Click here for Garmin ride data - Fixed!! (This is cool if you like lots of data! It may take a few seconds to load but you can hit play and time compress our ride) DAILY REPORT: David, John, James and Skip. This morning when we got up it was thundering, lighting and raining. I did a quick check of the weather on line and looking at the local radar picture the storm would blow through in the next 30 minutes. Isn't it great to have technology at your finger tips??!! We had a nice breakfast compliments of Robby from the Stevensville Hotel. When we started at 0730 the sun was shining and the rain had mostly evaporated. there was a 30% chance of rain in Wisdom this afternoon. So we headed south down the Bitterroot valley passing thru a number of small towns. Just beautiful country side. We eventually rejoined Hyw 93 in Hamilton. The city was fairly large in size by the fact it had a Safeway food store. We took a quick break and refilled our water bottles and continued on our way. We were meeting Skip in the town of Darby. Darby was about 35 miles down the road. It had a real cowboy feeling to the town. And had some great signs and store fronts. Skip was able to work his magic and talked w/ the owner of the Centrex gas station/food stop and got two cases of water donated to the Riding4Hope Team. Thanks Centrex!! It seemed too early for lunch so we decided to bike another 20 or so miles to Sula just before we were going for a big climb of the day thru Gibbon pass and Lost Trail pass both a little over 7,000 ft. Then it was time to climb, climb, climb.....Fortunately we had a great tail wind which helped. It was about 18 miles of climbing. Once we got to the top we were at the Montana and Idaho border so there was a rest/visitor station. John beat his brother to the top so there were some bragging rights going on. I was just trying to breath at 7,000 ft!! We took a much deserved rest and then climbed another couple hundred feet to the continental divide. Soooo for all intensive purposes it really is all down hill from here!! There was just a spectacular valley we passed through on our last stretch to Wisdom. And as a plus we had a wind to our back again as broke out of the tree line so we flew down the road the entire way at 25+mph. As a cyclist it just doesn't get any better. The last 1/2 mile from town we started to feel a sprinkle or two of rain and showed up at the hotel just in time. As it turns out had we been there several hours earlier we would have witnessed a thundershower and hail. Sometimes it is just good to be lucky!! Brenda of the Nez Perce Motel gave us a great rate so I wanted to personally thank her for helping out the Riding4Hope Team. Thanks much!! Tomorrow we have two semi major climbs but the challenging part of the day is that we have to cover 122 miles to get to VA City, MT (Who would have guessed there is city named that in MT?) That will be farther than any of us have ridden ever!! It equates to 8 hours of sitting on the saddle not to mention several hours of breaks. Yep it will be a long day!! Wish us well!! Thanks for joining us.....ride safely!! The Riding4Hope Team (David, John, James & Skip)
|
Follow us thru:
Copyright © 2009 by Riding4Hope |