Everywhere I can think of that I’ve ridden this century:

Countries:

USA
France
Bonaire
Antigua

States:

North Carolina
Virginia
South Carolina
Florida
California
Washington
Idaho
Montana

Seems like an awfully short list; I’ll have to work on that.This list was composed in a state of desperation.  We’ve been in the car for 12 and a half hours now, driving home from Miami.  We should be home soon, but I’m getting awfully punchy.  And stiff.

However, there has been one small saving grace on this insane drive—the internet.  My husband has Verizon wireless broadband on his computer, and amazingly, we’ve had a connection most of the day.  So we’re riding along, and whichever one is not driving is using the computer to entertain the other one.  We’ve been doing things like checking which exits have a KFC (quite a few), mail-ordering obscene amounts of chocolate and books that I can’t find at the library (The Pedant in the Kitchen, by Julian Barnes—I’m quite excited), and figuring out the time difference between EST and Baghdad (8 hours).

At one point, Lee was IM-ing (that is a verb, right?) with his friend Erik, who also writes a blog (his is on business stuff), and was telling him how excited we are to have internet while driving.  So Erik wrote a post about how we were driving along surfing the ‘net.  So then Lee’s brother IM-ed to tell him that Erik had posted about us, so we surfed on over to his site, to read about how we’re driving down the highway, surfing the ‘net.

Hmm.  I think I feel like a dog chasing its own tail.  Maybe I should just watch movies, like the children.

We made a last-minute decision to go to Miami, instead of straight home, after the cruise ended on Tuesday.  Lee’s mother lives here, and we haven’t been down in ages (so long, in fact, that our 9 year old doesn’t seem to remember it at all), and we were so close anyway . . .

So we spent Tuesday at the Kennedy Space Center, then drove down to spend a couple of days with Grandma.  Unfortunately, Delaney came down with a nasty cold (which I told her she would if she kept staying out late on the ship and not getting enough sleep—why listen to your mother?!), which has put a bit of a damper on the whole thing.  We’ve pretty much just hung out at Grandma’s and gone over to SoBe for meals.  Could be worse, I suppose!  But tomorrow we head home—it’ll be our longest car ride ever.

Anyway, on the way down here, we were driving along one of those long, flat roads next to a canal, and saw two guys on road bikes; one of them had a handlebar bag, and the other was on a Bike Friday.  Hmm . . . randonneurs, perhaps?  Whatever they were doing, they got me daydreaming about heading down this way to do some long rides.  Florida has several different brevet series, beginning in January, so I might try and check some of those rides out, just for variety.  I love riding on different roads.

Then yesterday I went for a short run, purely for the calorie burn.  I headed out of the building and crossed the Venetian Causeway, headed over toward South Beach.  I bet I saw at least 15 people on bikes, in just half an hour of running.  Only two were roadies, and some were clearly tourists, but a fair number were people who looked like they probably rely on the bike for a lot of their transportation needs.  Interesting.  And on Lincoln Road, which is closed to vehicles, we saw a number of  police officers and one mail carrier on bikes.  What a cool place.

I haven’t been down here in years, and even with a sick cranky child, I remembered almost as soon as we got here just why I love it.  It’s one of my favorite places; admittedly, I’ve never been in August, and I’d like to keep it that way.  But in winter, when the trees at home are bare and we all seem to close in on ourselves in the cold (even if it isn’t frigid), Miami is generally warm and colorful and open—all the things I love about North Carolina in the summer, and then some.

We ate outside as much as possible; if I could eat every meal outdoors, I would.  We watched people; our children roller-bladed on the beach.  Toby suddenly decided he needs a whole new wardrobe (ah, the agony of 13).  We listened to languages all around us, and ate Cuban food and Indian food and Chinese food.

We’re heading home in the morning, but we’ve remembered so many things we love about Miami, that we’ve pretty much decided to come back in the spring and stay longer.  Maybe I can bring my bike, and ride a little.  The only hills around here are bridges and speed bumps—my kind of riding!

Yesterday we spent the day docked at the island of Antigua.  I had been there once before, on the last Disney cruise we did, but Delaney and I did an excursion, and stayed on the water the entire time, so we saw nothing of the island.

This time I decided to take a different approach.  Now, part of my motivation was purely a compulsion to stick with my training plan no matter what (I’m not terribly flexible, sometimes), and part of it was just that at this point, I ride so often that it’s a habit—and without it I begin to have cravings.

