Today’s ride was full of farmland hills. Every slow, drawn out, hard climb up hill would be followed by a short brief downhill, not fully satisfying the speed and mileage equivalent to the climb. We rode leap frog style with Lees, Dan and Mark, Spokes for Strokes crew (SFS) for most of the morning. The sky began to darken toward the eastern horizon as we were heading south on 13. We have heard stories of these micro burst storms, very similar in their intensity, quickness and damage to Florida’s summer storms, only these would bring pelting hail and gusting winds. A woman told us about her barn windows being completely blown out a few days ago and railroad cars turned over on the tracks. We had just passed multiple phone lines that were down and so seeing the black sky streaked with lightening bolts ahead made me very nervous. I started looking for places to seek shelter if the storm blew in on us. We crossed over a small bridge and I thought, we could hide out under there. We passed an old farm house with a barn that I thought would keep us dry. As the lightening got closer and we felt the first drops of rain, I quickly threw my rain coat on and put on my pannier covers. The darker the sky got, the less the wind blew. As we crested over a hill, a girl was changing her bike tire. Matt stopped to help her, while I started the short descent and climb up the next one. Just as I got to the top of the next climb, Dan was there to the rescue with his camper and crew. We debated about the storm, as the rain continued to fall. Dan suggested we throw our gear in the back of the truck and come with them to the campsite 12 miles ahead. When Matt pulled up, I told him the option and we both knew our day would either need to end there, or we’d need to find a safe place next to the road to wait it out. Being from Florida and being terrified of bolted lightening, we both quickly threw our bikes in the back and jumped in the truck.
We made it to a small RV campground in Circle and waited out the storm under the awning of the local laundry mat. The guy that ran the place said we could tent for free, if we were crazy enough to put up a tent in the rain. We definitely are that ‘crazy’ if it means free camping :). The guy also showed us the single restroom and the tv in the laundry mat that we were able to watch. He insisted that if Hillary Clinton came on, he would start screaming at the screen and that it might get violent. He was very passionate about his hatred towards Clinton. When the storm passed, we road to a local spot to eat pizza with everyone from SFS and then crawled into bed by 7pm.
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