Big Ride Day 43

Photos from Day 43

Since the beginning, I was anticipating the ride from Canfield to Indiana to be one of the most challenging of the entire ride. Our first day in the Allegheny Mountains of PA would bring with it many steep hills and several difficult passes. Although the hills did not fail to impress, mechanical problems turned out to present the biggest challenge of the day. The first 30-40 miles were not as bad as I thought they would be -- certainly not flat but no real difficult hills either. Pulling into a water stop at about the 35 miles point, I noticed something strange about my rear wheel. Upon closer inspection, I found that the rim had failed and one of the spokes had completely pulled out of it. The rim was wobbling and the brakes were rubbing so badly that I couldn't see how I had been riding it as long as I did. I trued the wheel up as best I could and after much hemming and hawing about how safe it was to ride it, got ready to go. As luck would have it, our mechanic Chris pulled up right as we were getting ready to ride out and lo and behold, he had a spare wheel in the back of his trailer which would work on my bike. He installed it and off I went. As if to balance out my great fortune in having run across our mechanic, I soon broke a spoke on the new wheel! And now he was nowhere to be found. Again, I trued it up as best I could and rode on for a while. Conveniently, we soon ran into a bike shop right along the route and I decided to have him fix the wheel for me. He was able to do it fairly quickly and gave me a great price for it too. It was actually a neat shop -- a combined video rental store and bike shop! They carried a lot of unusual items, including a cool water bottle which I could not resist buying. There were a lot of other Big Riders in the shop buying things too. Oh, and to top it off, I got a flat when the shop mechanic was reinflating the tire, but that was fixed too and finally, we were off.

After all the mechanical problems, we had fallen behind quite a bit so we pushed on to catch up. The terrain was starting to get hillier and hillier as we entered PA. We hit checkpoint for a short time and the local paper in Butler, PA interviewed me. In the afternoon, we crossed the Allegheny River and that's when the real fun started. We hit some of the steepest climbing we had encountered to date and the day got tougher and tougher. Fortunately, this late in the trip, most people were feeling as if they could handle these difficult hills. We hit one hill after another until we finally took the turn up one final hill and saw a very pretty park by a lake that was to be camp for the night. Unfortunately, the showers were still not fixed and to add insult to injury, all the water in the well had been used up by the time we for to camp so there weren't even cold showers. After a pretty meager dinner, we had to ride 15 miles down to the YMCA in Indiana to take showers.

The camp is really pretty tonight and the PA ALA folks even built a campfire and had S'Mores for us. I didn't get to take part in that because I was down taking a shower. I wish I had been able to get into camp a little earlier. Alas, the cycling gods would not allow it today. Off to bed.

This page modified November 25, 2000