So before we left home, I did some research online and found a bike shop.  I gave them a call and made arrangements to rent a mountain bike for the day (they don’t have road bikes available—in hindsight, it’s a darn good thing).  So when the ship docked, I took a cab to the far side of St. John’s, the port town, and found the bike shop.  They gave me a bike, a pump, and a lock.  I brought my mountain bike shoes from home, but forgot the pedals, so I wound up having to just wear sneakers (no cages, even).  I also brought my own helmet, which the guys in the shop found fascinating—apparently they’d never seen a Giro Pneumo before.  Not terribly surprising, given that I never saw anyone else wearing a helmet, even though I saw LOTS of people on bikes.

So they plotted out a route for me, gave me the map, and I headed out with a water bottle and a few US dollars.  It was a fantastic ride—one that I will remember for the rest of my life.  I first had to wrap my brain around the idea that Antiguans drive on the left-hand side of the road—and they have round-abouts (traffic circles, in American English).  My first round-about was five minutes into the ride, while I was still in town traffic.  I got into it, then couldn’t quite get myself out at the right spot, so I made a slightly wrong turn, and just turned around down the block and tried again.  After that, the left-hand side of the road thing was a no-brainer.

I continued along down the western coast of the island, rolling through picturesque (if poor) little villages, where people waved and spoke to me.  I had to dodge chickens and goats in the road, but the drivers were unfailingly polite and gave me a wide berth, even when I was careening around potholes on the narrow little roads.

The roads were uniformly dreadful—I was really grateful for those wide knobby tires.  I’m not used to a mountain bike, so it took me a while to realize that I really didn’t have to avoid the potholes—when I started plowing through (and even over!) them, I had a lot more fun.  It was hilly, but the hills were generally short and steep, which I really enjoy.  Stand up, crank hard for a minute or two, then let it rip on the downhill.  My idea of a grand time.

The road ran along the western coast, just inside the outer perimeter of hills.  It ran out literally at the water’s edge, and turned back toward the east.  I rode for 30 or 40 minutes right along the coastline, with villages and jungle on my left and high cliffs above crashing waves, alternating with sandy white beaches, on my right.  It was absolutely spectacular.  A short, violent rainshower marred the view a bit, but only because I couldn’t see through the rain on my glasses.  It felt great in the heat.

At the top of Carlisle Bay, I stopped to buy a banana (a short little one called a Finger Rose) from a woman running a fruit stand on the side of the road.  She wouldn’t take money for just one, so I bought a bottled water from her as well, and told her to keep the little bit of change.

Just down the road, I came upon several teenagers hawking something they called “jellywater.”  So I stopped and bought some.  It turned out to be an immature coconut, which they hacked open for me.  I drank the water, then they showed me how to scoop out a white, jelly-ish goo that I suppose would eventually mature into the meat of the coconut.  It was just like it sounds.  But I enjoyed chatting with the guys; it was worth every penny of the two bucks that I spent.

So then the road turned back north, up through the middle of the island.  When I was at the bike shop, the guys plotting my route had asked me how I was on hills.   Not bad, I figured.  They warned me that Fig Tree Hill was pretty steep.  When I got back to the shop, I informed them that where I come from, we call that a mountain, not a hill.  All these islands were formed, aeons ago, by a massive tectonic upthrust—if you look at a map, you can see the curve of islands that popped up as volcanoes.  Some of them are still active (like St. Lucia), and some still have earthquakes (like Martinique), but most are just incredibly hilly, like small steep mountains poking up out of the sea.

Fig Tree Hill—definitely a mountain.  It was a good thing I was wearing sneakers—I had to walk twice.  At one point, a taxi van full of tourists crawled past me as I was laboring just to walk the bike up the incline.  I could see them staring at me through the windows; I felt a bit like an exhibit:  “See here on the left side, folks, we have a lunatic in spandex.”

The downhill would’ve been fantastic, except that there was a construction site at the top of the “hill,” and the trucks coming up and down had rutted and scarred the road so badly that even with the knobbies, I was afraid to really cut loose and go fast.  The construction site, just as an aside, was a complex of high zip lines being built up above the tree canopy and the gorge below.  I stopped for a minute or two (ostensibly to chat with the maintenance guy, but really to catch my breath), and he said that there are 30 lines up there, connecting platforms up in the treetops.  I didn’t try it, but I bet it would be breathtaking.

