The last three days (days 2, 3, and 4 of the divine 9) have been so much fun and quite eventful! I'd love to get into detail about all of them, but that would get way too long so I'll just focus on today - a 94 mile ride into Baker, Nevada (our 16th state!).
I woke up feeling well rested after an evening of sleeping under the stars. We're in the midst of the Perseid meteor shower so it was great to set up my sleeping bag on the playground at the Delta, UT park and just stare at the night sky. I even saw one of the most incredible meteors I've ever seen.
I rode with Chelsea, Sarah, and Stewart today and we were able to get out right at sunrise. It was one of the loveliest mornings we've had. The sunrise was beautiful and we were surrounded by hazy mountains on all sides. With the sun at our backs we had fun making funny shapes with our elongated shadows. With hardly any traffic all morning we had a fun time goofing around all the way until first lunch at mile 40.
Post-lunch we had a couple big climbs, but neither of them were too steep and they both offered a lot of visual distractions. The summit of the second climb is where things started to go awry. As we approached the top we started seeing dark, ominous clouds above the valley below. At that point we were in a bit of a pickle: our choices were to bike down into the valley where we would probably be hit by storms and have to stop, or stay on top of the mountain - a terrible place to be during a thunderstorm.
We decided to stay on top of the mountain and hoped that the storm would pass quickly. Unfortunately for us this was the largest storm we had ever seen and we ended up waiting on top of that hill for over an hour as storm cloud after storm cloud swept across the valley. It wasn't too bad though because there were so many of us up there and we were just having a good time hanging out. Plus it was awesome watching lightning from that vantage point.
But then, to our dismay, the wind shifted and the storms started heading our way. All of a sudden it got really cold and started raining and none of us had our warm layers because we're in the desert and it had been in the 90's just minutes before! We were on top of that mountain for another half an hour as we got poured on, but finally, after a wild, silly, chilly, ridiculous hour and a half we were able to start the decent to Baker, still nearly 30 miles away.
With Stewart in the lead we were flying and made it all the way to the Nevada state line sign (state line number sixteen!) in just over an hour. After our typical photoshoot we looked to our left towards Baker and a huge storm was forming in the distance. We decided to take refuge in the gas station and it's a good thing we did because shortly after we were hit by the most intense storm of the day. Sadly, with only 6 miles till the host we had to be picked up by the van because the storm showed no sign of stopping.
The whole afternoon was a bit of a frenzy but I still had a really good time! We made the best of an unfortunate weather situation and just laughed it off as best we could. It's pretty crazy that we've had weeks without rain and now that we're in the desert we can't seem to shake the storms. Oh the irony. They need the rain here in Nevada though, so it's hard to be too upset about it. Hopefully it'll clear up at some point tomorrow.