PACTour Eastern Mts - Day 9 "We pissed it in"

Today was a great ride. We left the 6 days of Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline drive behind us and re-entered the "real world" of PACTour today. Yes, even perfect roads, continual vistas, trees and shades, gentle grades and low traffic can get boring. Today we had to ride with some traffic, did some piecing together of less travel roads thru towns and on major roads, faced some steep climbs (and descents) and spent alot more time exposed to the sun. And, I loved every minute of it.

Initial worry of the day didn't bear fruit - Spartaca's tender Achilles responded remarkably to icing/anti-inflammatories, and then cleat repositioning coupled with ankle taping into the "ballerina" position. She had no pain riding (except muscular pain from using different muscles in her "new" position and also the fact that we rode a little hard early on to get thru a bit of the more traffickey areas.) She made it nearly 70 miles until the top of her foot hurt to bad from the taping and we stopped by the roadside to free the sucker. From then on no worries, even with the majority of the climbing after lunch at mile 75. Her pain was about 4/10 today compared with 7/10 yesterday. That would be 10-12/10 for the average mortal, natch.

Ride of the day was Lebowski!! He rode with Spartaca and I the whole day, very little grumbling and no leg pain. Looks like he's back in the game. He did complain that he missed the first rest stop, fortunately I had an extra bottle to give him and a Powerbar that I'd been carrying in my back pocket for 6 days so he got thru to the next stop OK. Let's see. The rest stop is marked on the cue sheet, was in plain sight in a church parking lot 100 feet from the road (the church was the size of Cornerstone Church) and there were 30 cyclists, the PACTour lunch truck and mini van and the Evil van all in plain sight there. Yeah, it was easy to miss?!?!

I started behind the group - you know Slauson time, takes me a little longer to get ready and going in the am than most. So I pushed the pace a little to catch on, which made me miss a turn about 5 miles in. I realized this within 1/2 a mile and looked back to see Mr. Evil just behind me. We turned around and regained the route (hey he's in the military and oughta be able to navigate without difficulty me, you know I have a good sense of direction!! ;-) Since I had led Evil astray I figured I would just follow in the path of Evil for a while - I knew he'd set a fast yet comfortable pace. Passed Lebowski who had been going just a little slower that Spartaca then sat up when I rejoined her. We all got back together after the first sag, (member Lebowski had missed that one) so we picked him up on the road at around mile 30 and he hung on the rest of the day!!

After lunch (funny how we don't miss that stop) the climbing began. We were on 2 climbs of around 2 miles which were 10-18% grade. Spartaca's achilles held up and Lebowski held on. We rode alot with Naughty Ann who can hammer up those damn climbs too!

The savior of the day was George Jahant who set up a spontaneous sag halfway between lunch and our finish town. We hit it after the two big climbs and the temps had gone up into the mid 90's. So we arrived at the hotel happy, healthy and hydrated, rather than grumpy, salty and parched!! At lunch we had asked Lon what was in store and if there was going to be a last sag (there was none on the cue sheet, but I suspected that George was going to do one when I saw him speed off in the caravan from the lunch stop.) Lon described the route and said that George was going to do that sag, in 10 miles which we would get to in "about 2 hours!!" That sounded a bit excessive and Lon's little "Stanley Roper smile" gave away that he was exaggerating some. Anyways, that stop made the day since we could drink all we wanted after lunch then refill and drink all we wanted for the last 9 miles (drinking today for tomorrow, you know!!)

Our friend Andrew Puddy is an experienced PACTourian and is Australian. (Real Australian, you know the kind who lives there.) He is teaching us some Australian jargon. We say things like "Good on ya" which means great for you, or nice job. The expression "Pissed it in" means that what ever you did was a "breeze" like when you do something hard but say it was easy or a breeze. So today we just "pissed it in!!"

Tomorrow we were supposed to ride 135 miles with 7000 feet of climbing. Looks like route has been changed to 109 miles with 10,000 feet climbing. As they said in Dancing with Wolves, "that sounds like a fair trade."

Pix as usual are at B-H FB

Gail Collins NYT editorial on Woodstock explains in a way that I cannot why we do these types of trips. The essence of the message was that "A takeaway lesson from attending Woodstock is that when someone asks you to do something off the wall, you should really try to do it."

Thanx for reading, tune in tomorrow. Mental faculties and backwoods wifi permitting!!