Wednesday, August 6, 2008 – Day 45

Start: Bedford, Pennsylvania
End: Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Miles: 104.30 Total Miles: 3,403.51 BRAA Total Miles: 3,221.20
Time: 7 hours 17 minutes (avg 14.3 MPH)
Flat tire count today: 0 Total flat tires for the ride: 10

The weather forecast at dinner time last night was for nice weather overnight and the following day. Well, we all know that the weather people are sometimes challenged. They included a 10% chance of shower to cover themselves.

At about 4AM, I heard a noise on my tent…guess what it was? Rain. It started raining pretty hard. I had planned on getting up at 5AM to start packing up for the early start we were trying to get due to the long ride ahead of us. The rain continued until about 5:15 when it stopped. This was great because we were then able to pack up without getting wet. The only bad thing was packing up the wet tent. It could have been a lot worse. That was it for the rain for the day.

The roads were wet and messy when we got going. It didn’t matter much since we had to get started. We had over 100 miles ahead of us and we had to climb over the Appalachians.

As we rode, we could see the mountain ridges in the distance. They were not too clear due to the low clouds that were still in the area. Maybe that was a good thing so that we could not see exactly what was ahead of us. Here is a picture I took at an overlook. It was looking back on one of the ridges we just climbed over and was from another we were currently climbing.

We rode through a place called Breezewood today. It is a center of activity for truckers since it is centrally located between several interstates. I have driven through this area many times, but the experience on a bike was much different. It is a very busy place.

Off to the right was a sign that I enjoyed seeing. It shows me that we are getting closer to DC.

After Breezewood, we climbed for a number of miles. We went through a national park which was a wonderful ride. The amazing thing was we kept going up and then we turned a corner at the top and there was a huge lake with a bunch of people swimming and sunning themselves. It was like an oasis. We had our PB&J stop there before continuing on.

The rest of the ride was a lot of rolling hills. It was definitely a long, tough ride, but it was expected since this was the “final exam” of the ride. I guess since I arrived at our destination – Gettysburg – I passed the exam.

Tomorrow will be a rest day in Gettysburg before we ride our final two rides into Washington, DC.