Big Ride Day 8

Today turned out in many ways to be one of the most trying of the ride so far. Not only was it our first official 100 miles day of the ride, but I woke up in the middle of the night and noticed that it was raining. After that, it continued to rain throughout the morning and all day. This created some unique challenges for the day. To begin with, putting all my gear away in the morning without getting it soaked was next to impossible. It was made that much harder by the fact that we had to stick all our stuff in the gear truck because of the bear danger. I tried to leave everything in the tent for as long as possible but as soon as I took the tent down, I had to lay everything out in the rain to get it put away. It was hopeless to keep thing dry. On top of everything, my rain fly, tent and ground cloth were wet and I had to put them in the bag along with everything else. By the time I got myself organized, got all my rain gear together, got everything packed up, and got ready to go, I was practically the last one out of camp. There was barely any room left on the gear truck. This seems to be a recurring theme actually. I am almost always one of the last ones out of camp every day. I just don't move that quickly in the morning. I don't know how people do get ready so fast!

Well, I finally got breakfast and got on the road about eight o'clock. I started riding with Molly, another person who always seems to be leaving late. Despite the auspicious beginning, after getting on the road, the ride actually felt great. The first 45 miles went by so fast that I could barely believe it. I was comfortable the entire day despite the rain. The toughest challenge of the day was the narrow shoulders and trucks whizzing by and splashing me with water. I wore my clear glasses to keep the rain and splashing from blinding me. All in all, the riding was pretty hairy. At about 80 miles, we hit the toughest climb of the day over a pass into Missoula. Crossing the pass, it was pouring down rain and kind of dicey coming down the other side in the cold, wet weather. It certainly was a challenging decent! At one point, I had to go around a street sweeper that was on the shoulder with a lot of traffic around. That made life interesting. Towards the very end of the ride, we finally emerged from the weather and cruised easily into camp. Tonight, we are camping at the football field of a local high school. We had dinner at the high school itself, which is actually about a mile away. The dinner was spaghetti, which was not that great, but surprisingly, this was the first time on the ride that we had had spaghetti. After the dinner, a bunch of us went to a sports bar in the downtown area and then out to some more bars. Missoula is quite the little college bar town -- there are a ton of little dives to visit.

This page modified November 25, 2000