Terri and I went out for a ride on April 25th. We were hoping to make it our first century (160km) but due to a miscalculation on our part we cycled 148. Still not a bad days work. The ride started at 8:30am with a major headwind for two hours. As we turned north we had a beautiful tailwind, for a while.
Our miscalculation had us in a small town called Paisley where by accident or fate we met up with other cyclists we knew. We ended up sharing their table and had a very nice break. We set out again after lunch and as we approached Port Elgin, the skies grew very threatening and we began to worry if we would make it to Tim's for our next scheduled pit stop. About 1km away we could not go on. The wind was so strong, the rain so hard and oh yes we had thunder too. The porch we saw off to our right looked dry so we headed for that. We announced ourselves to the owner and she invited us in. Well the storm went as fast as it came and we were on our way for hot tea.
The rest of the ride was cool and wet but we had battled such a storm we managed quite nicely. We will not be able to pick our weather this summer and we felt the ride was excellent training. We were glad however that we could go to home to a hot shower and a hot meal with our husbands. All our training up to then helped us deal with the day and we both felt good at the end and even on Sunday.
We plan to redo that ride and we have other century rides planned for the next several weeks. We will have to do a few in a row. Terri and I have ridden through other rain storms. In 2008 the Terry Fox ride took us to Tobermory (160km) where we stayed overnight and rode back the next day. It rained most of the way there. We knew that Terry himself went through some pretty rough weather and it helped us to our destination. The picture above is us leaving the hotel after a good nights rest.
posted by Holly McAdam
