Day 22: Cycling to a deadline
This morning cycling was nice. Gravel type trail leading into old packed gravel type roads leading into a bike path. Very little of highway 101 today which is a nice change as highway 101 is basically my life for the last few weeks.
Got a message part way through the day from Julia saying their warm showers hosts don’t mind me also camping in his backyard. Great, so I have a safe place to camp tonight. The only downside to this is now having a deadline of 3pm. I am very slow when cycling and haven’t had to cycle to a deadline on this trip before. But I left at 8.30 this morning so it has to be ok, right?
I stopped somewhere for lunch. During lunch I realized that google said it would take me 2 hours to get to the destination and it was now 1pm. And google always severely overestimates my cycling speed… So I am late. So I wolfed down the rest of my lunch, went outside, got on my bike, only to find my back wheel was flat. A puncture. Fuck.
Swapped the tube out with a spare I had patched during my last rest day and set off again. I am now riding on the first tube I had patched myself so wasn’t confident at all that I did this correctly.
Running late for the warm showers host meeting, I needed to put in some proper cycling. So I put music on full blast, dropped into my drop bars (which I normally don’t use) and tried to pound out the kms as fast as possible. Arrived bang on 3pm, panting, tired and nearly dead but I was on time. Perfect.
Today was a 70km day. Tomorrow will be close to a 100km day, the biggest day so far. Wish me luck.
