109.53 mi / 7:03:08 time / 15.5 mph avg. / 31.0 mph max. / 2504 ft. climbing
Staying at Beeds Lake State Park

I woke up this morning and had real Cheerios for breakfast in the motel lobby. Best motel ever! And yes, they provided lots and lots of towels, I didn’t even get through half of them. When I got everything packed up and rolled the bike out the door, it wasn’t even raining.

I had been up late the night before, planning my route, since I’m now well off my pre-planned path. I set a goal of Iowa Falls, which has motels, and is 100 miles away. Halfway there, I’d stop at Waterloo/Cedar Falls, check the forecast, and figure if I wanted to go all the way and get a motel, or stop sooner at a county campground.

The ride to Cedar Falls was pretty uneventful, except for this bright, hot thing that was shining on my back. That was weird. I’ve entered “waving” country, where many drivers will raise a few fingers off the wheel as they fly past. I passed pretty close to the town of Waverly, so that must be where they’re all coming from. Oh yeah. Been waiting to use that one all day. I made it to the Cedar Falls library, did a quick email check, and then checked the radar to see a storm was headed right for me. I packed up as fast as I could, and made a mad dash to Subway, where I arrived seconds before the rain hit.

While there, I was checking my map, and noticed this town “Hampton” up to the northwest. It too had motels, and a state park just outside of town. Even better, it was north, unlike Iowa Falls, which actually would take me five miles south of my northernmost point in the day. Since I eventually have to get back north, that’s an extra ten miles I would have added to the trip, so Hampton made a lot more sense. I have no idea how I could spend hours last night with full Internet access and come up with Iowa Falls, when I found Hampton in a few seconds while eating lunch.

By the time I was done, the rain had stopped, and the southeast wind was much stronger than it had been before. So I was crusing pretty well. There was one stretch of road where I was playing a game that somehow I’d never played before: cloud chasing. There were small clouds passing in front of the sun, and they’d cast a shadow on the ground that was moving exactly in my direction of travel, at about 20mph. If I wanted to be in the shade, I could speed up and catch a cloud. Otherwise I’d drop back and let them pass me. It was almost like porpoises leading a ship, if a bit of shadow can be compared to a mighty porpoise.

With the sun out, I was finally reminded that it was summer, and I actually started to think “a bit of rain wouldn’t be too bad right now!” But with the tailwind and the flattest day so far, it was tolerable. A note on my “climbing” figure: that’s a number reported by my cyclocomputer that adds up all the hills I climbed during the day, while ignoring the downhills. I don’t know how accurate it is, and there are all sorts of different ways to calculate it (see TopoFusion’s website for discussion!), but it should be a good way to compare from day to day. Today’s number was the lowest so far, and given the distance, the average grade was quite small. My max grade today was 6%, whereas the first two days had 12% and 15% climbs.

I made it to Beeds Lake State Park, got a beautiful site on the lake, watched the sunset, and ate my new campground-meal discovery (Country Crock Mac & Cheese…I was going to heat it, but after opening it and trying some cold, I realized it was pretty good that way, and didn’t even bother setting up the stove. The retirees group here told me it’s supposed to rain tonight, so maybe I’ll get to test out the tent’s waterproofing again. It would seem weird to have a day where I dodged all the rain, and the wind is picking up pretty good right now, so we’ll see…

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 12:27 pm and is filed under bike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.