Well, here we are, finally getting around to a GTR 08 report!  Bottom line?  Great rally!  This was our first GTR even though we had registered twice before!  (Illness/injury kept us from going two years running).  As it turns out, this was the ideal year for a bunch of Floridians to go!  It was *almost* as flat as it is around Clearwater!  I posted some details and a few pics on the RideBoards under the Florida/TampaBay forum, so I’ll try not to repeat much of that, but there are numerous thumbnailed pics at the end.  What I want to do here is tell you about OUR Georgia Tandem Rally! 

This was actually a double vacation for us.  Last year we decided we needed a “guest bedroom”, (as most in Florida do … in the last 6 years, we’ve had company 13 times for a total of 48 weeks!), and since Maggi and I both love to camp we decided the perfect “room addition” was a small camper!  So we bought a used 22 footer dirt cheap, towed it home and parked it by the pool.  We already had a sewer hookup on that side of the house installed by the previous owner, so all I had to do was install a 30 amp power line and bingo!  Instant RV park!  Pool-side guest quarters complete with a/c, cable tv, full kitchen and bath!  And when we want to go camping, we can just hook up and haul ass!  

So, though the camper was used quite a bit by friends last year, the Georgia Tandem Rally was really *our* first time getting to use it, and it was going to be a “double” vacation … camping *and* a tandem rally!  And what fun it was.  While everyone else was was hanging around a hotel in the city trying to find something to entertain themselves, we were out in the woods, (almost!), at the Chehaw State Park campground communing with the wildlife!  For Maggi and I, just sitting in our camp chairs with a cup of coffee watching the animals go about their daily routines was all the entertainment and relaxation we needed.

The campground itself was great.  We got there on Thursday so we basically had our pick of sites, but as it turned out only about 8 rigs total showed up that weekend anyway!  The RV area had about 50 or so very large spots, so as you can see we had *lots* of elbow room!  Naturally, we met  a few of the other campers and our nearest neighbors, (pictured), Dennis and Lucy from Alabama, were also attending the rally.  We didn’t get to see a whole lot of them at the campground because when they weren’t riding they were doing what I suppose you *should* be doing when attending these rallies …. exploring the local attractions.  But Maggi and I were content to just sit.  As a matter of fact, after Friday’s ride it rained the rest of the day, so we spent the whole afternoon sitting under our awning, watching it pour and talking to each other!  Yeah, I know.  For a married couple, we’re pretty wierd.  But, to each their own.  

The Friday ride route we chose was the 34 miler rather than the 68 for two very good reasons:  We hadn’t been on our bike for a week leading up to the rally for one reason or another, and it looked like it was going to rain any minute.  The rain actually did hit us on the last 7 or 8 miles of the ride, but by then it was just a welcomed cooling off on a hot, muggy day.  You can see the overcast in this picture, (and you can also see how well we filled up this little park’s parking lot!)  The  thunder and lightning didn’t come rolling in till later in the afternoon, and by then we were safe and sound back at our camp. 

The ride routes themselves I talked about on the RideBoard post ….. very flat, very rural and very pretty.  All things we enjoy, but the most enjoyable for us city dwellers was the lack of traffic.  Cyclists who live in these rural surroundings have no frame of reference for what it’s like doing a metro metric!  Being cut off, honked at, cussed at and brushed over by a close pass all generate more adrenaline than the ride itself, and, of course, cause more of an adrenaline crash afterwards.  Plus, there’s no such thing as LSD, (Long Steady Distance, and old school distance rider’s training method), in the city.  With lights and stop signs every other block, it’s impossible to take a reasonably uninterrupted ride.  So it was great for us to have these wonderful, scenic, unpopulated roads to ride!  I’m willing to bet though, for those who get to ride rural routes regularly anyway, the lack of daunting climbs and side-of-the-rode tourist attractions made it seemed boring.  It all a matter of perspective!

On Saturday, we opted for the 54 mile ride.  I had bonked a little bit on Friday and wanted to be a bit conservative, so took the middle distance.  Turns out, so did 70% of everyone else, so we had lots of company!  It was a mass start at the rally hotel that ran a whole three miles thru the city, and even that little bit of metro riding was with a police escort!  Add to that the visibility of 90 tandems in a pack, and we had no trouble at all with traffic on the way out!

Now, for the uninitiated, there are two ways to do a mass start ride if you aren’t Lance.  You can start up front and drift back until you find a group riding at your pace, or you can start at the back and pass people until you find that group.  Both have their drawbacks!  If you start at the back, you may never catch that group riding at “your pace” precisely because they are riding at “your pace”, so the gap never closes!  So, you often end up riding with a group going slower than would be optimal for you in a pack.  On the other hand, if you start up front, the temptation is always there to hang with a faster group than you can actually stay with for the whole ride.  There you end up burning out and crawling home. 

The latter was our Saturday ride.  I shouldn’t say “our” though.  Maggi was fine!  It was MY Saturday ride.  I was calling the shots, and it was my mistake.  We hung with the lead group for the first 20 miles or so, and after being off the bike all winter, I shouldn’t have done it.  Once we slowed down we ended up having a lot of fun, got to ride for a while with Jack and Susan Goetz from Tandems, Ltd. in Birmingham, www.tandemsltd.com, and then our gang of usual suspects from Central Florida caught up to us at a stop, so we hooked up with them for the rest of the ride. 

It was a good thing, too, because the damage had already been done!  I cramped harder towards the end of that ride than I ever have in 35+ years of riding.  Maggi had to push me, and our friends Ray & Nancy and Bob & Jan Thompson slowed down to pull me the last ten miles home.  If I hadn’t have had friends whose wheels I could suck, lunch would have been over by the time we got back! 

Oh, and speaking of those four, I guess this is as good a time as any to get in a plug!  Bob and Jan are hosting the Southern Tandem Rally next year, and I’m sure Ray and Nancy will be doing their share of the work too.  That will be a blast!  TWO tandem rallies in Florida next year.  Guess I better not get off the bike for 5 months next winter like I did this year!

The cramps were so bad that it was actually four days before I could get back on the bike and even then I was gun-shy for a few days!  So needless to say we didn’t make the Sunday ride at all.  We opted to take it easy, (since we had no choice!), and break camp early to start heading for home.  I only like to push our van at about 60 mph anyway when we’re towing the camper, so we knew it was about a 6 hour ride back and we both wanted to rest up for Monday morning.

It seems a bit of a shame to drive all that way to only ride some 90 miles in two rides, but since we were camping too, it was all OK with us.  Had we paid $309 for the hotel and ate every meal out like most did, I might have been a little more upset with myself.  But at $15 a night for 3 nights camping and cooking for ourselves, I guess I can cut myself a break.  Plus, what we got to do was a FUN time.  Plan on doing it again next year!

But obviously, I’m going to have to change a couple of things.  We’re probably going to have to come off our 60 degree Go\No-go temperature for the winter.  And if that’s going out the window, I suppost our 3% - 300 foot max climb rule out to be abandoned too.  

Bill

Finally!  The promised pictures!