Yesterday morning at 7:00 am, when the temperature was 26°, eight of us Tarheel Ranodonneurs left the Food Lion parking lot in Siler City to ride the North Carolina Jumping Off Rock Permanent.  Actually, it’s called the Siler City Express, but I’ve renamed it as an expression of the absolute authority I have over the keyboard.  Well, I don’t really have that much authority because I notice that quite often the letter I type is not the one that shows up on the screen.  Besides, that’s not really the reason I renamed the permanent, but I’ll get to the renaming later.  The picture above is a clue, though.

    Twenty-six degrees is cold for a North Carolina cyclist.  At least I hope it’s cold for a North Carolina cyclist.  I’ve only been one for about three months, but it seemed cold to me, and it sounds like it was cold for the others as well.  It was a clear morning, as cold ones usually are, and the temperature was supposed to rise into the upper fifties, but the low was supposed to be ten degrees warmer than it was, so who knew what would happen.

    The plants along the road were covered in frost, but it has been dry and there wasn’t any ice on the roadway.  When it’s cold, I wear the knit wool gloves you find at most sports shops with nitrile liners.  It is a good combination so my fingers were warm and with some thick socks on, my toes were too.  I wore cycling shorts with leg warmers, a long sleeve wool undershirt with a wool jersey over it, a PI vest and very light PI jacket that I found on the side of the road a couple of years ago.  By the time we got to Seagrove, thirty miles into the ride, I was ready to strip off jacket and glove liners.  I finished the ride wearing the rest of my kit so I planned pretty well.  Also by Seagrove, my frozen water bottles had thawed out.  When I’d reached for a drink earlier, I found they’d frozen on the drive to Siler City.

    Seagrove, North Carolina is the pottery capital of the world, I think.  The population of Seagrove proper is only about 250, but there are more than a hundred potters in the area and it is home to a fine pottery museum that’s filled with exhibits and samples of pottery tracing pottery history in North Carolina all the way back to pre-colonial days, when the North Carolina native population made red, earthenware pots.  This is red clay country with lots of brick buildings and plenty of material for pots.

    After a stop at the Hardees on the edge of town, we split into two groups: those who were anxious to go and those who wanted some biscuits and gravy.  Just before the split, we met a couple who are homesteading 57 acres outside of town.  They told us they are bicycle fans and then described the house they are building with materials from their homestead: rocks from the fields for the foundation and logs and milled lumber from trees on the land.  They are even nailing everything together with tree nails (wooden dowels).  We became homestead fans, but I also wondered if we don’t have enough homesteads.

    From Seagrove, we entered the Uwharrie Mountains.  The Uwharrie are supposed to be the oldest mountains in North America and my have once towered 20,000 feet above sea level, but now the tallest peak is less than a tenth of that height at just under 2000 feet high.  While the climbs in the Uhawarrie are not long, they come one after another with downhills in between.  Interestingly, the discovery of gold in the Uwharrie foothills in 1799 led to America’s first gold rush.

    A few miles into the Uwharrie, I bonked.  All of a sudden, it felt like I didn’t have any blood in my legs.  I guess that feeling may be the buildup lactic acid, but it always feels to me like there’s no blood getting to the muscles.  I dropped of the back of the pack.  After a while I drank a bottle of Ensure Plus I had in my handlebar bag and I felt a little better for a while.

    It took longer than I expected, but the second group finally caught me before the turnaround point of the ride.  Joe slowed to ride with me, but I assured him I was alright.  I have a slight cold and I thought this might happen.  He told me he wasn’t very energetic himself, but he did ride on to catch up with the others.  I met them as they were leaving the next two controls so they felt better about me and after the turn around, where I ate a PB sandwich and drank a V-8, I felt pretty good; just a little slow.

    Headed back into the Uwharrie -- the permanent is an out and back ride, I came to the sign that advised me I was on a North Carolina Scenic Byway.  My experience is that Scenic Byways are usually coast routes that are either cold and foggy or clear and windy; or very hilly or mountainous roads.    This one, I knew, was one of the hilly roads and I didn’t think it was very funny.  

    The almost seven mile stretch on Flint Hill Road didn’t excite me because I remembered that I’d ridden down some good hills coming out and now I would have to climb back up them.  As it turned out, there were as many downhills going home, so it was alright.

