Challenge of the Centuries Sunday......

I was wrong about us riding the 40-mile route today, since there WAS no 40-mile route. There was a 34-miler, but we cut off a couple of miles at the beginning to avoid the twists and turns of riding through town. (We had already done that at the end of yesterday's ride anyway.) Therefore our ride for today wound up being only 30 miles, but as Rozmo said, "We did a century over the whole weekend." This was one of those rare occasions when I could have ridden more, but I also wanted to get home. I was away this weekend, and our anniversary is tomorrow. In addition, I will be gone part of EVERY SINGLE WEEKEND in the month of June.

Rozmo and I rode into the first rest stop today on the tail of a 4-man paceline. We don't do that very often, mainly because it's rare that we can keep up. It's also rude just to jump onto a paceline, but this time the guys who came around us knew Rozmo, so they invited us to jump on. I don't know if they were taking it easy on us or what, but I had to keep hitting the brakes to avoid getting out of line. What's up with THAT? It is very cool riding in a paceline, though. Everyone moving at the same speed, movements almost synchronized. It does carry a whole new set of responsibilities, though. Riders in a paceline are so close together that you are expected to point out hazards along the road. And the person in the back (me, in this case) is obligated to alert the others when a car is approaching from the rear by yelling, "Car back!" We're supposed to do that anyway, but it's especially important in a paceline.

The rest stops this weekend were manned by Boy Scout troops, and they were on their very best behavior. They showed excellent manners and even gave recommendations as to which cookies were best. The water and Powerade were cold, and the Powerade was mixed very well. Not too strong, not too weak.

When I got to the ride location on Friday night, I had some time to kill before riding to Mom's house. So I cleaned the RV. I cleaned the bathroom, the shower, the stove (which I did NOT intend to use). I tried to vacuum, but I don't have the attachments, and it was too hard to crawl around on the floor with a hand-held vacuum. It occurred to me as I was cleaning that I was doing way more than I usually do at home. Of course, it was also much less area to clean.

My laptop is back, a little more than $200 later, and I'm trying not to think about all I lost. They had to replace the hard drive and reinstall Windows, so I lost everything that was on there. Luckily I had backed up my documents and pictures (I thought - turns out I only backed up the pictures), so I can restore those. I hope there were no vital documents on my hard drive. I hope I did the right thing by having it repaired; it may have been better just to buy a new one.

This time next week we will be in Atlanta for the beginning of BRAG. It's hard to believe it's finally here.