What a great day! It started a little gray and a little chilly, 40 with lingering traces of morning fog (nothing like Saturday, though) but it soon started warming and the sky cleared; by the end of the day it was in the mid 50s and I'd shed three layers.
I was joined by Patricia Sanders, Mike Bivens, Loretta Troen, Paul and Linda Bankerd, Rita Zeidner, Joni Forman and two Potomac Pedalers whose names and phone numbers became mere indentations in the sign up sheet when the ink refused to flow (and more about that in a moment). The route was an extended version of a route we might have considered for one of the Tuesday rides: Chapman's Landing, a tour of Potomac Heights, a bit of the Indian Head Rail Trail, Pisgah Marbury to the Pisgah store for a break, and then Mason Springs the easy way across 6 and down Durham Church, then Mill Swamp to a second break at Goose Bay, the group pretty much staying in contact all the way.
After we left Goose Bay the group started spreading out a bit, and by the time we went up Poorhouse to Ripley the gaps had grown quite large. Loretta and I waited a bit at Bumpy Oak, and one after another they caught up and went by, except for Steve the Potomac Pedaler. We waited around 10 minutes for him, rode back on Hawthorne, even tried phoning (but of course the number wasn't legible) and eventually gave up and continued on the route. At the intersection of the IHRT and Livingston, the missing Pedaler caught up. He'd had two flats and only one tube, but fortunately also had a patch kit. We rode to Bryans Road together.
AMS all day showed 14.1. I've just changed tires for the winter (I love those Challenge Parigi Roubaix, but a flat every 300 miles just won't cut it in the wintertime), didn't adjust the computer for their slightly smaller roll-out, and so have been reading a little more than actual mileage; that 14.1 is really somewhere between 13.9 and 14.0 -- well within the promised 13.5-14.5 range, straddling the line between Barely B and Used to B.
