Ride failure

I organized a trip to John Day, Oregon for my cycling friends to observe the solar eclipse and ride bikes.  One of the attendees said she'd like to ride about 70 miles and was concerned that most of the routes out that way were well over that 70 mile distance that she was comfortable with.  I took the 174 mile Old West Scenic Bikeway and shortened it to about 110 by taking Hwy 395 down  to Mt Vernon (Race Across Oregon route), which I figured that we could ride relay style as a "ride and tie" effort giving both of us about 55 miles. I put the route on my two Garmin Edge 305 bike GPS units, and on my TomTom auto dash GPS.

We were spending 3 days there, with one day being taken up with eclipse viewing.  That left Saturday or Sunday to ride bikes.  On Saturday, the person who wanted a 70 mile ride took off early in the AM, and said she was going to head into town for breakfast. (the Senior Center was offering a $10 all you can eat breakfast). By 11 AM it was obvious that she wasn't coming back.  The rest of us went into John Day. We had lunch and wandered around taking in the market atmosphere.

On Sunday I left early to get tickets for all of us to attend the Kam Wah Chung tour. I was back at camp with 10 tickets in hand, only to find that our 70 mile rider was again gone, and this time another rider was gone with her.

Most of us rode our bikes back to town mid morning to take the tour, and we found it very interesting.

Following lunch, Julie and I drove out to some potential eclipse viewing points that I had mapped out in advance. We took some Forest Service roads into the back country and were astonished to see the number of people tucked back into the hills to secure their eclipse viewing locations.

That evening we were all invited to our hosts' home for dinner.

 I told the second "missing" rider that if I had known they were going out for an extended ride I would have joined them.  She said that she didn't know either.  She had been invited to ride to breakfast, and from there they just took off on a ride.

Oh well, I know when I'm not welcome.

Monday arrived and our hosts invited us all up to the house again for breakfast.  Following breakfast we observed the eclipse.

The biking and eclipse watching weekend turned into mostly just an eclipse watching trip for me.  If I had known that in advance I would have brought my fixed gear bike rather than drag my carbon bike into the dust, and I could more easily ride the fixed gear bike with its flat pedals with my athletic shoes.

Oh well, at least I got a few miles (though I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Julie almost doubled my bike mileage total!)

.........Road Bike........Rollers.......MTB..........Lifecycle......Total
Today .......7.................0.................0...............0..........7
Jan.........304................15................0...............31..........350
Feb..........0..................0..................0...............0..............0
March.......18.................0.................0...............0............18
April.......113................0.................0...............0...........113
May.........155................0.................0...............0...........155
June..........10.................0.................0................0.............10
July..........79..................0.................0................0.............79
Aug..........36...................0.................0................0............36
Total.......730...............15.................0...............31...........786