Day 35: Get Big!

So today was the official epic of this trip. Last night I presented John with the idea of doing a "Big Day". I put a call into my dad to find out what the weather was going to be, to see how feasible it would be. I found out that it would be cross winds in the morning and was supposed to shift into a tail wind by afternoon. Since we will soon be parting ways we both figured that now would be the best time for an epic ride. So we woke up at 5:00 am and were on the road by 6:00. It was still dark out when we started, we were able to see a beautiful sunrise shortly after the start. The first 40 miles did not hurt but they sure didn't feel good. I think it was the fact that there were many more miles lingering over my head. My chain was skipping a bit so I thought that I might need a new one because it was stretched out. We stopped in the town of Bowling Green about 90 miles into the day for lunch and brought our bikes into the local bike shop. It ended up that both of our chains were in good condition and did not need to be replaced. Just after lunch we came across a sign on the side of the road that said fresh strawberries. So of course we pulled in, loaded up and hit the road again with some strawberries to snack on for the next couple of hours. The next stop was at mile 130. We found a gas station and loaded up on Gatorade had some ice cream and continued on. From here on it was all business. We saw the potential for a 200 mile day and both wanted to take advantage of the opportunity. So far in the day the winds had not been favorable but hadn't been head winds either. As we left the gas station we soon discovered that we had a light head wind. It was not too strong though, we were still doing 16 - 17 miles an hour. So we finally made it to Lake Erie at about mile 165. We had a couple hours of daylight left and kept trucking. We stopped for pictures once near sunset. By 10:30 at night we were approaching the 200 mark. Shortly after that I stopped to see where exactly we were at. I was getting to be extremely hungry at this point, the last time I ate was at mile 90 and since then had only had energy bars and they were starting to taste bad. So I told John we need to have a game plan - Lets eat then find a place to stay. John wanted to continue on to downtown Cleveland, another 15 miles. My thinking was that it would be harder to find food in downtown Cleveland and lodging would be more expensive. After some negotiations I continued on. I could feel my blood sugar falling quickly so I found a gas station to stop for a Coke. It was there that I discovered my wallet was missing, I had left it on top of a case of water outside the gas station we had stopped at 30 miles earlier. Luckily John had a receipt from the station and I called and they had my wallet. So it was now 11:30 at night. We eventually made it into downtown Cleveland at midnight and found a hotel. We ate at a sports bar and went to bed around 2:00 am, a long epic of a day, 211 miles and 22 hours later I was in a bed and passed out.

Miles biked today: 211

Miles biked total: 2912