Pancake Riding

Finally, the long overdue cycling post from our monster vacation training week in Cedar Key, Fl.

I was really looking forward to taking the bikes with us on vacation, especially because Florida is pancake flat and that's something we don't get to do a lot around the Upstate. While I love riding in the mountains, every now and then, I just want to have a flat piece of road and our vacation location seemed very promising.

I checked the map before we even got there, but you can never tell from a map on the condition of the road (there were a couple of unpaved roads too) and the amount of traffic. There were also not a ton of routes mapped in Map My Ride.... But, we certainly lucked out. We might did get a ton of variety in courses since we didn't want to drive anywhere to ride the bike, but for a week's worth of riding (3 rides), it was plenty.

We did our first ride the day after our arrival. Too make a long story short, we waited way too long (after 9am) that morning to hit the road and we it was hot and steamy way to early into the ride.

We still ended up with 40 miles at a pretty good clip. For this first outing we chose a road that was decent, but was travelled quite a bit, that why we tried out a different road for our next ride two days later.

What can I say?

We hit the jackpot. The road was smooth and overall flat (there were some small "hills") and the best thing: one car about every 10 minutes. The only scare we got was around mile 20 when we got chased by a big scary looking dog for a little, but that was our only encounter with a loose dog the whole time.

That day, we ended up with 60 miles!! That was also a new distance record for Terry! Woot!

On top of that, we did the ride with an average over 17mph... I *heart* flat roads.

For our last ride, we basically did the same route than two days earlier and therefore ended up with another 60 miler... And did that one even a tiny little bit faster than the first 60-miler.

We thought about trying to get 100 miles in, but we planned to visit the springs in the afternoon and we started to feel all the mileage we put in after the last couple of days... It was vacation after all.

While I am not a huge fan of carrying my hydration system (Nathan Race Vest -> Working on a review, because that thing is just awesome!) on the bike, it was really necessary here. It was hot and humid even on the later two rides, when we left the condo around 7am. Also, it's was so in the middle of nowhere, that you didn't see a gas station or store for at least 30 miles.

Does this bike make my butt look fat?? ;-)