All day with Maggie – Our first century

The ride into Clarksville was our first century on the trip (some had done over 100 miles earlier in the trip after taking alternate routes). I was sweeping with Maggie, so we had to make sure that we were the last riders. To start off, once everyone left Little Rock, we took a 20 minute nap in the church before leaving. The buffer was quickly gone as there was some confusion with the route (streets not matching what was shown on a map) and we had to wait as people doubled back. We crossed the Dam Bridge, which is supposedly the longest bridge strictly for biking and walking in the US. Lunch was at mile 37, and since a rider missed a turn and had gotten behind us, we went to the bike store while the van went to pick her up and dropped her off ahead. Assuming we had a big enough buffer to the 2nd lunch (2 lunches if its over 90 miles or 90 degrees – mainly to refill water), we took off, and caught a rider resting at mile 54. Since we still had 20 miles to lunch, we took a nap under a tall oak tree and then watched a train go by. Unfortunately, there were not places to stop when we wanted to. To avoid catching up the rider, we slowed down, and to entertain ourselves, practiced riding no hands on US-64 (made sure cars were not coming). Once we got to lunch, we hung out there for a while, let the riders get a lead and then stopped again (for ice cream) to create another buffer. We waited 20 minutes for a torrential storm to pass – just 6 miles outside of town before rolling in at 6:30, just in time for an awesome pot luck dinner. After 11.5 hours on the road, I was more than ready for it. We headed to the preacher’s house in the country to light some fireworks before going back to the church to sleep.