HOT!

Don’t know how else to summarize it. Hot. 105 at lunch where we called it a day. Gotta give the human credit. No cramping up before lunch. But then….geez…how many bottles of electrolyte can a human drink in a day?!?!?! Guess I shouldn’t complain. We made it to lunch, we got over the big bump of the day and a series of rollers without incident. Yes! Not all of the humans fared as well today, but we learn and adapt.

The ride started with absolutely gorgeous valley views, then up through the pine forest (with evidence of the fire that went through 4 years back). After a long gently sloping 15 mile climb and an equal rip roaring descent, where the human only had to slow me down a few times, we ended up in high dessert. Pretty. But it started to get hot. Toasty hot.

But, with the rollers we would get some nice descents to help cool us off. And we had ice from the rest stop that lasted a few miles at least. Still…by lunch, my human was done for the day. We begged a ride off of Susan and came in with the crew. Methinks the crew was as fried and toasted as the riders…setting up and running that lunch stop in the heat. The crew works hard, but today was tough on them as well.

But, we got back in. The human cleaned me up, greased my chain and we’re ready for another day.

Details: 73 miles (out of 101), 4317 feet of climbing (out of 6000), 18.1 strain

Reading List

The Colossus Michael Hitzik Since we are tonight at the Coulee Dam, we thought it might be fun to learn about the Hoover Dam. But…it wasn’t our style so we bailed

The Third Chimpanzee Jared Diamond We finished the book. Still didn’t agree with many of his conclusions (uh…Clovis First is not agreed upon by the majority of archaeologists) but it raises good questions.

Fluke Joseph Mazur. Fun romp through probability and statistics. Not sure it makes good audio (0.000000014 reads better than hears), but fun.