HOT AND A TAILWIND
Finally the westerly breeze found us! Tailwind, westerly, about 12-15 mph all day, what a difference!
One would think that basically going east would not be hard to navigate. Not so! Started off trying to ride the unpaved Buffalo State Trail hoping it might be like some of the gravel trails around Seattle/Bellevue. Wrong - loose sand, good for ATVs. Maybe that is why there were ATV tracks on the trail. Back on the state route. After awhile we exited onto paved county roads, beautiful! Ridewithgps tried hard to put us on more gravel roads and did succeed in taking us on a 2 mile detour. Back to more paved roads and pretty countryside.
As the day wore on temps increased to about 90 with humidity at about 80. (Not sure which was worse, central Washington at 103 and low humidity or today.)
We finally ended up on State Route 73, after a slow slug on some gravel roads, for much of the latter part of the day. Fortunately traffic volume was low.
No services were to be found to buy water or food. At about mile 60 we stopped and begged water from Cody, who was working in his yard. After a rest in the shade of an oak tree we pressed on, finally finding a gas station/mini mart in Pittsville. Replenished we rode onto Wisconsin Rapids.
Our speed today was greatly helped by the tailwind! Our Ave speed was about 2 - 3 mph higher than normal, and would have been higher except for the slow, gravel portion of the day.
Pics from the road
Black River
Lots of corn, with a minor in soybeans.
By the numbers:
Distance - 89.8 Miles
Elev gain - 1,838 ft
Elev loss - 1,845 ft
Moving time 6:33
The center of Wisconsin is "Pitts-ville" hope it didn't seem that way!
ReplyDeleteRight -- corn with a minor in soybeans. You will get that all the way to Cleveland. But the huge fields I found impressive. Also, because we are so used to our urban environment, I was interested in finding how so much of America is rural. The routes, of course, took us through countryside, but that is a lot of land, too.
ReplyDeleteI am glad you had a tailwind, which helps in the heat and humidity. Going on there will probably be a lot of humidity.
One thing good about the Adventure Cycle maps is that they usually had routes with periodic services. Maybe the GPS could take you to more frequent services. The midwest is more populated than the west, so hopefully that would be possible, maybe at the expense of more busy roads. But the people are friendly, so I am glad you made out.
On through Wisconsin! Maybe you can pick up a cheesehead bike helmet..... eg
One more note: farms are always a major feature of a country. I was surprised how much of France was rural when we drove through Normandy with Cyrus. On our Rick Steves tour, we found the same with Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary.
ReplyDelete