Today was my second day as sweep along with the charming Paul. We spent our morning in the back of the pack discussing the finer points of marine biology as he has been doing research in the Bahamas on Bonefish and Lemon Sharks. Pretty neat stuff. The ride wasn’t terribly long and weather conditions were perfect. We took a few short breaks for photo ops, one in which Paul almost walked onto a decently sized corn snake on the side of the road, not realizing it was there until it took a shot at his front tire. The hiss sounded like he had blown a flat so we were upset until the snake was spotted backing away. Its funny we ran into our scaled friend, as we had been talking about how we hadn’t seen many snakes on the trip and how Paul wanted to wrangle one Steve Erwin-style. We contented ourselves with taking a few pictures and moving along. The rest of the day went swimmingly and we even arrived at the host location by 2:00 pm.
In the evening we had a slight downturn in luck as several of our riders, myself included, came down with some sort of stomach bug right after dinner. We all went to bed strait after the meal and crossed paths in the night on our flights to the bathroom. This is another knock on wood incident because we had recently been discussing how it was great that none of the riders had gotten sick yet since we share everything. Hopefully the issue will stop at those of us already effected.
Day 28 – Holyoke, CO – 66 miles
Go figure, everyone who was having stomach issues last night woke up feeling terrible this morning so several riders loaded into the van to rest up for the day. This of course is the intelligent course of action, which I tried my best to ignore. Since it was a century day there were two lunch breaks planned along the route at miles 45 and 75 respectively. I decided to start out the morning after a breakfast of Gatorade and shoot for the first lunch stop. I made it without much ado but didn’t feel on the top of my game upon arrival so I took a nap and jumped in the party bus with the other infected persons for the second leg of the trip.
This was my first time riding in the van when there were cyclists on the road so it was a very interesting experience. Zooming through the countryside at three times your normal speed gives you a completely different view of the land, not to mention it was awesome to see where all the riders were stretched out along the road. When you are riding in a small group, you may not see anyone else from the team for the entire trip from stop to stop because everyone is moving at about the same speed, give or take a mile per hour.
We arrived at around mile 80 to catch up with the lead group who got a little farther ahead then planned and I had started feeling better on the ride so I jumped out and grabbed my bike for the last 20 mile stretch. During the course of the ride we passed both the change into Mountain Time as well as the Colorado border. I seriously can’t believe we’ve already hit Colorado, the state we’ve all been talking about since day one. The mountains are only a few days away and then its judgment time. In the meantime though, Colorado is the flattest state we’ve been in yet. Farmlands from horizon to horizon, just as we had been promised in Kansas and Nebraska but never saw.
We arrived in Holyoke around 3ish and enjoyed a pulled pork dinner before going to the local movie theater for a private screening of Mel Brooks’ hit movie Robinhood Men in Tights. Talk about ending the day on a high note. Looking f
orward to a healthy day tomorrow!
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