Afternoon Walk

Morning Walk

All over Staunton

Staunton exploring

UPS errand

759 cars, 2.6/mi, 0.7/min, 47.9mph(avg)


I knew as I got closer to the end of Day 1 that I was facing a bit of a dilemma. My normal strategy is to leave early evening so that I can ride 10-12 hours at night and finish the last 6-8 hours during the earlier part of the day with the worst case of finishing early afternoon. But that was the problem, I wasn’t even going to arrive at the hotel until several hours after the time I’d normally like to start riding during the summer!

The best I could do was start riding again by 3am, which means riding the entire daylight hours. So I set my alarm for 2:30am with the hope of leaving by 3 or 3:30 at the latest. Instead, I slept right through that alarm (it was on vibrate only) and didn’t even wake up until 5am. This worked out well because I am glad I got to ride in my favorite part of the day (sunrise) and decided by lunch that I could find a place to take an afternoon nap somewhere and then get started again around sunset and ride through the night.

The question I was trying to work out was route I could take so that I wasn’t just riding the same roads back to the start. I mistakenly trusted Google Maps to take me to a few intermediate points, and it didn’t take long before I was three miles into a gravel road staring at a “Dead End – Private property – No turnaround – This road does NOT go through” homemade sign. So I turned around because I had passes a few other turns, but the ones google maps tried to re-route me through was a long abandoned county road in one of the pics attached to the ride. On my Garmin with popularity routing turned on, it looked like a well ridden road which made me wonder if it was on a bikepacking route.

So not one, not two, but SIX bonus, gravel miles later myself back on Highway 71 at the same spot where I had just been. A few miles later I was able to get breakfast at a McDonald’s in Ashdown, Arkansas and load up on ice and make my way across a large dam of the Saline River creating Milwood Lake. This was followed by a fun, long, rolling climb up to Saratoga.

By the time I had made it up through Nashville and Murfreesboro it had started to get quite hot. I started struggling a bit and stopping at all the gas stations again. It was around here that I decided to start looking for hotels to take an afternoon “siesta” and found a great hotel in the Caddo Valley outside Hot Springs.

It was perfect and much needed. My Garmin had climbed up to near 110 degF in the sun. When I woke up a couple hours later and left, the temp was still in the 90s, but with the sun low enough in the sky before sunset everything was covered in shade as I rode. It was wonderful, my favorite part of the entire trip – the section of US Highway 67 from Caddo Valley to Malvern.

It stayed hilly for a while but it eventually flattened out. I wasn’t sure what I would find open in the middle of the night so I loaded up and carried extra gatorade. Thankfully I never ran out as the temps had dropped down finally into the lower 80s and upper 70s. It was interesting looking at how much harder my heart had to work during the day in the heat as opposed to the nighttime riding. Check it out on the distance-based graph in the analysis tab.

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Brian Toone

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Afternoon Walk

Morning Walk

All over Staunton

Staunton exploring

UPS errand

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