Daffodil Classic

QUICK STATS	This Ride	2010 Cumulative
Distance	105 miles	1057 miles
Elevation Gain	4,132 feet	10.93 miles
Average Moving Speed	15.5 mph	14.6 mph
Dog Bites	0	1

Last weekend was our first century of the season. Today's ride is our first fully supported and organized century of the season.

Self-supported and starting out at our own house has the distinct advantage of not having wake up and drive to the event at Insanely Early A.M. On the other hand, it is pretty cool to have organized rest stops with water, food, rest rooms, etc, not to mention a nice treat ready for you when you finish.

Maps showing all rides: 2010 Rides • 2009 Rides • All Rides

Amy swayed me over to riding this Daffodil Classic over the Cherry of a Ride in The Dalles, Oregon. She liked the idea of a ride with lots of good views of Mt. Rainier, which we don't get to see very often. I was playing around with Google Earth on Friday and plugged in this ride for a "tour" and the scenery and views looked extremely promising. I didn't realized you could do such things so easily in Google Earth. I just discovered how to embed it, although this embedded version doesn't have the actual route highlighted on the map. Will try to fix that later.



Okay, some details about the ride...

First, the positives. The scenery was actually quite spectacular. I am used to mountain views growing up with Mt. Jefferson in our window in Madras and now seeing various large snow covered mountains around Vancouver (Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Adams, Mt. Hood, and even Mt. Rainier on a clear day from certain spots). However, Mt. Rainier really does kind of dwarf the other mountains. It is just plain huge when it is only 20 miles away!

Also, we rode by numerous lakes, which is always nice. Not only do they look great, but on a hot day it is nice knowing you can go jump in if need be. Of course it didn't get that hot today, but it did end up quite pleasantly warm, and in fact we are probably just a tad sun burned. Who'd a thunk we needed sun screen in April? Very cool!

We didn't bring the real camera, thinking my phone would suffice. We probably wouldn't have stopped for any photos, as usual, but I could have at least gotten some action shots like I did last year if I'd had it with me. Digital film is cheap. The camera isn't that heavy. Lesson learned.

EDIT: I was able to find some photos of myself on the ride! None of Amy though. :(



Now for the not-so-nice parts of the ride.

Three flats. Have I ever mentioned that I hate to change flats? I am getting pretty good at it though. Turns out Amy's rear tire had some sort of cut or defect. Didn't notice it on the first change, which occured somewhere in the first 60 miles, so I just put a new tube in and it seemed to hold up fine. Well, until it blew out again around mile 100. We still had a few miles to go, so we could either change the tire or Amy could just wait while I went for the car to come back and pick her up. We chose to fix the tire. Spotted the defect in the tire and put a piece of tyvek between the tire and the tube hoping it would bridge the gap. It did, for about a mile. At that point I hardly even slowed down and just told Aim I'd get the car and pick her up as soon as I could. The irony is, it should have been my bike. She felt strong and I was wiped out. She had been pulling me for 20 or 30 miles. I did make it to the car though. The lesson learned here? We are going to start carrying a spare tire (in addition to a spare tube each) on long rides. Just the tire folks, not the wheel. Although a spare wheel has gyro-copter potential...

The roads. Ugh. Compared to other century rides it seems this one has lots of cruddy roads, and by cruddy I mean generally bumpy (I think it is called chipsealing, but it is more like glob here, glob there, let's just make it very rutty and bumpy!) or high traffic but no shoulder roads. There were lots of exceptions to this of course, but way too many miles of either uncomfortable or unsafe riding.

The painted route marking on the pavement were generally done pretty well, but there were a few exceptions. On flat or downhill sections when a turn is approaching they should have provided a marking much sooner to warn you about the turn. When you are riding downhill 1) it is hard to spot the little painted signs and 2) there is no way to slow down in time to make the turn if you do see the sign. So the lesson here for us is this: put the cue sheet on the handlebars so we can anticipate turns and/or correct wrong turn mistakes. That's how we do our own rides anyway, so a very simple solution.

There were numerous poorly-behaved drivers. We have experience them before, but usually only once or twice a ride. Today there was at least 6 different incidents of either dangerous driving (e.g. coming far too close to a cyclist with their vehicle), idiotic drivers (yelling, honking, swearing, etc.), or some combination of the two. Needless to say, we will not be riding again in Orting anytime soon.

No post-ride strawberry shortcake. This was our own choice due to happenstance. I drove back to pick up Aim and we decided to just keep driving since we were already on the road headed home, rather than turning around and going back for the shortcake. Probably a bad decision as I am sure it would have been scrumptious. We just wanted to get out of there at that point though.

I guess that is about it. We're glad we did the 60-mile loop first as it was the hilliest and the bad road traffic conditions probably worsened later in the day.

In the end we still basically enjoyed covering over 100 miles of new ground, so from that perspective at least it was easily worth it.