Many of us were not ready to see day break today. The night did not give us all a successful night’s sleep. As always we wanted to find some souce of water so we were able to clean up after a very hot day of riding and driving. We found what we thought as a support staff the perfect site at Elk Horn State Park. Needless to say it was a very beautiful site, but we had many different problems through out the night that made the next day a little diffcult.

To start out with we wanted to take a swim in the lake, but once you got out of the water you had the problem of sinking in the mud. Once we all were back at the site we had problems with the nasting biting flies. The only way to solve that problem was to cover youself with all of your clothes. As the night went on the wind started to pick up a bit. We were all in our tents trying to sleep and hold down our tents at the same time. Although there was a considerable amount of wind there was no relief from the warmth in the air. Through out the night we would wake up and have either sand or rain coming in the tents and need to close up the windows. Once the sun began to shine I am not sure anyone was ready to get up. As soon as you got out of your tent you needed to start taking it down , before the wind tried to take it away. In the morning we realized that we had lost a pair of biking shorts to the wind. As the day started we wished Sarah and II Timonthy farewell for a few days. They will be rejoining us in a few weeks.

We now only have 4 bikers for a while, so we have a very different feel as a group. As the day progressed you could tell that everyone missed out on a good amont of sleep the night before. I had the day off from driving and at every stop we made that day I was fast asleep until the bikers were seen. You could tell the bikers even needed their sleep. The bikers rode a little over 100 miles, and as soon as we hit the camp people got in the pool for a very short swim, then showers, and then naps for all.

During the day the four bikers had been talking about going for a double century the next day. I was not sure if they were serious, but as the night went on I found that everyone was for the idea. So, when dinner time came they had to eat until they were almost sick, as Dave instructed. Kendra was the first one to stop and say that she was done eating. As the three remaining bikers continued to eat. Dave had finished his first plate of pasta, and was slowly working on his second plate. I Timothy was not sure about starting a second plate, but said Dave was like his big brother and he has to keep up with him. Drew was busy telling stories and it took him a little longer to finsh all of his pasta, but afterwards he too felt a little sick. So, dinner turned out to be a succuss, everyone was a little sick, that is, except the support crew.After dinner we all had things that we needed to get done before our bed time at 8:30pm. Alicia and I did some grocery shopping to make sure we would have enough food for the next day of 200 miles. The rest of the group worked on cleaning up dinner, working on bikes, and making sanwiches for the day ahead of them. Once the clock hit 8:30 we were crawling into our tents, and getting ready for the 4:15am morning alarm. Some of the group had trouble falling asleep because of the thunder in the distance, the train arcoss the way, and a high pitch remote control car being played with in front of our tents. Thanks to Kendra the remote controled car stopped very soon. Well, the morning will be here soon. Ready or not here comes the two hundred miles.

Posted by Teresa Lehman

This entry was posted on Monday, July 31st, 2006 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Trip06. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.