(Picture Winnie the Pooh when saying this!)Up! Down! Up! Down! Up! Down! That was our morning! Many nice rolling hills with a tailwind !
An amazing Day!!!! We are now halfway done our days of biking!!! We have biked 28 days out of the 56 total. What a difference from the beginning when we were packing so many things with us on our bike to now having just the bare necessities. We left at about 7:20 and flew to the first rest stop. There was a Time Trial scheduled for today, which meant after reaching the first rest stop there was an orange line and Bill, our motorcyclist had a watch. If you wanted he would record your leaving time (crossing that line) and then Carrie (a rest stop lady) was waiting 10km further down the road to record the end time. The goal was to see how fast you could bike for 10km. Sara and I didn't plan on doing it so we flew past a lot of cyclists who were taking it easy to prepare for the Time trial - we knew they were taking it easy but we had a nice tailwind and so we pushed and we flew. It felt great to pass all of them. We were averaging over 25 km/h. Several riders commented on our 'extra power' today! We didn't officially participate in the time trial but we were going between 25-37km/h for most of it. We started off kind of slow but with the people racing by us we picked up speed. If there's another one later we'll probably participate. The results were announced after dinner, the fastest time was about 16 minutes. Sara and I figure we were around 20-22 minutes. The rest of the day was not as great as the first 50km but they were still pretty good!!! We saw the Mississippi River and then got to camp at the Robert Elkington Middle School, which is a gigantic school (1200 students grade 5-8) with an indoor pool (but we don't have access to this one). We arrived here at about 12:30. At 3:00 we were given a ride to downtown, where we got a snack and had wifi access. When we got back we had a good dinner of bratwurst, salad and corn on the cob!!! We also got to meet the 9 new cyclists and 8 support staff who are joining us, most only for a week. My team has a new member and she and her daughter are riding a tandem! During our meeting, We were slightly interrupted by a stock car race that is happening just a walk from here, it's quite loud. A lot of people have left to go watch. It's going until 10pm so I'm glad I'm in the gym, it muffles the sound. Now I'm alone in the gym so I think I'll read a book before bed.
111.3km
4h 36min
24.2km/h
284m elevation