Day One

Ok, 45 miles down, 4,955 to go.  (Don’t worry—I won’t do that every time…)

There is a guy (I think he’s an attorney or something) who is the de-facto voice of road cycling in our area.  I don’t know that he’s associated with any one particular bike club, but he keeps in pretty close contact with all of them.  He puts out a very well distributed e-mail newsletter every week, and has been organizing a New Year’s Day ride for several years now.  His influence has been bringing out about 250-300 riders to this ride, and this year we were two of them. 

So there we were on New Year’s Day morning, in a pack of a couple hundred riders cruising along the streets of downtown Orlando.  That’s one of the coolest things about this ride—the traffic at 8:00 on January 1^st is next to nothing so that allows us to ride on roads that we’d ordinarily never be on.  And that’s quite an experience—there’s nothing quite like being in the middle of a huge group of bikes, all going up the on-ramp to the 528, blowing through the tollbooth, and significantly outnumbering the cars on every road we were on.

Brenda had her first experience in a very large group, and also learned the technique of negotiating the rest stop…or more accurately, how not to negotiate the rest stop.  Picture 300 cyclists all pulling into a convenience store at the same time.  Of course some of the guys are finding a place out behind the building or in the bushes across the street, but the girls are all queuing up at the inside rest room.  After awhile, the general crowd starts to get a little antsy, and some start drifting out towards the road.  The girls start using the men’s rest room too, to try to pick up the pace a little, but before the bulk of them are done, the de-facto voice of road cycling in our area announces “ok, we’re rolling.”  Next thing you know there are 250 bikes on the road out at the stoplight waiting for it to turn green.  And Brenda is still inside waiting her turn.  Needless to say, we lost the group.  The lesson of the day:  either hurry into the restroom in the first wave, or don’t bother. 

But a very dear friend of ours, along with our middle son who rode with us this morning, waited with me so there were four of us that finished the 2^nd half of the ride together.  We hooked up with a tandem couple for 5 or 10 miles, and another single rider.  So we didn’t have the draft of the big group, but we had our own 5-person draft, and all took turns at the front.  Brenda took her turn too, and pulled us down University Blvd at 18-19 mph.  Pretty good considering this was at the 30-35 mile mark.

So it was a great start for the project.  It was a beautiful day (sunny and temperatures in the mid 50s to start, & 60’s at the end) and a fun ride.  We’re on our way!