I said goodbye to some of the Scouts of Troop 72 at our meeting tonight —it’s the last troop meeting that I’ll make for 4-5 weeks. I handed out my new “OldScouter.com” business cards so they can all follow my journey on this blog!
Today was my day to gather up all my gear on the basement ping pong table. I need to have it all boxed up before I go to bed tomorrow, and I have a quartet practice in the afternoon.
The new tire in my rear wheel has a wobble, so I want to have the Spring Street Sports look at it, but they are closed Monday, so I couldn’t start disassembling the bike yet.
I also started looking more closely at the route the first few days — holy cow, I had no idea there was that much climbing!! For example, Santee to Pine Valley is only 34 miles, but requires 5568 feet of vertical climb!!
To put this in perspective, that is 28% more uphill than Day 3 of RAGBRAI last July (4437 ft), which was the single hilliest day in RAGBRAI history! And on that ride, I had a much lighter bike and no camping gear (a total of 25-28 pounds vs. 93 pounds this time), and was in much better biking condition. Looks like I need to do some serious adjustments on the tentative schedule to avoid disaster that early in the trip.