Is this an Alpaca, a Llama or a big moms goat?

Thought this was pretty (early in day)

Lake Berlin near Deerfield OH

Looks more fun than riding a **(& bike!

One more of Lake Berlin

Good evening all,

Tonight, I am going to try to make lemonade out of lemons. That was the kid of day that i had. My British friends have a term they call “knackered”. It has something to do with horses that need to be put down. A couple of the Brits used it after a particularly rough day – today that is how I feel. I skipped the Route Rap meeting and dinner with the crew to stay in my room and relax. The best thing that I can say is that I am 90 something miles closer to Boston. My Garmin says 95 but I believe we went off route a bit to boot.

I guess the day overall started off not too well. The last group to leave is supposed to leave at 7:15 but today we left more like 7:25 – we are usually late when they let us go. Normally I wouldn’t complain but it rained here a lot yesterday and this morning was already hot and muggy when we left. To start the morning, we had a 2 mile climb out of Wooster – nice wake up call. Needless to say, that Mike K and I dawdled a bit too much on the climb and due to some very long traffic lights that we missed, we lost sight of the rest of the riders. I like to ride with Mike. He is intelligent, witty and comes up with some great one liners. When we could we exchanged thoughts on blogging and other matters. We really didn’t push the pace and that may have been a tactical error.

We had some good roads today and some that were not so hot. On one 2 mile stretch , we were on a freshly “chip and seal” road – not fun for a car – definitely not fun on a bike. Even when the roads wee good, we seemed to have a lot of traffic and I would rate Ohio at the bottom of the list of states that we have visited on their driving skill and courtesy to cyclists. Perhaps it is the proximity to cities but the drivers were fat (on the old country roads) and often way too close. That made for a bad combination when the roads were sub par and often there was little or no shoulder.

Yesterday was pretty ride, but today I hardly noticed. The hate and humidity (my Garmin said the max temperature was 116) seemed to make my saddle sores much worse and my feet and toes suffered from hotfoot and my legs felt like they were on fire. Under a little better conditions, we might have averaged 2-3 miles per hour faster. We did catch some of the early departure riders but not all.

The SAGs were a welcome relief  but when you are last, there always isn’t a lot left. Tomorrow is 80 something miles and then a rest day. Hopefully, I can make it through tomorrow and recover in Erie Pennsylvania. I stood on the bike today more than I ever did just to get some relief from the saddle – but that puts more pressure on your knees and feet.

In any event, I can chalk up another day done and almost through Ohio. We were close to some large cities and that probably increased the amount of traffic and number of big trucks. I think we were near Akron and Canton.

I took a few pictures and will post them sap.

Tailwinds

Chuck