Monday, June 24, 1996
Day 44
Doylestown, Ohio to Guilford Lake State Park, Ohio
Today's Miles: 60
Cumulative Miles for the Tour: 2906
Degree of Difficulty: Easy/Medium
Terrain: Rolling Hills
Find of the Day: None
The weather has decided not to cooperate with us during the final week. Today's ride included a muggy start, 10 degree temperature drop, lightning strikes on both sides of the road, constant thunder, one of the heaviest downpours of the trip and ended with a tornado watch. Talk about a full day...
I woke up this morning to the sounds of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" coming out of the TV. Adam had rented it last night so that he could see Devil's Tower National Monument. When we were in Gillette, Wyoming, Dave had taken everyone up to the monument. In the movie, it is used as the landing pad for the alien spaceship. Adam and Lee were screaming, "That's it! That's the KOA campground." and such things, as landmarks we had passed became recognizable on the screen.It's just starting to sink in...we've come an awful long way. When you're traveling like this, the day to day pedaling seems so short, 75 miles here, 80 miles there. But it adds up. We will have gone over 3000 miles by this Wednesday. It's a distance that is incomprehensible, even to those of us who have done it.Once again, the backroads of Ohio were a nice setting for today's ride. One of the problems with traveling rural roads, though, is that sometimes you can't find anything to eat. Usually, the sag wagon can provide something to munch on to get you through, but today's route was so complicated, the van went straight to the ending campground and left us to our own devices. Normally, that wouldn't be a problem, but today's weather added a new variable to the equation. We haven't had to use rain gear for almost a month, now, so we all left it in the van this morning. Big mistake...The rain started with 20 miles to go in the day. There weren't any places to eat in the first 40 miles. I had to sustain myself with half a Powerbar and a bagel with peanut butter. As I was heading east on Highway 172, I heard the thunder rumbling to my left and behind me. The storm front was moving right in behind me. I picked up the pace, hoping to outrun it to the nearest town, thinking there might be food and shelter to wait out the storm. Nope, it was moving too fast and I was drenched within 2 minutes.I saw a farmer sitting on a tractor, under the awning of his garage. I pulled into the driveway to ask him how far the turnoff to Knox School Road was, getting the dreaded response, "Oh, you've got a ways to go, yet". This is the typical response I've received all week when asking for directions in rural Ohio. Nobody knows specific distances, it just "a ways".I thanked him for his help and started to pedal out of the driveway. "Do you want to have lunch with the two other bikers?" he called after me. What? It turns out, he had seen Adam and Lee about an hour before, pedaling up the drive to the local country club. I took off like a shot, and sure enough, there they were, sitting in the coffee shop at the opening tee, waiting out the storm.I was soaked to the bone, dripping water everywhere. The coffee shop didn't seem to mind, so I had a couple burgers and watched the rain for the next 45 minutes. There seemed to be a slight break in the cloud cover, so we took off to finish the final 18 miles to the campground. It was tough. There were constant lightning strikes and rolling thunder the whole way. I could just envision getting zapped off the road by a lightning bolt, a twitching piece of carbon by the time the first car found me. It sure helped me pedal faster.We showed up at the campground just as the storm broke and the sun started to come out. That lasted for a couple of hours. Now I'm in my tent with a new storm passing over. The rain is heavy and the lightning is back. This is supposed to clear by tomorrow morning, leaving with us with 70 degree weather and a sunny sky. I'll believe it when I see it.6 days and counting to DC...
Bike America Tours
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