This was definitely not a boring day, esp for me. Somehow I totally lost my brakes, both the front and rear and we were going down a very steep hill when I realized this. Also at the bottom of the hill was a four lane highway with many of our riders waiting to cross the road. Checking my odometer later I was going 33 miles/ hour. As I am yelling I have no brakes I need to decide in a split second if the car coming towards us is far enough away. I decide to go across the first two lanes and quickly check the traffic coming the other way. Luckily there are no cars that are close and so I go across the next two lanes, turning left into the shoulder. My biggest fright was hearing Danielle scream as I rode past her as she was waiting to cross the first two lanes. There were about half the riders looking on, and pretty much what heard from them was that first of all it was very scary, and second they were impressed. Y my turning into the shoulder of the highway. It seemed like some of the thought I was going to crash into the side railing across the highway. Interesting I had not doubt about me making the turn. My only concern was not getting hit by oncoming traffic. About 1/4 up the highway I coasted to a hault. David, one of the riders, who it really good with bikes fixed the problem. Somehow my front brake had gotten jolted out of place, and I'm not really sure what happened to my back brake, but it had been getting less and less effective for the last few days, but it wasn't really a problem until today.
It took awhile for David to feel satisfied with my back brake so all the other riders went on. Than the problem was riding with David. Kim and I are the slowest riders. David is among the fastest. On my own I would rider faster, but I enjoy riding with Kim and certainly the time goes quicker with a partner. So now riding with David I pushed myself to go faster than I normally would if I was riding by myself, but I could only keep that up for a limited time. We must have been riding at a pretty good pace because we caught up to Kim before we got on the trail.
The trail was very gravelly and since it had rained, very full of puddles, but it was also beautiful. Kim and I didn't mind going slowly and enjoying the scenery. Although ten miles on the trail was enough for us. We sagged from the first rest stop until the second one and than we got to ride on a very nice paved path. Our last 12 miles was why I was a bit nervous about this week. It was constant up and down and than some more up. It was hard to believe that Hazon routed us over hill and dale instead of the trail, but Garth said last year the group complained so much about the unpaved part of the trail that they routed us on the rode instead. I think Kim and I would have been much happier on the gravel trail.
I'm still very confused about the ft/mile thing each day, but I will just ignore it. Yesterday was easy, today was tough, even though the ft/mile was higher yesterday than today.
Dinner in ten minutes, than community meeting. Tomorrow is our last full day. I guess I'll make it.
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