WARNING! Heat advisory! Avoid all outdoor exertion today due to excessive heat index and chance for heat stress induced illness. NWS.
Dude! They were right. It started hot and humid, and ramped up from there. The tailwind made us fast, but made us even hotter (and wetter). When we got to Circleville, and rolled into the first coffee shop we were a wet, smelly, bedraggled lot - that chilled so quickly in the air conditioning that we had to run outside occasionally to warm back up - that didn't last long, too hot, back into the AC.
Gradual transition from the overall impression being vast expanses of cultivated fields with periodic remnant woodlots, to generally forested land with fields cleared in the forests. We got close enough to Dayton and Columbus that some stretches were clearly suburban "ranchettes" - 5 acres with house and pond and maybe a small barn (think the communities east of Lafayette, or the Erie airport without the landing strip and hangars), in small groupings of 10-20 homes.
Passed through some stretches of long rounded ridges - perhaps 100 - 200 feet high - that, if I read my Wikipedia correctly are remnant moraines from the continental glaciers. See picture.
Plenty of small industrial operations: metal fabricating, some electronics manufacturing, farm implements - presumably the outliers of the "industrial heartland".
Talk about getting "dropped by the peleton": at one point, the trailing edge of a cloud shadow was about 25 meters ahead of me, and (shadow being cooler than blazing sun) I tried to make it up into the shadow and chased it full gas for a couple kilometers without ever quite making it into the shade. Suppose it was hopeless anyway, since I suspect that once I caught the shadow I wouldn't have picked up a draft anyway.
We came out of the finishing coffee shop to find a fast-advancing wall of black clouds and made it over to the hotel just in time to run inside from the thunder, lightning, howling wind, and torrential downpour that last half an hour, prompted numerous weather alerts and some flooding north of here, and left us with much cooler, drier air afterwards. (Note the faint semicircular arc of wind-driven mist coming off the left edge of the roof of the blue car in the picture.)
The towns we rode through today seemed to have this thing with county courthouse buildings - must have been a competitive thing - ornate, stone buildings with decorations and big towers.
BTW Circleville was named after circular mounds from early native Americans back predating the modern "Indians" (Hopwell culture, 500 BC to 200 AD). The town was built on the circular mounds, and laid out in a circle. In the early 1800's they figured out that this was impractical and "The Circleville Squaring Company" (great name) was commissioned to reconfigure all the streets. It's now square middle america with no remnants of the original mounds.
5.2 hr, 150 km (94 miles), 17.9 mph, 2408 kJoule, 371 meter climbing, heart rate 99, 141 watt av. (Did some longer intervals the last hour).
Tomorrow back to a bigger day with 6000 ft climbing.
No comments:
Post a Comment