    Nina loves to hike and we went for a hike a little further north in the Uwharrie last Monday, so I was happy to see lots of trail access stops along this route.  We will be back, but I think we’ll wait for hunting season to end because the parking lots were all full of hunter’s pick-up trucks and we saw hunters on our Monday hike.   There’s no hunting in North Carolina on Sunday, so that’s an option if we go to church early.

    As I started up one hill, I noticed that someone had painted “Jumping Off Rock” on the road with some arrows pointing to the left.  I knew there was a Jumping Off Rock around here (the homesteaders called it lover’s leap), but I missed it coming out.  This time, I turned off the road and down the trail to the rock.  As I approached the rock, I saw the trail dissolve over the rock like a river over it’s delta.  I also noted that there was a thin blanket of pebbles on the rock.  As I skidded toward the edge of the rock, I snapped the photo at the top of the blog in an effort to document the end of my life.  

    Fortunately, when I built the Red Randonneuse, I endowed it with certain special abilities that I don’t want to discuss on this blog for fear that agents from Sector 7 might read it, kidnap me, and take me to a secret debriefing location to find out what technologies I may or may not have developed for bicycles.

    After being extricated from my almost certain death by my faithful bicycle, I pedaled back up to the road and found that the road went almost straight up from here.  “So that’s why people jump off the rock,” I thought to myself.  I dropped the chain to the small chainring and lifted it to the largest sprocket -- 34x28 -- and started up.  In a moment, I might have gotten off and walked, but I saw a hunter coming out of the woods and I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of a certainly fearless man who had been out alone in the woods facing the mighty Bambi  while armed only with a Winchester Model 70 .270 calibre rifle and a camouflage colored lawn chair.

    Pretty soon, I passed the Scenic Byway sign at the other end of this part of the ride and pedaled back into Seagrove where the rest of the group was just leaving again.  When the lady at the counter signed my card, she asked if the others were leaving me behind.  I admitted that I fell off the back a long time ago.  

    I ate a medium size french fries with extra salt, and drank some green tea before heading out from Seagrove.  Before I left, I flipped the cue sheet up so that I could read the cues for the last 32 mile section, but I inadvertently left the first part folded under so the cues didn’t make any sense at all.  I stopped at a pottery and asked where Old Coleridge Road is.  The lady at the counter said, “Well, honey, I’ve lived here all my life and I never heard of Old Coleridge Road.  Where do you want to go?”  

    “Siler City,” I told her.  She began to tell me the best route to Siler City, but I said I had to ride on the designated roads because I was in a kind of a contest -- to see if I could finish.  We decided no one at the pottery could help me so I took off down the hill in front of the shop.  I’ve ridden around here a few times so when I saw Fork Creek Mill Road, I knew where I was.  Then I found Erect Road and Jess Jesup Road.  Somewhere along the way, I stopped and found the turned under part of the cue sheet and everything that hadn’t made sense came clear.  Thanks to the Red Randonneuse who takes such good care of me, I was never in any real danger of becoming lost.  Besides, I could have ridden home from here, but the car would have been in Siler City and Nina would have wanted me to go and get it; which I guess I would have been doing this morning.

    With the cue sheet straight, most of the hills behind me, a PB sandwich and Snickers bar in my front bag, and some green tea in my water bottle, I was in good shape to finish.  

    There are dogs all along the roads in North Carolina and riding at a diminished pace by myself, I became prey to lots of them.  I get so sick of them, I sometimes stop and dare them to mess with me.  They don’t seem to like this response and head for home when I do it.  I should carry a chip and dare them to knock it off my shoulder, I guess.  I’m not really trying to scare them when I do this.  I get so mad, I really want them to try backing up their bark and I guess they understand that I’m serious.

    One missed street in Siler City and the follow up directions from a lady at a store where you drive right through and I was soon at the intersection with Highway 64.  The last control was across the street but some yahoos had tried to save on a tow truck bill by pulling a stalled van onto a rattletrap trailer.  The trailer broke so there were three tow trucks, the broken down van, the broken trailer, and the pick-up truck trying to pull the trailer all trying to straighten the mess up.  I got past the mess on my bicycle, but the light wouldn’t trip for me.  I waited through two cycles and then ran the light when the people on the other side got their third green and stopped the traffic on 64.  

    It was 5:00 pm, ten hours after I started.  Someone asked Greg LeMond if riding gets easier with training.  He said it doesn’t get easier, you just go faster.  Sometimes I don’t.