Post ride: CJBC's The Longest Day, Saturday 06/16/2007

Short version:

Start: 4:45 AM, 48F, 92% humidity, foggy, minimal wind
Finish: 7:54 PM, 68F, strong wind, S
Total time: 15:09
Ride time: 12:28
Avg: 16.7 mph

The entire ride was pretty quite, the first half traffic was lower than expected. Many (but not all) of the road ways had been repaired. It was interesting to descend at 40 mph in 48F weather (think wind chill). It warmed up on the middle part, the Pine Barrens seemed to have changed a bit. Down by the Mullica bridge the pine is now more pine and pin oak. It didn't help us with the wind but did minimize the direct sun. We managed to miss one rest stop on Rt 50 (our SAG was on a refill run) but it worked out a little better. I describe this section as the doldrums because it looks the same and we're really far into the ride and physical and mental exhaustion starts to set in. We managed to stop in the middle of that section and reduce the distance between Egg Harbor City (some visual and mental interest), the Pines and the WaWa at mile 183. This helped to make these two sections a little easy mentally and physically. The last 25 miles were all head wind. The gusts were the worst part. We had lots of wind in our training most of it worse. None had gusts of this strength also the traffic increased and we had to deal with discourteous pick up truck drivers and high school graduates yelling out the window. One of the more interesting things was the number of people who were honking and waving hello to us. There were at least as many as the discourteous folks. We managed to pick up one straggler from another team (we totalled 5 people then). When we pulled into the park at the light house most of us felt pretty good. Also, because of the wind there were no mosquitoes. That is unless you were by the reeds that minimized the wind.