Diary

Mileage: 93 miles (150.66 kms)

Elevation Change: 2683 feet  (818 meters)

Weather: rainy, cloudy, cool

Morale: gave all to make the time cut

Incidents: started with wrong cue sheet, flat front tire

Daily Summary:

We had a difficult mission today.  From a 6am departure, we had to ride 92 miles in time for a 12 noon World Cup final kick-off.   We opened the door today to a soaking rain, and were about 15 minutes late getting out.  We took a left out of the hotel like the sheet said onto Front street—but wait—it wasn’t Front Street.  Then a right at the first light—what light?  Something wasn’t right.  Sure enough, we eventually figured out that Ray was working off of yesterday’s directions!  Sigh.  Back to the start for a new sheet.  New departure time:  6:25am.  But we covered more than 20 miles in our first hour so were feeling pretty good.   We outdistanced the rain about one hour in (the slower riders had rain most of the day), but got a flat tire at around the 25 mile mark.  Fairly typical for a rainy day—the rain floats a lot of crap out of the road and something got in our front tire.  But we fixed it quickly, blew through the SAG stop in a few minutes (Christopher was a great help here), and hit the halfway point in 2 hours 23 minutes, feeling pretty good.  Then we took a right turn.  Wham!  Straight into a killer headwind.  We immediately lost over 10mph in speed.  We hammered away at it, but it was slow, discouraging work.  Then, there was a very stiff climb with about ten miles to go which really wiped us out.  But we made it:  we pulled into the hotel just before noon and got to see the whole thrilling World Cup final.  We thought that France had Italy on the ropes until Zidane got himself thrown out and ended any chance for a score.  Oh well.  A great tournament, even from afar.  Ray and I both have throbbing legs so tomorrow’s climb of Mount Rushmore will be interesting. 

 

Only time for one photo today between the rain, the flat tire, and the time pressure.  Below is Ray at the South Dakota state line—our fourth state!  We’ve been on the road for 3 weeks already.  Hard to believe!