for the first 26 kms while getting out of town and in
to the beautiful countryside. The road today had fields on one side and more
fields with occasional tree plantation (when we neared a human settlement) and
train tracks on the other side. Just while we were about to stop for a break we
saw Merryn, Kendra and Mike (The train – fast cyclists) passing by and Jack
entertained the thought of going with them for a while so that we can catch up
with Ron, Michael, keith and Marg. I agreed and then for the next 12 km we
pedaled at an avg of 33 km/h and eventually got dropped as they pulled at higher
speeds. We continued with the momentum and ended up doing 30 km/h on our own
and caught up with our core group. From then we pedaled in to Marquette and
stopped at a café. I had a hot chocolate and a coffee and ate it with my PBJ
sandwich.
After that brief stop we formed a double pace line and
tackled the winds until 73 kms and we pulled in to town of Warren. We stopped
for lunch there and I had ½ L of chocolate milk, garlic cheese toast and fries.
In the town Ron picked up a bottle of wine to go with tonight’s spaghetti
dinner. We left the town after an hour long break and it was already 1.30 pm.
We formed pace line again and rode along. The food provided me energy for a bit
but after a while I felt drowsy and my 120 km I had trouble keeping my eyes open
on the bike. We took a short break and I had a brief nap and tried to gather
myself up for the long day.
By the time we pulled in to the final stretch for the day we
were tired of the wind and were partly exhausted. About 30 km from the camp
site, on the highway, we saw police cars on the side of road and wondered what
happened. As we got close we saw some of our riders at the scene and were quite
worried. As we got closer one of our group cyclists had been hit by a pickup
truck and was rushed to hospital with critical injuries. As we got the news I
was quite taken a back and had my mind preoccupied by thoughts I didn’t feel
good about. Emily, one of cyclist at scene, asked us to go along to prevent
congestion and also to prevent situation from escalating. From there on I
started chanting mantras for the safety of the cyclist and also for our group
as we pulled in to camp.
Camp today was on a really crappy dirt road and I got
frustrated with the big stones combined with the bad news we got earlier in the
day. Dinner tonight was spaghetti with meat sauce and tomato sauce, salad and
cake for desert (Dave’s birthday). Chris decided to spend a few nights with the
injured cyclist as his wife came to the hospital. It was a long day today with
head winds and some not so pleasant news.
 |
| The slim line of smooth pavement to the end of road. |
 |
| Hay stacks |
No comments:
Post a Comment