Day 22, May 12, 2014

Today's ride was pretty uneventuful;  rural Alabama.  The "late loaders" (named after the faster riders, therefore, made to load their baggage and start later to give the slower riders a head start in order not to spread out the support too much) rode as a pack for the first 40 miles, to the first SAG stop.  Unfortunately for me, some of the stronger riders (all under 6' and 160 lbs) decided to play.  The pace got quick fast and you could smell an odor of testosterone mixing with the scent of honeysuckle.  Knowing that we have 114 miles, the 3rd hilliest section of the trip and forecast temperatures rising to the humid mid 90s, I was doing my best to hang on and vocally reign in the ring leader, JERE.  To compound matters, I had a slow leak in my back tire.  When we left the hotel, the psi was 100, but by the first SAG stop at 40 miles, the psi barely registered at 25.  I pumped up the tire at lunch (80 miles) and that worked until about 5 miles out.  After running over a particularly bad set of railroad tracks, the tire really went low.  Dave has a mini  hand pump, and twice Dave pumped my tire (I'm not sure why he did the work rather than making me pump my own tire) so I could limp the final miles to the hotel.  At the hotel, Jere changed out the tube and replaced the entire back tire for good measure.  He was asked by the tour leaders if he was my tire bitch, to which he replied; "Yes".  Seems like a fair trade to me since my work is to blog and slander him in prose.
  No rain today, not even wet roads.  Some pretty bad isolated thunderstorms rolled through the Montgomery/Prattville area after we arrived at the hotel, so we dodged another bullet.  Tuesday's forecast is slight breezes out of the south-east (our direction of travel), and warm.  Thunderstorms forecast for late afternoon, hopefully, after we are secure at the hotel.  Today's destination is Columbus, Ga, home of Fort Bragg.  We'll cross into Georgia and the Eastern Time Zone at the very end of the day, another 113 mile today, but 1/3 of yesterday's climbing.