
Well it’s still warm in the desert. Where it’s not quite as warm however is the coast. Yesterday Jiles, Dennis and I made the trek over to Oceanside where we figured out where to put Dennis’s 48 foot long RV. With that settled they then dropped me off at the pier and we pretended it was next Wednesday and did the first part of the race over to Borrego, testing our thought-out plan of which designated support sites to use and what to get when. Went fairly well, save a couple hitches with the new aero water bottles, they don’t like to be tossed aside like a regular bottle, so there’s still some inventing to go on with that, but otherwise we seem to be in good shape. At least for the first few hours… The only real mishap of the day was up near the top of the Glass Elevator. This being my third descent down now, I reckoned I could let it open up a bit more, well a tail wind pushed me off the top and into the first corner at a nice 85km/hr, which was okay until as I went into it a huge thermal buffeting up from the desert floor was there to greet me and had a mind to thwart my turning attempts, after a sketchy couple of seconds we managed to not go over the guard rail for a 3,000 foot free fall and got back on with it. Hopefully I’m in contact with the mountain boys of Austria to follow their carving ways down the mountain!
Back on Saturday Dennis and Jiles again supported an easy ride down towards the Salton Sea, just getting in a few more handoffs and testing out an aerobar mount for a miniature water mister, which I’m pretty sure is going to prove to be pretty dynamite.
Taking it easy today, got our communications worked out this morning, and tomorrow we’ll get the bikes back out into the heat.
On another note, the van tour leaves Huntsville in just two short days now! Looking forward to getting the rest of the crew down here by Friday, and then things will likely happen far too quickly leading up to the start line next Wednesday.
Back on Saturday Dennis and Jiles again supported an easy ride down towards the Salton Sea, just getting in a few more handoffs and testing out an aerobar mount for a miniature water mister, which I’m pretty sure is going to prove to be pretty dynamite.
Taking it easy today, got our communications worked out this morning, and tomorrow we’ll get the bikes back out into the heat.
On another note, the van tour leaves Huntsville in just two short days now! Looking forward to getting the rest of the crew down here by Friday, and then things will likely happen far too quickly leading up to the start line next Wednesday.