Jun 24 - wait almost over

12 hours to the start.  I still haven't decided on what to do vis-a-vis my rain pants.  I don't think that I'll need them for rain, but I might need them for cold.  Well, I will probably put them into my Susanville bag and chance needing them for those long descents on the return.

Given that I have three bag drops and will hit them both ways, I guess that I won't carry an electric toothbrush, long sleeved jersey or civies.  I'll have that stuff in my drop bags so if I change my mind along the way, I can pick one up and perhaps dump something else.

The U.K. ride will be another matter altogether -- I'll have to carry on that ride, but the temperature swings won't be as dramatic.

I don't know if I'll blog or post any FB entries.  My history on these rides says no.

On this page -- http://dbcgoldrush.org/ -- there is a link on the bottom left to "Rider Progress" but it's not live yet.  I'm assuming that it will be updated during the ride but I really don't know to what extent -- overnights only, delays between updates - not sure.  It won't be like Paris-Brest-Paris updated automatically due to RFID chips passing Control points, that's for sure.

LEL will have many more riders, at least 10x that of the Gold Rush, could be up to 1000 riders.  The Gold Rush is in the 70's.  I don't know if they are going for the RFID technology either.  There's a new organizing committee for that one and I don't know if they're going to go all out competing with the French.  Will Waterloo beat Napoleon again ?

Who will I know / recognize on this ride ? -- Bill, Patrick, Catherine, John Lee Ellis, the Swedish fellow from the Shenandoah, Ken Bonner, that's all that jumps out at me from the list of names.

There are a couple of riders from Japan, four from Russia, one from Sweden, a couple from Canada, one from Australia and the rest are from the U.S., the largest number being from the west coast.   There are three riders who are overlapping with the Granite Anvil, plus me of course and plus Bill who is doing seven rides in the U.S.

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7:42 a.m.  Rain is moving through but supposed to end this a.m. and by the looks of the Doppler, that will happen.  Hopefully we can start in dry weather.  I'd really like to be able to ride to the start so that my hanging around before the ride is dry.

Rain is forecast for tomorrow for Susanville, so we'll likely get wet.  It's going to be windy, from the south, so that bodes well for our northbound leg uphill in the rain (I'm trying to find some solace in the forecast !).  I'm still struggling with the rain pants.  I'm not planning anything over my shoes, which could be a bad move.    I'm already carrying way too much stuff.  Other people seem to have rain pants, coats etc. materialize out of nowhere.  Mine take space.  Why is that ?

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Waiting, waiting, waiting, almost over.  Once I head downtown to meet Patrick for lunch the rest of the day will move quicker.  I watched an episode of Fringe on Netflix.  It's marginal.   It's one of the few things that I found available in Netflix in Canada.  It doesn't matter that I have a U.S. account; it matters which IP Address I'm accessing through.  Perhaps that could be faked with a proxy server or something, but probably not worth the effort.

Onward ...