Further down the road, I came to an unanticipated intersection, so I stopped once again, this time at a roadside lunch stand.  These were all over the island, and they make our taco trucks look sophisticated.  Each stand consisted of a couple of folding tables covered by a tarp on poles.  This guy had seasoned rice, lobster salad, conch water, goat water, pig’s foot soup, cow’s foot soup, and some other kind of salady thing that I can’t remember.  I would’ve bought something from him, but none of that sounded like cycling power food.  Especially in the 85 degree heat.  So I got directions and soldiered on.

I got back to the bike shop uneventfully.  The whole ride took me two and a half hours, start to finish.  I was a bit smug about that, since the guys had plotted what they were certain was a three hour ride.

I know this is an insanely long post, but I wanted to think about what it was I enjoyed so much yesterday, and I’ve concluded that it’s hard to sum up.  I loved what I saw, I loved talking to kind people, I loved blowing up on that mountain, I loved the smells of food as I passed the lunch stands, I loved that every other person I saw on a bicycle called out to me some raucous, exuberant greeting—at home I’m lucky if I get a nod of the head or flick of a finger from another person on a bike.  So I guess it was the pure physical pleasure of riding a bike, plus the intellectual stimulation (although I’m not sure if that’s the right word) of seeing a new, and very different, place.

In honor of David Letterman, I’ve written this handy list of tips that I’m sure you’ll all use regularly.

Top 10 things to remember at the nude beach:

10:  Sit on a lounge chair, not the sand.  (You think sand in a bathing suit is uncomfortable?  Where do you think it goes if you skip the suit?)

9:  Go about your business—sprawling yourself seductively right where the voyeurs are walking by just looks like advertising.  And in the broad, harsh light of day, trust me—you have nothing worth advertising.

8:  If one member of your party is naked, the rest should not be fully clothed.  If the solo naked person is your father-in-law, you need to just give up and go home.  Then straight into therapy.

7:  If you are having a picnic, eat things that do not require a knife and fork.  Holding a paper plate in your naked lap and struggling to cut a piece of fried chicken is a recipe for true disaster.  And medical care is not always what one might hope down here in the islands.

6:  Do not ever wear a Santa hat when you’re in your birthday suit.  It looks ridiculous under the best of circumstances, but if it’s warm enough for nudity, it’s too warm for red and white fur.

5:  If you choose to surgically enhance one (or even two) parts of your body, you should give serious thought as to whether or not the rest of your body needs to be visible.  Fresh, perfect parts look a bit strange when their surroundings are still in original form.

4:   Sunscreen.  I think this one is self-explanatory.

3:  Yoga is only for the clothed.  Let me repeat—yoga is ONLY for the fully dressed.

2:  Wrinkles are probably best left covered.  If this applies to your whole body, so be it.

1:  If you’re planning to go to a nude beach because you think there’s something sexy about it, think again!

This, folks, is the thing to do in winter. The weather’s fabulous down here in the islands, mon. It’s currently Wednesday evening. We’ve been at sea the last couple of days, but we spent today on St. Maarten. I’m not a huge fan of the planned excursions that all cruise lines offer, so we rented a car and drove to the beach for the day. I swam and walked and generally tried to soak up enough warm sun to get me through January.

We’re all generally having a grand time. Delaney isn’t getting enough sleep, and Lee and I are eating WAY more than we should, and Toby was bored out of his mind at the beach today (the topless women held his attention for a while, but after an hour or so, bare breasts weren’t even interesting anymore. We tried to convince him to walk down to the nude end of the beach, but he couldn’t be bothered. Hmm. Now that I look back at that last sentence, I wonder if maybe we’re dreadful parents, after all. Oh dear.), but otherwise, it’s quite fabulous. Yesterday, by the adult pool, I found these giant, two person lounge chairs, with separate backs so that each person can adjust the angle just so, and great deep mattresses. That was a particularly nice nap, although I did manage to sleep right through our reservation for tea with Wendy Darling. Whoops.

I’ve been going to the gym–they’ve expanded it since our last cruise two years ago, and there’s an upright stationary bike that works perfectly well for interval workouts. And I’ve been doing lots of core work, and running the track that goes all the way around the ship on Deck 4. And I am trying desperately to maintain my resolve not to set foot in an elevator a single time. So far, so good. The children have given up, though. They don’t seem to want to go up 4 or 5 flights of stairs at a time. I can’t imagine why.

