The good-- Wow, what gorgeous scenary. I rode my bike onto the gravel shoulder a half dozen times because I was so busy rubbernecking at the houses, the covered bridges, and the views. Fortunately, I never dumped the bike and never rode into a guardrail, although I came close a couple of times. The ride support, especially the mechanics, was flawless.
Route markings were frequent around turns and in between to let you know you were on the right path, so that we rarely looked at our trip ticks.
The ADA folks were friendly, supportive, and helpful. My daughter saw a full grown bull moose by the side of the road, but by the time she alerted me it had disappeared into the forest. The closest I came was photographing muddy mooseprints at a different moose crossing. And, of course, spending a week with my daughter, and 2 days with her boyfriend on bikes, priceless. Only one flat tire between the three of us in over 1,200 total miles.
The bad-- We learned early in the week that we would be perenially amongst the last to finish each day. We like to ride more socially. In groups we have ridden with before, we would start early, stop mid-morning for coffee or cocoa and pastry, stop a couple of hours later for lunch, and the again mid-afternoon for an ice cream or similar treat before rolling into evening accomodations in time for a hot shower before dinner. Even though everyone stressed this was not a race, fully
48 of our 53 week long riders jumped on the bikes early morning, never stopped for lunch, and tried hard to get to the end as quickly as possible. We were more interested in enjoying the ride, and after the early morning start, scarcely saw other riders, with rare exceptions.
The weather was beastly hot, in the low 90's much of the week with high humidity, which wore on my Seattle acclimatized body.
The ugly-- I got sick on the afternoon of Day 2, and couldn't shake it.
In spite of their exhortations to "Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate!", I couldn't keep fluids nor nutrition in my body. My diabetes got dangerously out of whack. By the end of Day 3 I was a mess and told Felicia I might not ride Day 4. She told me later I looked like a cadaver that night. I slept hard that night, and feeling better the next morning, I chose to ride afterall, but was only able to ride 60 miles that day, before giving up and SAGging to the finish. I completed Day 5 (a short 50 mile day), but I just couldn't recover fast enough and was only able to ride 62 miles Day 6. I finally felt pretty much back to normal Day 7 and rode 73 miles to finish. But, unfortunately, not a real comfortable week in the saddle. I was pretty disappointed after all the riding I did to prepare.
Overall, the "good"s well outweighed the "bad"s, even though it might not sound like it. Lot's of laughes, and of course, "the worst day on the bike is far better than the best day in..."
For those interested, I rode 494 miles of the 550 mile course (Felicia rode every mile). Total ascent (feet climbed up hills) was over 19,500.
My bike computer calculated I burned over 30,000 calories in a week.
And even thiugh you can't measure it accurately, we estimated we each drank about 8 gallons of water (and sweated out 7.9!).
Thanks for all of the support and well-wishes.
Roger E. Berg
