An amazing experience has to have highs and lows, right ? This definitely qualifies !
It was epic, an extremely tiring but gratifying ride. How tiring – well, can you imagine a beer in front of her and Liz going to bed instead ?
First and foremost, the eight of us started and finished together. That in itself is unusual. Michael, Martin, Arthur, Peter, Dave, Vaune, Kathy, Liz – great riding company.
The route was amazing – I put that in the past tense because it will probably be reconstituted if/when we run this again. The major hang-up is getting from South River to Highway 522 towards Loring. Unless the recent changes to the Highway Traffic Act will let us ride on Highway 11, our only option at this point is Rye Road with its 16km of gravel. I had checked that section out just one week earlier and while rough going in spots, it was do-able. Well, we did it, but in between my checkout drive and our ride, someone had seen fit to do some road maintenance and filled quite a few spots with what we call pit-run gravel aka soft sand. Perhaps it will pack eventually, but that was brutal. Spinning wheels, a couple of tip-overs … you get the idea.
The rest of the route explored as much of cottage country as possible, hitting parallel roads to Highways 11 and 69. Southwood Road delighted everyone, as it had on the 400k the prior week.
The weather could always have been worse but the north wind as we headed north and the very strong south wind as we headed south, then capped off by heavy rain from Orillia almost to the end … well, that just about did us in time-wise as we finished in 39:22.
Other than that wind, we were cold coming into my place close to 1am – yes, that’s 19 hours to do the first 340k. The temperature was in the single digits and we’d had a long day. Everyone enjoyed a hot shower at that point. In Orillia on the return, temperature dropping and in heavy rain, we donned all our clothing for the final stretch. In Vaune’s case, that included a large trash bag, arm-holes cut … yes, we were quite the motley crew !
Nature tried to stop us once more at a road closure. It seems that water had taken out a culvert. Now I think of a culvert as one of those corrugated pipes across the end of my driveway … this one was those large concrete jobs that you can almost walk through, connecting two parts of a lake right on our way east towards Bala. As soon as we topped the hill and saw the huge crane down below and all the trucks, I knew that we were in trouble. There aren’t many east-west routes through this area. This wasn’t going to be eight of us tip-toeing through the water. However … just as Vaune was approaching the workmen to see if they’d let us move our bikes across the piles of gravel that were accumulating on the concrete culvert sections as they repaired the road, someone discovered that there was a walk-around with a little foot-bridge. I’m pretty sure that adding perhaps 40km to our ride at that point would have sealed the deal, but we lucked out. Back-tracking to 141 then north and east … ugh
The mosquitoes were epic. I’ve never seen them like this. You only had to stop for a second and there were clouds. On Rye Road we couldn’t outrun them, hard as we tried and they bit on exposed skin and through cycling shorts. It was too slow going to stay ahead of the critters. Vaune set a new record for a flat-tire-change in the midst of those Rye Road mosquitoes.
Speaking of flats, the last group rolled into my place and we’d lost Peter. It seems that he’d had a flat 3kms back at the entrance to our cottage road, Osprey. I went out with the car to track him down and he was not too far behind. Kathy had two flats – one at the house and another early on while on one of our short highway 69 stretches.
We never had much time in the bank on day two. We’d left my place about 1/2 hour negative and were rather pressed to make Parry Sound, 100+ kms further on. With only 10 minutes in the bank, we rolled out of Parry Sound and got to Bala with about an hour, used up most of that fortifying ourselves with cappuccino and such (have to have some fun, right ?), and used up a bunch more in Orillia as we got reorganized to roll to the finish in the heavy rain. 39:22 is certainly a new 600k record for me. That was one full-value ride !
Special mention must be made of Michael and Martin as they did way more than their fair share of pulling. Michael, in particular, could have finished hours earlier, but elected to stay with the group. At times the group was spread out but we always reconstituted at stops.
Last but not least, thanks to my wife Sandy who organized food and drink for dinner and breakfast and sleeping arrangements. Our washer & dryer have been going full time today as all those towels and bedding are washed. For me it was a two-snooze drive home. Usually I’m so wired that I don’t need to stop on a 2.5 hour drive, even after a big ride … but not this time !
No comments:
Post a Comment