Day 17 of 17 Days of Texas. Another day of riding into the wind. We rode to breakfast just a few miles down the road. This is were Bob finally came up with the words to express the feelings of our last 16 days - “Texas Blows!” With that in mind we rode a few more miles to a little ferry that would take us across Galveston Bay. On the other side we rode into the worst wind of the trip; Keri, Sig and I all got behind Bob. He worked as hard as he could and still had trouble staying in the high single digits. Bob and Sig stopped at one point and Keri and I struck out on our own for awhile, it was incredibly hard to move forward. When we got to Mo’s van I couldn’t believe we had only gone 30 miles.
Then road turned a bit, so the next 20 miles into checkpoint were a little easier. We stopped at the DQ as the sag vans pulled in full of riders who had given up for the day, or didn’t even start the day riding. They were kind of annoying and loud, so Keri, Bob and I went farther and found a Subway. After refueling, we set off at a better pace and caught up to Sig just before we came to the 2000 mile mark. Kelly had drawn the state of Texas on the road with chalk and had included all the riders names except mine – she hastily fixed her error before we left to finish our last miles. There were many squished armadillos and one flat six foot gator on the side of the road.
Our accommodations were at a YMCA, wonderful showers and a very hot tub to relax in. We could camp outside, but I elected to sleep inside along with about half of the others, but wish I hadn’t – some of them are very weird.
83.5 miles