Say Hello To My Little Friend: Day 8: This is more like it

Jim picked me up from my hotel a little before 8 am and got me to the Parkway in about 5 minutes. He drives like he rides. Full throttle. I found out the rest of the story with him in that short ride. The day before, he put on a fresh jersey before his wife took his picture in front of the BRP sign and said, "Gotta put on the sponsor jersey." Jim is a pro rider for the Seven Cycles MTB Team. When he's not racing he's a wrench at High Gear Cyclery in New Jersey where the website refers to him as "Uber Wrench." If I'm gonna get smoked on my ride, I like knowing he gets paid to be fast. I'm slow for free :)

The Flex-all did the trick for my knees. The Holy Communion probably helped too, despite the Catholic aerobics of stand/sit/kneel for an hour the night before. I started off the morning with incredibly fresh legs. it felt like day one all over again. Skyline drive is a much nicer ride, in many ways. The scenery is excellent, there are lots of overlooks that actually look over something, the pavement is an improvement. I was feeling really good and then the gremlins attacked my computer. The best I can figure, I think I knocked the wireless sensor by the wheel when I loaded/unloaded my bike from Jim's car. I was going up a hill and the computer showed reception, but it also said i was going 0MPH. I know I'm slow, but I can go faster than that. What really pissed me off, was screaming down a hill at 0MPH. it's gonna take me forever to make camp at that pace! Tack on another 2-3 miles that I lost during the ride for that.

Another nice thing about Skyline Drive is that things are OPEN. If you see a wayside/restaurant on a map, it's actually there. After 25 miles it was lunch time and I actually got to eat a real lunch at the Loft Mountain Wayside. Better still, the cook there understood my desire for low-carb and knew what I wanted just from how I ordered it. "Nothing white, right?" he said. In addition to the bun-less burger, I got a couple of hot dogs to cook for breakfast the next morning. I'm sick of powdered eggs and summer sausage.

Since the spring, I've been going on training rides of ~30 miles on Skyline Drive to prepare for this ride. I started in Front Royal, and each time I came out here, I'd start a little further down the Drive. Today I finally got to familiar territory. Mile 65 is the Route 33 entrance to Skyline Drive and the furthest I rode on my training rides. In fact, if you saw the first ThrillCam video I posted on this Blog, that's where it ends, about 3 weeks before I had left for Ashville. From here on, I'm covering ground I've ridden on before. If something happens that prevents me from finishing, I can still say I've ridden the whole thing...just not in one shot.

While I was in Roanoke, I made an executive decision. I'm tired of sleeping in my tent. Especially on the dying air mattress. I went to the Shennandoah Park website and looked at accommodations along the way. My options were the lodge at Big Meadows, milepost 51, or a cabin at Lewis Mountain, milepost 57 and my original destination for the the night. The cabin was about $5 more. SOLD. when I got there, the man at the store/office said he had good news and bad news. The bad news was, there was a hornet's nest at the one person cabin I had booked. The good news was, he had moved me to the only other available cabin; a handicapped accessible 2 room cabin with the largest bathroom of all the cabins. God likes me again. I had a room for me and a separate room for my bike :)

Everything you need to know about my last 105 miles.

Somewhere down there is my hotel last night.

Wallpaper shot

History lesson of the day....actually, just an excuse to take a break while climbing up from Waynesboro.

The aforementioned Brown's gap

My Mamma always used to say, "if you can see the underside of the leaves, it's gonna rain."

If you watched the first ThrillCam on my last training ride, this was the closing shot of that ride down the hill. A Crossing of the Appalachian Trail.