200K Dairy Brevet
The weather looked promising this morning, but there were scattered showers early on. I soon found myself in the second group on the road. Lon Haldeman pulled up on a tandem and the group I was in jumped on his wheel. We had a pretty bad headwind heading out so it was definitely good to be in a group. We passed an Ostrich farm and I would have liked to get a picture, but I didn't want to lose the group. Amazingly, I reached the turnaround point before anybody had started back. That's never happened before.
On the way back, we had a great tailwind, so I stopped a bunch of times to get pictures. I pulled over to check the directions at one point and a recumbent flew by and went the wrong way. I followed briefly, but I had a bad feeling about it and turned around. I looked over the directions with another rider and even started to call the Sag driver to ask directions when a bunch of people came by and we followed them. It started to rain pretty hard, but I thought we were near the control point, so I didn't stop to put my jacket on. Big Mistake. I got soaked to the bone.
At the control point, my fingers weren't working very well and I started shaking pretty bad, but after I got moving again with my jacket on, I heated up pretty good. I was eventually joined by "E" and a guy E kept calling Johnny Botox. They had done Team RAAM last year and they are doing the Elite PACTour this year. E is a big guy from Chicago and you can hear it in his accent. The rain stopped about 20 miles outside of Beloit. We had a fast ride in, even though I was starting to bonk.
