Day of the hundreds

Day 15
From Rocky Mount NC
To Warsaw NC
Mileage estimated 100
Mileage actual 100
Top speed 26 mph
Riding time 6 hrs 35 mins

Today dawned early - notice I don't say bright and early because it wasn't daylight when we shuffled across the hotel car park to Denny's for breakfast. That started at 5.45am and when I got there, nearly everyone was already seated. The Grand Slam breakfast was our allowance and porridge, two eggs on toasted 'English Muffin' and two pancakes with syrup (it's getting to me, but at least I had them on separate plates!) with large orange juice and Denny's famous never ending coffee cup meant that the tank was full for what was going to be out longest day mileage-wise. We did start the tour with a day in the 90's but today was going to be out only day where the mileage officially hit three figures.

Despite thunderstorms in the night, another thing to hit three figures was the humidity, so much so that when I got outside Denny's the condensation was streaming down the OUTSIDE of the windows. At 7am when we left it was 71 degrees and 100% humidity. Calling it 'sticky' today was like calling Tate and Lyle Golden Syrup 'watery'. The Weather Channel, which seems to have become every riders' favourite TV station said that the humidity would decrease as the temperature increased and that did prove to be the case. Once again though, the best way to beat the heat was to ride a bike because the wind generated did cool you down. We were also blessed today with North Easterly winds and as our route was generally in a Southerly direction it was more 'for' than 'agin'.

It is noticeable that everyone has become stronger as the days have gone by - if we hadn't done then there would be something wrong with all of us - and we are also riding well as a group. Today, in fact, for about 20 miles, we rode as a group of 8 as three other riders were travelling at roughly the same speed and we all tagged along together, to every one's mutual benefit.

The first SAG stop was not until 39 miles and we had been warned not to let our water bottles empty, to look out for the vans as they were 'patrolling' back and forth and fill up whenever we could. At the end of today, I had drunk 12 bottles of liquid @ 500ml per bottle so that was 6 litres of fluid. When I got to the hotel, I tried to get more cold drinks but couldn't but we have just come back from diner and I have drunk another 2 litres there. At the moment, I don't feel thirsty, but I do need to keep topping up through the evening and will drink heavily again at breakfast. I am not alone in the need to drink as much as this.

The route out of town was now through the fields of cotton, tobacco, soy and peanuts and we spent a little time trying to work out which were the peanuts and which the soy. Cotton and tobacco were easy enough to separate but, interestingly, the locals could not tell me which was which of the other. Out of our extended group today, only one could tell me how peanuts grow (they are attached to the roots and have to be dug up to be harvested, he told me). It really is strange. This is a country where people can tell you what their own personal Vol O2 (volume of oxygen or lung capacity) is, how many calories there are in certain foods, that orange juice heightens cholesterol (and by how much) what their average heart beat should be etc., etc., but no one knows how a peanut grows or what happens with cotton plants. Have they got it right and do we have it wrong?

The cotton fields were, as promised, a little more mature here and the cotton was starting to sprout out of the bols. The picture shows one just a shade more open than another with others waiting their turn. The plants were still not much higher than 12 - 18" and again we thought about the backbreaking work that used to be done to harvest this. You can still buy a T shirt in Wal-Mart in 100% cotton for $5. The tobaccos fields' crops were slightly smaller in height that their counterparts in Lancaster County, and we spoke to another farmer who was harvesting his crop. He was going about it in a different way to the Amish farmers as his machine just came along and took off the leaves; he told us he was on his third crop from the same plant this year and may get another. That's mechanisation for you (and crop/profit maximisation!)

As we have done throughout the whole of this trip we rode along some roads with familiar names; Halifax Road was one in particular that caught the eye today, but we also passed along the likes of :- Reedy Branch Road, Jeff Outlaw Road, Cow Branch Road, Hood Swamp Road and Bennetts Bridge Road. Names like that make your imagination run to think of how they were named in the first place. The best of the lot was an instruction on the cue sheet at 85.5 miles (so just when tether end was being approached) and the translation of this was :- "At 85.5 miles, turn Left onto Summerlins Crossroads Road. Turn is situated at a STOP sign at a T junction and the road may be unmarked." Is it any wonder we get lost occasionally?

There was little other activity from wildlife, probably due to the heat, though one or two dogs did give us a bit of a run for our money. The way I was taught to deal with them was to shout at them and make more noise than them whilst pointing at them. The best thing to shout is 'Go Home!' or something similar. It was suggested last night that the first thing that should be shouted is 'Get in the Truck!' and if that doesn't work, try 'Get in the damned truck!' (That was one for the locals) One of the riders, Bill, told us that when he was a youngster, he used to deliver papers and one dog always used to give him problems. Bill used to shout 'Go Home!' and that was normally effective until the day when he arrived at aforementioned dog's home and it was waiting for him with a 'What are you going to say now, then?' look in its eye. Standoff took place with dog barking at Bill until the owner came out of the house, grabbed the dog and was very, very apologetic to the poor young paper boy. Bill handed over the paper and the owner then proceeded to leather the dog with the rolled up paper berating it not to do naughty things again. Any surprise that the dog didn't really like Bill the paper boy? He said he gave up delivering soon after that.

There were a couple of longhorn cattle which were very well corralled away from the road as I didn't really fancy trying a quick getaway from these horns, especially the ones on the left.

The Weather Channel had proved very accurate in its forecast and the humidity had gone down as the day went on; the temperature did go up, too and one of the riders had a reading of 96 degrees, so we almost got three centuries today!

The last ten miles before we hit Warsaw city limits were on a road surface that I met last year, but haven't so far this year. I named it the 'Da-Dum' road. It has wide (1") cracks running across it at fairly regular intervals that go 'Da-Dum' as the bike goes over it (almost like the old railway tracks but more frequently) and they are of such depth that your body gets grief from when both wheels go over the crack; the front wheel gives pain through the hands and up to the elbows, the rear wheel gives pain through the saddle and into the, how shall we say, pelvic region. The problem is, there is no avoiding the bumps. You can't stand up and pedal and you can't let go of the bike or you lose control. You have to try and tolerate it, but after 80-odd miles in blistering heat, my patience was tried and, I have to admit, the road got a couple of rounds of abuse.

We were particularly pleased to ride today and complete the day in one piece; it seems like we rode it as quickly as we could to get it over with, but that wasn't the case, it was merely that our fitness allows us to ride a good deal faster and smarter than two weeks ago. We kept good pace lines and rode sensibly, so much so that we were into the hotel just before 3 o'clock having completed 100 miles in just over six and a half hours' riding at an average speed of just over 15 mph. Others probably did it quicker, but we were more than pleased with that.

Dinner tonight was at Smithfield Chicken Barbecue restaurant. It was interesting. The sign said Smithfield; there was chicken; there was no sign, sight, smell or taste of barbecue and the word restaurant had had its definition stretched to the absolute maximum. Never mind, there was plenty of food and lots of lemonade started the liquid reserve restocking process. Tomorrow's only 73 miles!