Samford plus light up the resistance

Tried the triple but ran into tire problems

Dog park with J

Church shakedown triple century tonight/tomorrow

MTB practice with the jags

Left at 4:00pm on Sunday simulating my Paris-Brest-Paris start time and drove 350 miles to Sumter. Immediately got my bike out and started riding yesterday (310 miles). Slept for 3 hours in a hotel (but 5 hours total stopped) and then did this ride. Then immediately after finishing drove home another 350 miles ... carefully, stopping to sleep at a couple gas stations for about 15 minutes in one and an hour in another.  

This ride was great and on many more backroads because I was far enough inland that many more backroads were chip/seal instead of unrideable sand/dirt. Correspondingly, there were 3x fewer cars. It was also a bit more hilly but still very flat. 

The biggest challenge of the day was rain and thunderstorms. I was dreading having to do the full ride in the rain, but the first 75 miles were "dry" with it only spitting rain.

Then the first storm hit with much heavier rain lasting for much longer than anticipated (maybe a full hour?). Then it completely stopped for several hours to the point I was completely dry ... just in time for the next storm which also lasted about an hour but was only a moderate soaking instead of a heavy soaking rain. 

I was completely dry and quite hot and even sunburned by the time I hit Florence, though. Florence is where my grandparents lived and where we visited for many years while I was growing up. I recreated a picture of their driveway of me and my dad on bikes in the driveway from almost 30 years ago (it's in the photos).

Then, I guess surprisingly and not so surprisingly, I got hit by one last storm system and drenched again crossing into the last county in South Carolina - Darlington, South Carolina - wrapping up riding in all the counties in South Carolina, my seventh state completed behind Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, Georgia, and Tennessee completed in that order. 

I also knocked out a good chunk of the North Carolina coastal counties, but unfortunately despite Google Maps routing me on NC-172, I didn't realize that it takes you straight through Camp Lejune with a nice big sign saying military traffic only, no thru traffic in EIGHT miles. I didn't want to risk riding EIGHT miles one way to find out that they wouldn't let me through (which seems highly likely that I couldn't just ride through a major marine corp base!) and then have to ride those EIGHT miles back.  Unfortunately with a big bay there, even turning around at the sign at the NC-172 entrance, I was going to have to add on about 20 miles to a ride that was already pushing my sleep threshold and timing for the amount of time I had set aside before a somewhat busy rest of the week back here in Alabama as I type this up. The consequence being that I missed some hard-to-reach NC counties that are going to involve another lengthy trip to add them back in some day.

Drivers were super friendly, the memories were great. I did have some drivers yell some things at me ... maybe three or four out of close to 4000 cars that passed me but I could never understand what they were saying and it didn't exactly sound mean so I'm just going to assume they were yelling encouragement, which actually does happen sometimes. 

If I had any super-power, I would hope it would be that my mind would automatically and subconsciously translate anything mean and hateful directly yelled at me somewhat regularly (particularly back here in Alabama) into something nice and positive and encouraging.

774 cars, 3/mi, 0.8/min, 46.6mph(avg)
https://www.mybiketraffic.com/rides/view/45405

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Brian Toone

2023/06/20 Kinson, NC road to paris nc/sc gator hunting day 2

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Samford plus light up the resistance

Tried the triple but ran into tire problems

Dog park with J

Church shakedown triple century tonight/tomorrow

MTB practice with the jags

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