Tomorrow, St. Lucia. I bowed to popular opinion, and signed myself and the children up for a “Pirate” excursion. Last time we were on St. Lucia, we rented a cab for the day, and saw more than we thought possible on a tiny little island. But for some reason the children flat-out refuse to go back to that volcano again–okay, boiling sulfur is not the nicest smell on earth, but we all learned a LOT that day. So this time we’ll go do the hokey stuff on the boat that was used in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie (not that I saw it), and they’ll be happy as clams. Hopefully I’ll get in a good swim, and Lee can stay on the ship and vegetate, and all needs will have been met.

In the meantime, I need some sleep. All this fun is wearing me out!

Coming to you live, from–somewhere deep in Southeast Georgia.  No clue where.  The children keep asking; I think they find it worrisome that their parents will blithely check into a cheap motel without even knowing the name of the town.

We’re on our way to Port Canaveral, Florida–we’re going on a Disney cruise for the holidays.  We picked the children up from school this afternoon, and we’ve been headed south on I-95 ever since.  Except, of course, for the obligatory vacation-Walmart stop.  Long story there–somehow, it seems over the years that whenever we find ourselves in any town smaller than, say, New York, we wind up in desperate need of something we’ve forgotten, and Walmart is the only place within 50 miles that might possibly have a cheap, poorly made version of whatever the essential item is.  At home, I avoid the Walmart like the plague.  I HATE it; it’s disorganized, overstimulating, poorly staffed.  An overall dreadful experience.  But the standing family joke is that we’re not really on vacation until we’ve been to the local Walmart.  Tonight we went to one somewhere south of Savannah, but north of Brunswick.  We needed batteries, lip sunscreen, chewing gum (for the child who insisted that boredom requires constant intake of food), a small container of laundry detergent, and a new garment bag (the one I pulled out of the attic this morning smelled funky).  Lee went in, and was gone for half an hour.  I thought perhaps he had gotten lost and just given up.  No–he was just having a typical Walmart experience.  Oh well.  At least we’re on vacation now!

 Anyway, in the midst of the packing craziness, I missed riding on two of the most beautiful days we get in winter in NC.  I hated being stuck inside, but I had to just let go of it–I had no time.  As it is, I forgot several significant things–jewelry (I have no earrings for the next two weeks!), my mountain bike pedals (I’m planning to rent a bike on Antigua and ride for a few hours, and I brought the shoes, but forgot to take the pedals off the bike–you can visualize me smacking my forehead now), and my training plan.  Duh.  All the worrying about whether I’m packing the right clothes for which workout (constant movement is the only way to get through a cruise without gaining enough weight to sink the ship, in my experience), and I go and forget the instructions.  Dingbat.  Mr. Helpful is going to try and figure out how to download it for me, since we have internet here in the motel. I guess I’ll just ride that bike in sneakers.  And who really needs earrings, anyway, right?!

So we’ll board the ship around lunchtime tomorrow, and I’m sure Lee’s first agenda item onboard will be to sign up for unlimited access in the Internet cafe.  So I’ll be blogging at sea–now you can visualize me grinning widely!

Oh, one other event from last week–my computer died.  Had to get a new hard drive.  In the process, Lee moved this blog.  Don’t know what that means, exactly, except for this:  a) if you went to the website to look at it, it’s not very pretty.  I want to make it prettier, but can’t promise when that’ll happen.  It’s way far down the to-do list, somewhere below buy new pajamas and sweep the garage.

and b) I think those of you who usually get emails with my posts may not get those now.  Not sure why, or what you/I should do about that, but Lee mentioned it sort of off-handedly as he walked out the door this morning, so there you have it . . .

Okay, yes, I admit it–I’m a total slacker.  And not much of a blogger.  Apparently, you have to actually write posts in order to qualify for the title.  I haven’t written in weeks.  I haven’t much of an excuse, really.  I’m just a slacker.

Let me think what’s been going on.  We had a birthday (Toby’s; I think I mentioned it earlier), then the next week we had Thanksgiving.  My mother-in-law was here for several days, teaching the children to play poker.  (Sorry, Grandma, but it’s just too funny not to mention!)  Anyway, on Thursday I went for a short spin on the bike–that was the day Toby took to calling me Spandex.  It was a bit chilly.  Then we (a group of about 9 Rosens) went to the Angus Barn for a lovely late lunch.  It was a great place for anyone who can’t be bothered to cook the whole spread (I love to cook big holiday meals, but some years it’s just too much work.  This is one of those years).  The food was surprisingly good, there were LOTS of people, and it was an event, without being stuffy.  The next day we went to my brother’s house (an 8-minute drive) to do the whole thing all over again with my family.  I have a brother and a sister; between us, we have 8 children, most of whom are 5 or under.  Enough said.

