Jim's Cruise Across America!: Walker to Grand Rapids

Today's ride took me back to 2019 when I did the Coast to Coast ride from San Diego to St Augustine. At times it felt like Deja Vu, and brought back lots of memories. Here's why -

1. We were 95% of the day on roads (nicely paved with good shoulders)

2. We rode for about 60 miles, which is more than the average for this ride, but just about the average for the Coast to Coast.

3. There was a lot of up and down hills. (mostly not too steep, but I am more tired tonight than any day on this trip yet.

4. It rained on and off most of the afternoon (we had a lot of bad weather on the Coast to Coast in 2019)

The day can be pretty much summed up with these three pictures:

These three roads pretty much took us the whole way. One of the nice features of both this trip, and the Coast to Coast is getting rest stops along the way. The wife of one of our riders drives a van, which also hauls our clothes and gear so we don't have to carry that on our bikes. She also positions herself about every 20 miles so we can stop and refill water, get a snack and just check in with each other. Here is what such a rest stop looks like.

We are just getting ready to pull out after our break. You will notice that I have my yellow rain jacket on, which means this was in the afternoon. The forecast was for "sprinkles", but when we came outside after lunch at a local cafe, it was raining, not sprinkling. We waited for about 10 minutes, and the rain stopped, but still looked threatening, so on went the rain gear. For the rest of the afternoon it alternated between steady rain, and other times the road was dry meaning it had not rained at all there. Most important I was warm.

Here is a picture someone got of me from behind. You can see the storm clouds building.

One of our riders is intrigued with how I start out from a stop on my Cruzbike. My approach is what is called the "Fred Flintstone". I stand up and push off to get the bike rolling a bit, then just slide down into the seat and raise my feet up to the pedals. I find it very effective. He says that from behind it looks like I am getting ready to launch like an airplane. He tried to get a picture of it for the last few days, but wasn't happy with the results, so this morning we did a posed take off, and got this interesting shot. I told him we just need to get the tires off the ground!