This morning I took one of my usual Sunday morning bike rides. I rode up Caraway again, which has become one of my favorite routes when starting from home. I can usually get a good 50 mile ride in, with a decent amount of climbing, and with options for extending the ride if I wish.

This morning the ride was nice, except in about the last hour the clouds started to change tone and texture, and I decided I wouldn’t extend the distance. I had been considering pushing on to maybe 70 miles again.

One thing I observed today is that there were an unusual number of dump trucks on the road during one part of the ride that usually has very little traffic. I think one of the farms was harvesting their corn and they were filling the trucks full. They were all headed in the opposite direction from me, so they didn’t really cause me too much of a problem. I just put my head down into the headwind when they blew past.

I decided to head back via Jamestown, which I haven’t done in a while. That route has a couple of not too long, but really sharp little climbs that give a nice bite near the end of a ride. But I had forgotten that Guilford Road was being repaved, and there was a good mile to mile and a half section that was incredibly rough. I likened it to being the cobbled section of a race in Belgium or Northern France.

Ride stats: 54.74 miles with an average of 16.1. Climbing 3,025 feet, and the fastest speed I hit was 34.1.

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