77.86 mi max 38.5 6:05.21 avg. 12.7
This morning's breakfast was served to us by Odessa High School's FBLA. It was a delicious ham & cheese & egg casserole...and there was really yummy cantaloupe, also. Odessa, WA is a very small town. The entire school, K-12, is housed in one building. Of course, it is hard to justify multiple school buildings when the graduating class is 17 students.
Last night, I talked with a few of the riders, saying how difficult it had been to ride on my own all day, knowing that I was at the back of the pack with no chance of catching up to anyone. Brian and Deb (pictured above, with me), offered to ride with me today. I had such a great day! We were all suffering from similar maladies - severe butt sores - and needed to take it on the easy side. Deb comes from Virginia, and is a PhD candidate in industrial engineering at VTech. She's got a house there, with a few goats, and a pig, and a cat, and a miniature horse. Brian is also PhD candidate in some specialized study of political science (how presidential advisors have affected the presidents' decisions, I think), near Seattle. He's been across the country by bike twice already, having competed in the Race Across America (RAAM). It's insane, way more insane than this ride. He said that to qualify, you have to be able to ride 425 miles in 24 hours.
It was an awesome ride. We left behind the dry sagebrush for beautiful rolling farmland. Outside of Davenport, there was supposed to be a hill, but I was flying at 14-15 mph. There's no possible way it could have been an incline!...unless it was because I was riding with much better riders and I didn't notice it?? Having company made such a difference in both my speed and the psychological difficulties - it was so much more motivating!
For a while today, we were on US Rt. 2...I could have taken it all the way back to Sunday River in Maine :-)
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