Sunday, June 8, 2008

Thru Time Station 1

The race is on!

Kevin left Oceanside with a slew of other folks at high noon. While he then rode thru the hot afternoon, Jeff, Mary, and I drove the RAAMinator to the Hertz office to try to add me to the insurance on the roaming white van. They were closed on Sunday, however, so we started following the route RAAM gave us to get out of town and to the route.

Which was apparently the wrong way to go. Looking at the route sheet they gave us our interpretation of it was that we would get to the route 32 miles in. As we churned our way around this twisty route we started wondering: why must we go 92 miles to get to this point? At first I thought it was because they would be highway miles and the riders were supposed to be on a trail for a part of the route. But the road we were on was a twisty one-lane mountain road. Maybe they had us going this way for the scenery, I then surmised.

About this time my cel phone rings. It's the other folks wondering where the heck we are. We tell them and, after much consternation and dropped calls, it is made clear to us that we were off-route.

Quickly we come about and make our way back up the winding road, down another, and get to Lake Henshaw about 3:30 local time. We get Jeff's bike down and everything set up for him to ride, and about 10 minutes later Ellen, Brenda, Gary, David, and Chris come in. They tell us Kevin is about five miles back and that it's hot.

About 10 minutes after that, Don, Doyce and Allen in Kevin's support van comes in, followed a couple of minutes later by Kevin. Jeff starts off as Kevin rolls in, and we start cooling Kevin off. We give him a root beer, a tube sock full of ice for his neck, and an ice cream bar. He was starting to get comfortable when we left to start following Jeff.

While I've been writing this we've leapfrogged Jeff twice. It's hot, but he's doing okay.

Robert

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