Stefen Ray's Blog: AIDS/Lifecycle 12 - An Unforgettable Journey

I peddled 110 miles and climbed 2,875 vertical feet.

What a long and exhausting day! They told us this route today was relatively flat, but we still climbed over 2,800 verticle feet. Wow!

It was still a gorgeous route going down the Central Valley past artichoke, lettuce, strawberry fields, fruit tree groves and grape vineyards. It was pretty flat during those segments, and with some occasional tail winds I was able to get up to some speeds past 25 miles per hour. It was quite a rush to say the least!

I had to stop for a bathroom break at a deep fried artichoke vendor and one of my friends talked me into staying and purchasing some. YUMMY! I'm glad I listened.

Some of the best fun on the ride, besides the community and scenery is the Rest and lunch stops. As you saw from my previous blog post, they have a daily theme and dress and get campy. It makes a potentially boring pit stop fun AND sometimes causes delays as I was soooo busy snapping pictures of as much as I could...lol.

My favorite stop on Day 2 was the Otter Pop Bear pit stop. There were bears in tutus passing out Otter Pops. For those of you who don't know, in the Gay community a "bear" is a rather burly and large man that can be hairy or not. You can clearly see this in the pics I've included here.

Rey Rey was getting to meet sooo many people and colorful characters. He made taking the pictures a lot more fun for sure.

All in all it was a looooong day! I started early and ended rather late for my pace, but I was still far ahead of the crowd so I got set up and showered without too much difficulty.

All this busy-ness did make writing daily blog posts rather challenging though. I didn't seem to have a minute to myself between eating, drinking, peeing, cycling, eating, drinking, peeing, cycling some more, showering, eating dinner and watching the evening program.

Every night I made sure to set up my morning "stuff" so I could get dressed and pack up my tent efficiently and get on the road as early as possible. Even with getting up at 4:30am and doing all of that some days it was a real challenge to get started when the route opened at 6:30am.

Oh, and I forgot, I got to experience the amazing medical team as I had to check in with them every morning and evening. My nether region has little body fat so I was sore and raw. I had to go to a "butt clinic" every morning to get stuff put on down there to make 8 or more hours in the saddle as safe and comfortable as possible. I got over bending over in front of a female stranger to look at my arse and see how things were...

I also got a flat 2 miles before rolling into camp darn it! I ran over something that ripped a hole in my tread. I thought I was hosed about peddling into camp, but this HOT fellow cyclists stopped to help out and patched up the whole, threw a tube in it and got me rolling again.

Then I had to check in with Bike Tech to look at my tire. They said to change it. Thank goodness I brought spares. I brought them the tire and they told me to head to the showers and they'd have it changed by the time I was done. It was AND they didn't charge me a dime! Wow!

What I experienced by these challenges is the AMAZING support this event provides the cyclists and volunteers. I didn't have to worry about a thing. Medically or mechanically!