We have driven or rode our bicycles by a sign for this location the last two days. Today our route took us by the location. We had to get a picture.
While we planned on a 58 mile ride today. It was a little shorter. We’ll get to that in a little bit. Again it was a beautiful day with beautiful rolling hills. There was only one true significant climb similar to yesterday, but the rolling hills were surprisingly steep.. With 58 miles, we had 3 sag stops. The last one was at a golf course. We took some extra time and had a burger before the last 12 miles - lunch.
The incline around 30 miles in was almost as steep as yesterday’s hill, but much longer. We ended up walking part of it again. None of us expected to be walking our bikes on the rides at all and now we have two days in a row. And we walked even more than we expected today for another reason.
On the downhill side of the only big incline, we had a decent as steeper as the incline as you can see. The road was not the best so a lot of braking was needed. Matt blew out both his rear inner tube and his tire while descending 25 mph. Luckily it was on a straight section of the decent so there was no crash or spill. I was probably 1000 yards ahead of him an heard the tire burst with a loud pop almost like a gin shot. I stopped immediately and turned around. We were about 4 miles from the sag stop so a lot more walking ensued until a call ahead brought a new tire to us 30-40 minutes later.
Little did I know that all the walking tore up one of my shoe cleats. Once we had Matt’s tire fixed and got back on the road, I realized one of my shoe cleats would not click into the pedal. It was mostly shredded. We limped to the SAG stop a few miles away and saw that the mechanic had already left for the next sag stop down the ride. So we hitched a ride from one of the rangers to the next step. This cut about 12 miles off of our total ride. Gregg gutted it out and decided to ride the 12 miles. He met us at the next sag. We had our burgers, commiserated over the day, and headed home.
Tomorrow is a 66 mile ride with…….more hills.