Hello sports fans! Today I had a 5-hour bike ride on tap. Normally this wouldn't be all that daunting, but with temps/heat index soaring into the 100's, you can imagine that my excitement wasn't too great.
Troy and I met in Platte Woods at 6:15. We were gonna try a new route - one that I "happened" upon when I was lucky enough to run into a group of cyclists last weekend while preparing for my 4-hour ride. Anyway, I'm not sure folks realize how difficult it is to find good bike routes that are nice surfaces for the tires and our bike frames, but also safe, without a ton of auto traffic. Anyway, I drove around for the better part of about 2 hours last night, trying to ensure that the roads my online mapping tool had given me would be suitable (ok, and I got a little lost!).
Anyway, we started early with the hopes of beating the bulk of the heat. It's funny how your perspective changes, eh? It was already in the 80's at 6 in the morning, but that seemed pretty nice. :-)
So, for the most part, we used the route I "learned" last weekend. I didn't recall all the turns, so we had to do a little creating of our own route too. We headed from Platte City out to Camden Point and on to Dearborn. Dearborn is where the fellas turned around last week, but this time we continued through Dearborn. This took us onto some great back country roads - great finds!
I was feeling great for the first 3 1/2 hours or so, and then it was just getting soooo hot out there. We stopped a few times to refill the water bottles and "fuel" up, so that was very helpful.
All in all, it was a great ride - lots of fun, and we were happy to establish some new routes!
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