Then, the next week, Mr. Helpful was, unavoidably, not very helpful.  He was out of town.  I hate that.  I would be the worst single parent ever.  For 13 years now (actually, more like 18 years–we met in January of 1989) I have thought of his coming home in the evening as the punctuation of my day.  When he doesn’t come home, there never seems to be a moment when I stop and breath and feel that all the loose ends are neatly tied up.  The hard parts of the day just seem to go on without a break.

 Plus, both of my children (who don’t seem to read this, but you never know, so I have to tread carefully here) are in, shall we say, challenging stages right now.  I’m ready to tear my hair out.  And they just absorb my stress like sponges, so take away my moral support person, add in difficult children, and it was not a good week.  And then last week–same thing.  And I sort of realized last week that–whoops–it’s December.

 There’s more–friends in town (had fun with Amelia and Betsy–great to see both of you!), various parties (bookclub, Lee’s office), field trips (hiking last Friday morning–coldest day in two years–what fun), car repairs . . . and we seem to be in homework hell.  Oh, and the bike.  I’ve been working out just about every day, but a lot of that has been drills and intervals on the trainer, and some pretty intense core work.  I did get out on the road yesterday for 30 miles; it was mostly good, but in the last half hour the temperature dropped 6 degrees, and I was quite chilly by the time I got home, beating sunset by about 5 minutes.  Lesson learned.  Next time, rake leaves faster, and get on the bike earlier!

 Anyway, it’s now Monday morning; school gets out on Friday, and apparently it’s going to be Christmas soon.  Guess I should get on that.

If you see me at the mall, I may be wearing a Grinchy sort of frown.

Because of my bizarre discomfort with loose ends, I must share with what I wrote after the 600k brevet that I rode in my 2003 quest for PBP.Here it is:

Final Qualifier- This is not a funny story.  If you’ve been reading these updates for the chuckle-factor, feel free to stop now.  It’s a long story, a wet story, and an exhausting story, but it’s really not very funny at all.  The weekend of June 7th and 8th I rode the final PBP qualifier-600k.  I finished (barely), and I qualified, but I really can’t remember a single amusing moment.

The basic facts:  we started at 6 am on Saturday-a day of record-setting rain all across the state.  We rode in said rain.  All day.  By 6:05 am I could feel water squelching in my shoes.  When I arrived at the turn-around in Wilmington at 11:30 pm, they were still squelching-four pairs of dry socks later.  Mercifully, we saw no lightning.

The route was lovely leaving Morrisville-a few gentle rolling hills, pleasant roads, minimal early-morning traffic.  But the rain really slowed me down-I had to pay intense attention to the road in that kind of weather.  I felt like I was just crawling.  Then the route wound down into the flood plain, in the flat part of the state.  I’m sure Bladen County is a lovely place, what with that huge state forest and all those lakes and all.  But it surely does feel remote-devoid of inhabitants.  Lonely.  Isolated.

And then there are the roads.  I don’t know much about the science of road surfaces, but I know that the stuff they use in that part of the state is brutal for cyclists.  Rough, bumpy-bone-jarring.  You can actually identify the individual pieces of rock that have been pressed together to create the material.  And eventually, those roads begin to develop cracks.  Apparently the most sophisticated repair technique available is a large quantity of some sort of black caulk, poured into each crack to an excess that allows it to mound up over the road surface, creating a distinct bump in the road.  Put one of these 2-inch wide black bumps every 18-24 inches over 70 or 80 miles of road, and you have devised this cyclist’s worst nightmare.

At the checkpoint in White Lake, after about 110 miles, I changed into dry clothes-don’t ask why.  It was totally mental.  I was soaked again as soon as I got back on the road.  Onward to Wilmington.

At the turn-around, I realized that I was much more exhausted than I had expected to be.  I guess I wasn’t fully recovered from the 400k, two weeks earlier.  Lack of recovery combined with the intense focus required to stay safe in the rain had completely wiped me out.  The turn-around was at a motel, and I had reserved a room so that I’d be able to shower and re-organize all my stuff.  I really had no choice but to nap for a couple of hours.  It wasn’t in the plan, but that’s one of the important lessons I’ve learned doing this brevet series-things don’t always go according to plan.  The key is to be flexible and stay calm even as you’re implementing plan b, or plan c, or even plan d.

