Out on the line (170km isn’t quite the same as 200km, but it’s close enough for today)
/RandoCrap.jpg "it's apparently a rule that you have to pick up one road find per trip")
Today, I went to Vernonia for lunch and found this screwdriver lying by the side of the road on the way back. It, fortunately, wasn’t a brevet, because despite my 14.3-14.4 mph moving average (only estimated because I left my GPS turned off for the first 10 miles after we stopped for lunch) I spent about 3 hours of the 10 hour trip stopped and either eating, photographing, or waiting for the rest of the lead group to catch up to me.
The outbound lead group & I arrived in Vernonia before the restaurant opened, so we spent about half a hour sitting outside waiting for the doors to unlock. And then we slowly ate lunch, because one of the non-lead people on the ride had a spoke break (and knock her rear wheel so badly out of line that it was rubbing against the frame) and had to creep the last six miles into Vernonia much like Pete the flamingo. (I’ve had this happen to me, and it was amazingly annoying despite it happening to me in the city. The Vernonia-Scappoose highway is not in the city, so I can only imagine how frustrating it must have been to creep along while being outrun by passing slugs.) So we ate slowly, and after she showed up we provided important sidewalk superintendent services while the wheel was fitted with a temporary spoke and retrued, and then finally, at sometime around 13:30, set off back towards Portland.
Have I mentioned that the midlifecrisismobile is a fabulous success? Well, it is. Despite having to stop to grab the mandatory piece of rando junk and recover a water bottle another of the lead group dropped when we went over a bridge with sunken joints on the Banks-Vernonia linear park I managed to catch up with them, then go on ahead and force them to catch up to me several times on the last 20 mile run into the city (they caught me just at the climb over the west hills, then briefly dropped me before they took a wrong turn, and then caught up to me for the final descent from Skyline down to downtown Portland (a less optimistic description of this would be “they were in the throes of dropping me again except we ran out of uphill”) The mlcm is gratifyingly fast for me; there was too much of a sustained ESE headwind on the return to take full advantage of the bike, but it moved right along when I put my head down and pedalled like mad to try and get away from the wicked wicked headwinds.
And I almost brought along enough food. I microwaved a couple of potatoes the night before, then loaded the handlebar bag up with them, a couple of cookie bars, and three packages of Clif gelatine blocks. I was planning on bringing a big honking Toblerone bar, too, but I forgot to pack it when I was rolling out the door at the ungodly hour of 7am, and forgetting that meant that I spent the last 20 miles scrounging every last spare kcal out of my system as I first cranked along ever so quickly to try to get away from the wind, and then cranked along ever so slowly to try and get to the top of the West Hills. (And now that I’m home, I feel absolutely flattened. This is the hardest long(ish) ride I’ve ridden, possibly because when I was moving I was moving along as quickly as I could. Oy. If I could maintain this rate on a R200 (without spending 3 hours off the bike) I think I could actually do a < 9 hr loop.)
But it was pretty, and well worth the trip.