Bruce and I were awakened by the alarm at 6:15AM. This is the normal time for me but usually Bruce is already up and dressed when my alarm goes off. He was a little bit beside himself because in his mind he was late! I told him to relax and come over to the dark side with me where you don't rush to get up and out. We got dressed and ready and walked down to the hotel lobby for breakfast. There were no bikers at all eating breakfast. For a split second I thought maybe we are late but then I realized that we were not loading until 7:00AM. The rest of the group was already outside waiting for the van. We finished our breakfast and then went back to the room, gathered up our luggage and went out just as the van started loading. We didn't miss a thing and we got an extra 45 minutes sleep! I am sure this lesson was wasted on Bruce, He will be up tomorrow just like always and I will still be in bed until the last minute just like always. Ha!
The day started off warm and sunny. Meiri and I started down the road. The first turn was at 2.6 miles. Meiri was not feeling very good, she probably has a touch of flu. Just as we reached the turn, I noticed that Tom our new mechanic had gone passed the turn. Ed was just coming up and I asked him if he felt like running Tom down to tell him he missed the turn. Ed said he didn't feel up to it. Meiri and I started to turn when Ed yelled TOM at the top of his voice. This startled Meiri, who thought maybe a car a was coming or something and she ran off the run into a big ditch and fell. Luckily she was just scraped a little and the bike was OK. So far we have had gone 2.6 miles and she was not having a good day.
We were on back roads for most of the morning with little traffic. The hills were rolling but there was no wind. By the time we made it to the first Sag stop, it was pretty warm. Meiri still didn't feel good so she didn't eat anything. We left and continued riding but she started to really get fatigued at mile 45 or so. We stopped at a small store in a little town where she could sit in air conditioning for a while. We started talking to a woman who lived in the little town we were in, Altamont, population 214. She pretty interesting and wanted to know what we were doing like everyone else we have met.
Meiri had never seen Amish folks before and was anxious to see them. We got into Amish country, actually Mennonite, and started seeing horses and buggies. We stopped for our second sag at a small town called Jamesport. It was full of antique and craft shops. They also had several restaurants and bakery shops. It looked like a pretty neat place to visit. The roads were now pretty well deserted county roads. A Mennonite man was using a horse team to rake hay and we stopped to take a picture. He was done working the field and was leaving where we were stopped. I asked him if we could take his picture. He said not to take his but we could take pictures of the horses if we wanted. He was very curious about what was going on as he had seen bicyclists all day. We told him about biking across America and he told us about raking hay. A pretty good trade.
We were on the back county roads for about 15 miles. A headwind started to kick up, just what we needed with Meiri dragging the way she was, but she kept at it and eventually we made it to the motel although we did have to go through about a 20 minute downpour. Not too bad when the temperature is around 90 degrees.
When I got to the hotel, my new derailleur had arrived however when the mechanics went to install it, it was the wrong size. Go to order another one.
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