Day 44: Bates Motel

Paul's media star continues to rise.  Today he's being filmed for a TV spot in Rochester (we're in Henrietta, which is south of Rochester).  Tomorrow, Syracuse.  This will surely launch his career as a butt model.  It might also help our fundraising.

 

Our day off in Niagara Falls was wonderful--or at least mine was.  Don and Susan Lubick took me on the Maid of the Mist, for a hike through the lovely park on the American side of the falls, and then to their house for a wonderful langorous lunch on their patio overlooking Lake Erie.  They served up many fresh fruits and vegetables, some from Don's garden, and all of which tasted just wonderful after 6 weeks of iceberg lettuce and other vegetables specially engineered for shelf life rather than flavor or texture.  The hike amused me somewhat.  We walked a long way and I was getting tired, but there was no evidence that Don (79) was tiring at all, much less Susan.  They are both amazing.  (Don was the Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy at Treasury who hired me to be his deputy in 1998.)

 

Paul stayed at the hotel and worked on his independent study project for most of the day.  We wandered out and found a funky pizza restaurant in what had once been an interesting part of Niagara Falls, but is now mostly abandoned and depressing.  The pizza was surprisingly good.

 

Today started with Grand Slam breakfasts at Denny's followed by 80 miles on mostly pretty rural roads.  We have 13 new riders with us for the last segment.  I passed most of them this morning and sensed that they were a bit intimidated by the prospect of joining a group of hardened road warriors.  The terrain was flat to rolling hills.  After a day of rest, I felt like I had brand new legs.  That was wonderful, but after a while, the heat and humidity sapped the spurt of energy.  When the fossils passed me, I rode in their pace line for a little while, but dropped off when we caught up to Paul.  (Did I ever mention the fossils?  Paul has, at least obliquely.  This is the group of relatively fast older guys whose picture appeared on Mike's website next to the "fossils" sign in Oregon.  Matt thought that it was apt, and I agreed.)  Shortly afterward, Paul dropped me too.

 

I stopped for lunch with some other cyclists in the village of Bergen.  This restaurant, unlike so many we have assaulted in the past, was not daunted by the inundation by spandex-clad weirdos.  The food was great and I got as much ice tea as I could drink, which is what I crave most on a hot day.  It was wonderful.

 

After returning to our bikes, Susan told me most of her life story and the miles went by very fast.  I was almost disappointed to get to the hotel.  Getting inside the hotel, I was really disappointed.  Our room smells like cigars and the shower flow was anemic.  The pool had been filled in with concrete, and while there is theoretically wireless internet service, the person at the desk said that there was nothing she could do about the fact that it had obviously stopped working and no one she could call for help.  Who knows when you will see this post.  I joined the dairy queens for a post ride milkshake and Carol said how much she hated our new hotel.  She was trying to find an analogy.  I suggested the Bates Motel.  Carol's eyes went very wide.  I suggested that she'd be fine as long as she didn't take a shower.  Dianne volunteered that the Bates Motel was actually a Wisconsin attraction.  The dairy queens promised that one of them would hear and come to the rescue if Carol screamed.  (The dairy queens are Carol, Dianne, Jill, and Val.  They usually ride together and almost always seek out ice cream and milkshakes after rides.)

 

Speaking of Dairy Queen, Mike gave us all a lecture on how we're going to have to cut back on our food consumption if we don't want to blimp out after the ride.  Duh!  He implied that we should start now, which seems odd given that we're going to need those glycogen stores in our muscles for a few more days.  I will surely miss the unfettered consumption of ice cream, milkshakes, and french fries.  I will try to simply feast on the memory (and try to forget what I had to do to burn all of those calories).

 

Today's injury report:  I got to the hotel and one of the other riders told me that Paul had crashed. I had to probe to learn that it was not serious and Paul was okay.  (Hint to other riders:  Say, "Paul crashed, but he's fine," rather than "Paul crashed..." which evokes scary thoughts like, "and he was medivaced to the University of Rochester.")   Paul's fine.  He was riding with Sierra (youngest, cutest, woman in our group) and turned to see why her derailleur was making noise.  When he returned his attention to the road, he was veering off it.  He destroyed a pair of gloves and got a few scrapes, but he says his shifters now work better than ever.  Bending them appeared to be just the trick.

 

Cheers,

 

Len