Epilogue--A few post-ride thoughts

I'll use this spot to post some random thoughts if and when they occur to me...

The grand total mileage came out to be 335 miles. This is slightly longer than what Adventure Cycling shows as the official mileage from Aspen Alley to Salida, due to the fact that we occassionally rode off course to get to our various overnight spots during the trip.

Answer to the milkshake riddle: Grammi was the healthnut who ordered Strawberry, I went for the caffeine spike of coffee-toffee, and Richie SweetToothMan opted for the cookie dough.

Speaking of Adventure Cycling, I have to thank them for plotting out this course (2008 is the 10th anniversary). Their maps are unbelievably great. We never got close to getting lost during this ride, and the maps are printed on waterproof paper. I mistakenly left them exposed on the outside of my BOB trailer the night we had heavy rains along Gore Pass. No worries, they still appear (almost) as fresh as the other 4 maps that we did not use on our ride. Find out about them at http://www.adventurecycling.org/

I was surprised that during our 8 days out on the route, we encountered only one other rider who was doing the ride. On the first day Grandman met Tim, gave him a coke and let him use our full-size tire pump, and chatted with him for 20 minutes or so (Richie, Mom, and I rode up late in the conversation, so we met him too.) Tim was doing the ride solo and backwards, from Mexico north to Canada. He encountered lots of rain on his ride, and told us stories of the infamous mud in New Mexico. He had been on the ride for 43 days, and we encountered him right about at the halfway point. It would have been fun to hear more about his journey, but we both needed to put in some more miles. I figured we would meet more Divide riders, but in the end we saw only Tim. I'm sure we would have seen more if we had done the ride in July.

That same day Mom made it up a particularly steep and long hill, and a cigarette-smoking lady standing by a car smirked at her and smuggly said "That's the easy hill, you have 4 more coming up, and one is much worse than that." Hmmm, how shall I describe how Mom felt about this? Let's just say it is a good thing that this lady was not a grasshopper.

Dilly Miles. My odometer's battery ran out right before the ride, so I replaced it right before driving to CO. That sounds good, except it turns out that my settings were all lost, and I did not know how to reinput them. The most important setting is to tell the odometer how many full revolutions of the wheel it takes to travel a mile. When the odometer reset, it did two things:

1) It decided to show me kilometers instead of miles

2) It returned to the factory preset for revolutions per kilometer, which does not work on my bike, since I have 29" wheels, somewhat larger than standard 26" mountain bike wheels.

Result? My odometer dutifully tracked a measure of distance that was somewhat greater than a kilometer, but significantly less than a mile. I decided to call these Dilly Miles.

Mom's odometer was tracking closely to the official map mileage. After a few days I determined that when Mom's odometer read 10.0 miles, I showed 15.25 Dilly Miles. How do you keep an actuary occupied during a 300 mile bike ride? Make him convert everything to and from Dilly Miles!

Example...on the Ute Pass day we were at one intersection where the map read 96.3 miles, and we had a turn upcoming at 103.3 miles. So far so good, we need to turn in 7 miles.

OK, the Dilly Mile conversion is close to 3:2, so 7 miles /2 is 3.5, and 3.5*3 is 10.5 Dilly Miles per 7 real miles. Plus I have to add a quarter Dilly Mile per 10 real miles, so we will call this roughly 10.7 Dilly Miles. My odometer read 23.6 Dilly Miles at the time. I therefore was looking for the intersection somewhere around 34.3 Dilly Miles. This worked great, and I was always right within 0.2 Dilly Miles.