Day Three - Noah’s Ark
Last week a cycling buddy nicknamed me “Rain Man” due to my tendency to ride in the rain when other cyclists stay home. Normally today would have been enough to keep even me indoors.
It was a very lite rain at the start, mostly we had to deal with the wind. The big attraction of the day was the “Exotic Feline Rescue Center” (Lions, tigers, etc). One of the riders says he misheard this as “Exotic Female Rescue Center” and got a little excited. In the Lion and Tiger section I started having flashbacks to Jurrasic Park; I’m told these beasts weigh up to 600 pounds, and they were growling and chowing down on monstrous slabs of meat. It was fun to see the big cats up close, but we had to stay on guard as some of them like to spray urine on visitors (with good aim I’m told). One of them nearly got the group, but fell a little short on distance.
This is when the rain started to pick up, and we began to hear thunder. When the tour ended I left the center in a hurry, and hit the road hard to warm myself back up. At 34 miles I arrived at lunch, and that’s when things got ugly outside. Someone from the support crew called it the “second coming of the flood.” We were told we weren’t allowed to continue on because the roads were flooded. Also the support vehicle didn’t have room to take all of us accross the flooded roads (hence the Noah’s Ark title).
We sat around the diner for an hour or two, joking about fording the roads with our bikes overhead. Suddenly it became my job to teach everyone triathlon skills, as if triathlons somehow deal with this kind of situation. Eventually the conversation degraded to “what if’s” and that’s when I interjected.
“You know, the roads aren’t going to become less flooded before tomorrow. I say we either ride now or not at all.”
Suddenly we were suiting up, and two minutes later 5 of us were outside mounting our bikes. No one stopped us. A few of us had been shaking since we arrived at the diner, so we hit it hard at first to warm ourselves back up. When we arrived at the flood, we shifted into low gears and pushed through ankle deep flood water. At one point the flood was deep enough that I watched my feet sequentially submerge and reappear. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to waterskiing on a bike, and I LOVED it. There were a few times I suggested we turn around and do it again.
Tonight we’re staying in the high school gymnasium, and we’re promised a performance from an Elvis impersonator. I’m sure I’ll have more on that later…
