Miles: 113 Miles
Ride Time: 8 hours 4 minutes
Avg. Speed: 14.0 Mph
Total Climbing: 7996 feet
Work: 3943 kJ
Our main challenge today was dogs. We must have been chased by almost a hundred dogs. It seemed like every house we passed had a dog or more and they would either bark or chase us. Some came close but no one got bit. Most of the dogs are not smart enough to know that you have to run forward of the bike to catch us. Time after time the dogs would run straight at the bike and then when they reached the road they would have to turn. Only about one or two had figured out they had to run at a diagonal if they wanted any chance to catch the bike. Most of the time I would just speed up and leave them behind but some dogs would follow for a long time. I had one dog that raced us for a good quarter mile before giving up.
Team Colorado started out with mechanical problems first thing this morning as Dave’s chain ring had a bent tooth. He had broken the chain yesterday and this was not noticed yesterday since he never used the small ring after that. While he changed bikes, Stephanie started out and I joined her. We rode together all the way to lunch. I expected Team Colorado to catch up but they never did since they also took a 6 mile detour as the made a wrong turn. At the end of the day Hollywood’s directions where in taters so I’m surprised if they would ever find the hotel but lucky for them they found the Sonic where I was enjoying my chocolate shake.
The road continued through the Ozarks so we had a ton of small hills to climb as the road snaked its way along the ridges. We also had to deal with about 6 miles of gravel road which proved very challenging. Lucky no one in the group crashed or got a flat.
By the end of the day we had finished the hills of the Ozarks and entered the flat river valley of the Mississippi River which we will cross tomorrow. I was glad to pull into a Sonic and have a chocolate milk shake. We had just completed 17,000 feet of climbing in the past two days.
I hope you get a chance to check out the other photos from today on Flickr.
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