I got there at just past 7am, got registered and unloaded, and hung out in the 57-mile staging area until roll out and never saw any of the BikeJournal.com folks I was supposed to meet up with.
Chip was feeling poorly—or maybe had a premonition about having to ride in the rain—and had to back out, so when I didn't find the BikeJournal folks I decided to just tag along with John, well known locally as operator of www.bicycle-stuff.com.
Early on, I rode ahead to stretch my legs a bit and came upon ThrasherTim (from DORBA and BikeJournal forums), waiting by the side of the road for SAG and looking just a little shell shocked. He had good reason. Tim had a bad crash the previous weekend when he hit an oil slick left by a drilling rig. When I met him, he had a broken chain dangling from his fist and a taco'ed rear wheel.
I'm pretty certain his bad luck rubbed off, but I shouldn't get ahead of myself.
Things went smoothly enough until Margie the Okie (who had joined John and I along the way) flatted. She had what she needed to change it and we were back on the road before too long, but not before accidentally discharging her only C02 cartridge. Fortunately, we had spares.
Somewhere after the 20-mile mark, there was a slight headwind that dried my contacts. I blinked and one of them started to fall out, so I quickly clamped my eye shut and stopped by the road. Carefully, I picked the contact out of my eye and had it on the tip of my finger to reinsert it when... PUFF! The wind gusted and blew it off my finger into the tall grass by the side of the road. John and Margie came back to find me squinting with one eye, pathetically trying find the lens. They started looking too and, although I had already started trying to figure out how I was going to make the hour-long drive home with one eye, John spotted the contact. I retrieved it, Margie washed it off with water from her bottle, and I gingerly prepared to reinsert it.
PUFF! There the bloody thing went again. Well, let me tell you that, as big a miracle as it was that we found it the first time, I just knew it was gone for good. But again John spotted it. We went through the whole drill again, this time with my companions forming a wind block.
Amazing.
From there we rode without mishap until Margie turned off to follow the 32-mile route. Maybe we should have done, as well, because the rain started spitting shortly after. By the time John and I were into the horse farms, it was raining steadily. I was soaked to the skin and, since the 74°F predicted temperatures hadn't materialized, very cold. All I could think of was "keep pedaling" and "hot shower".
Again, things went on nicely once the rain stopped. John tended to fall back a bit on his recumbent when we hit a hill, but I kept an eye out for him in my rear view, thinking that he might still be due for his 1/3 share of the bad luck. Sure enough, somewhere around 45 miles, he flatted.
Along with three other stragglers we'd formed up with in the last 20 miles or so, we were the last riders to cross the finish line. The good news about that is that there was no guilt about garbaging up on all the left-over food and drink, and we got our pick of all the unclaimed door prizes! I got the ping bell I've been too cheap to spend the $8 on.
This was my second year for this rally, and I enjoyed it despite the weather. The volunteers are friendly and enthusiatic and the roads generally good—the exception being about a 2-mile patch that was crumbling; and where not crumbling, it was patched; and where patched, it was a buzz strip of indentations left from tractor tire treads.
I'll be back, and maybe next year it will be sunny.