I’ve also learned that while I enjoy the stopping, I really must figure out how to spend less time organizing and more time pedaling.  Wilmington turned into a 4 hour stop-way too long.  I had a drop bag there, which I had to retrieve, as well as getting the brevet card signed, finding food (at the Hardee’s across the street-we checked into the room, parked our bikes, and walked to Hardee’s-in retrospect, that was somehow a mistake.  It took too long), showering, eating the food, refilling the drink bottles, cleaning out the handle-bar bag, etc.  I also lubed my chain-I was worried about it in all that rain, called my husband, and tried desperately-but-unsuccessfully to find a weather report on television.

Anyway, the upshot of it was that my friend James and I left Wilmington at 3:30 am, in off-and-on drizzle and humidity that was thick enough to clog up lungs.  From Wilmington to White Lake-75 miles or so-we had no access to any kind of support or resources.  No stores, gas stations, etc.  We stopped a few times in parking lots, but mostly we just pushed on toward White Lake, where we knew we could get breakfast and, once again, change clothes.

It finally stopped raining sometime around late morning.  Then around 1:30, the sun came out.  That was when things got really ugly.  It was suddenly 87 degrees and so humid it was hard to breathe.  I could feel my arms crisping.  I started feeling even sicker than I had been, and began to really come unglued.  This is a fun sport, but it’s not worth brain damage.  I was very concerned about heat stroke; my husband had teased me once that the first symptom of heatstroke was an inability to remember the symptoms of heatstroke.  This is worrisome, particularly when you’re so tired that it’s hard to rationally analyze the situation and figure out what to do.  I was so hot and dehydrated I couldn’t take in calories, and started feeling really weak and dizzy.  We found a gas station, and worked hard at getting our core temperatures down.  After sitting in a-c for a while, sipping cold Gatorade, and pouring cold water on my head, I sort of got myself back together again, and was able to pro-actively fight the heat when we got rolling again.  Basically, the entire afternoon we pedaled for ice.  We’d stop at a gas station, buy a bag of ice, and stuff our clothes with it.  I had a bandana around my neck filled with ice, and put more down my bra and my shorts.  I was just nursing a bottle of Gatorade and a camelback of water at this point, so I kept adding more ice to those, as well.  Then we’d ride until the ice melted, and do the whole routine over again.  It was unrelentingly horrible.

The sun finally went down-we had hoped to finish by sunset, thereby avoiding another evening of slow, careful riding in the dark-but that was a lost cause.  I was just relieved that the temperature dropped a tiny bit.  I did see a few flashes of lightning off in the distance as we came into Wake County, but honestly, at that point I was too exhausted to care.

At some point-I can’t remember when-we started to have some uncomfortable anxiety about actually making it back to the finish by the cut-off.  Remember, these are timed rides.  The 600k limit is 40 hours; I had finished all the others several hours before the cut-off, but by late Sunday afternoon, things were beginning to look questionable.  We got to a store that we knew was 21 miles out at a few minutes past 8; we had until 10.  Sounds possible, right?  But the miles just crept by.  And my memory of those 21 miles and the mileage totals I was seeing on the cue sheet just didn’t seem to match up in my sleep-deprived brain, so I became increasingly agitated.  Finally, with 6 or so miles to go, at about 9:30, we saw a car coming with a bicycle on top.  One of the guys who had already finished leaned out of his window and shouted, “I think you’ve got it!  You’re almost there; I think you’re going to make it!”  Thank you for the encouragement Mike; you got me to the end.  I realized that if he had said he thought we were going to make it, then perhaps we weren’t.  I panicked.  It wasn’t rational, I didn’t process or think or calculate.  I just got this incredible surge of adrenalin-lift-the-car-off-the-baby kind of adrenalin.  I rode the last 6 miles at speeds well over 20 mph.  Even as worn-out tired as I was, I knew enough to appreciate an amazing moment-it felt truly powerful.

I finished with 13 minutes to spare, I think.  Those minutes at the finish are kind of a blur in my brain.  I was just so glad it was over.  I went home and cried.  I cried off and on all day Monday, too.  It was a traumatic experience.  All of the other rides have had obstacles and adversities, but I’ve looked back on them and remembered a generally positive experience.  Not this one.  I truly don’t remember a single fun moment.  After 5 days of thinking about it and coming to terms with it in my head I’ve decided that the best I can do is to go with all the platitudes people have offered me.  It was a means to an end, a learning experience, and since it apparently didn’t kill me, perhaps it will make me stronger.I leave for Paris two months from tomorrow.  Now I just have to keep up my endurance and refine my logistical strategies.  I’ll keep you posted.