This past weekend was the thirteenth Rolling in Randolph County bicycle ride weekend.  Foster Hughes, of the Parks and Recreation Department ,organizes the ride every year, and did so again this year, but this year, on the weekend of the ride, he took a small vacation and left the actual running of the ride to his staff.  They did a marvelous job.  A better job than I did.

    You see, I’d been looking forward to the ride since before I moved to North Carolina because our plan was to move to Asheboro, which is smack in the center of Randolph County, and I’d seen the web page for the ride while researching the area.  As it turned out, we ended up about seven and a half miles north of Asheboro, but still plenty close enough to make the ride an easy one to catch.  

    The day before the ride, some new tires arrived for my bicycle and I put them on and made a quick run down the road to see what I thought about them.  They seemed fine so I lubed the chain, put my bike in the shop for the night, and mounted the bike rack to the car because it would be dark when I left and I didn’t want to tote the light all day.  I woke up at 5:30, loaded my bike on the car while it was still dark, ate breakfast and drank a cup of tea.  Nina always worries about sunscreen since I’ve had two skin cancers removed already, but she hadn’t been able to find Bullfrog sunscreen when she went shopping and our stash has not turned up since we moved.  

    “No worries,” I told her.  “I found some in one of my shop boxes when I unpacked them.”

    I should have been suspicious because the plastic bottle was pretty well worn, but full.  I thought that was curious, but didn’t take time to really meditate about what it might mean.  I stepped up the to the bathroom mirror, took my glasses off, and squeezed a little sunscreen onto my fingers.  Then I began to rub it on my forehead.  It felt oily and the reason I like Bullfrog is that it is a gel and doesn’t feel oily.  “This is odd, I thought.”  But I also thought, “Nuts, I already put arm warmers on.  I’m going to have to take them off to put sunscreen on my arms.”  And it was the second thought that most occupied my limited mental facilities so I put some sunscreen on my cheeks, and around my eyes, and on my chin, and I was just greasing up my nose when Nina asked if there was anything she could do to help me get ready.

    “Yeah, is this sunscreen?”  

    “Of course it is,” she assured me.

    “Smell it.”

    She did.  “Where did you get this?”  She asked.  “Didn’t you put motor oil in one of these sunscreen bottles once?”
   Yuk!

    I arrived at the Park where the ride was to begin and spoke to Don, who had come up from Atlanta for the ride.  Actually, his mother in law lives in Lexington which is not too far from Asheboro and when his wife said she’d like to visit Mom, he looked on the Internet to see if he could find a ride to go on while wife and kids visited Mom.  Rolling in Randolph is the one he found.

    Don was concerned that he might not be in good enough shape to ride the full century and was hoping there would be a place where he could pull out.  He looked fit to me and he had a nice Serrota so I told him as much.  He admitted that he’d done 60 miles by himself not long ago and I told him it was a cinch that he could do 100 with a crowd.

     As it turned out, a 25 mile ride went off by itself and it was a figure eight so if you got tired, you could make it a twelve mile ride.  The 50 mile ride went off in another direction and if you wanted to ride 100, you had to first finish the 50 and then get a map for the second 50 which would restart right back here at the park.  That doomed the century.

    For the first 50 miles, I rode with a good sized crowd that got a little smaller when we found the hills to the east of the Uwharrie Mountains.  I passed a rest stop and ended up alone for a while, but then saw the shadow of someone drafting me.  There was a headwind off and on.  He pulled up alongside and introduced himself as Vance.  Vance was riding a beautiful, gloss black Klien.  It was a Chehalis Klien that he bought used three or four years ago.  He admitted that he doesn’t ride it much because he wants to keep in looking good.  A little embarrassed, he admitted that he has four bikes.  I told him that’s not so many.  I have three myself.  I didn’t mention that there are three frames in the attic and that I got rid of two others just before we moved.

    After a while, we came to the Zoo.  It is supposed to be a very nice zoo, but I haven’t been there yet.  Vance wanted to stop for pictures at the entrance so I hooked up with a couple of other riders.  I’d miss Vance.  He told me he reads my blog.

    Pretty quickly I felt hungry so I flipped the top to my handlebar bag to rummage in there for something to eat, but no sooner did I get it open than I saw another rest stop.  This is a well supported ride.  I wanted to be sociable, but I still skipped two rest stops on the first 50 because there were just so many of them.  One of the girls at this stop was the one who gave me my packet at the start.  She was chilled at 7:30, but it was about 76° by this time and she felt much better.  I ate some fruit and took some Hostess sugar donuts with me.

    Not far past this stop, I saw a fellow next to the road where the road went up.  “Flat,” I thought and felt bad for him because when you flat on a hill, you have to start back up on the hill when the flat is fixed.  As it turned out, he didn’t flat.  He broke three spokes on the climb and three was about one quarter of what he had on that wheel.  I sure like more spokes than that and haven’t broken one in a long, long time.  It’s kind of funny.  You ride with more spokes so you really can spare one, but the wheel is so much stronger that you don’t break any.  Thirty-two spokes looks pretty good and makes a strong wheel.  In fact, on a bike forum once, where someone asked what is the prettiest part of a bicycle, one fellow opined that it is a three cross, thirty-two spoke wheel.  That’s his opinion, but I wouldn’t argue with it.  Spoked wheels do look nice with their delicate looking rims and shiny spokey triangles.

    Then the finish of the 50 mile ride.  

    As I entered the park parking lot, the lady checking us off asked if I was going back out for the second 50 miles.  “Yep,” I said.  “How many have already started?”

    “Six or seven,” she told me.

    Six or seven!  I’m doing pretty well considering that, with the move, I didn’t ride a bicycle at all from the end of July until the middle of September because they were in storage.

    Off I went.  There were some other riders in when I arrived, and more arrived while I poked around the snack table deciding what I wanted to eat, so I looked for another social ride.  Wrong!  I didn’t ride with anyone the entire second half of the ride.  I guess it was too easy to pack it in at the finish/start parking lot.

    Still, I had fun.  The country is beautiful, lots of people wave in North Carolina, and the dogs get just as excited here as they do elsewhere so I got a chance to do a few sprints.  And best of all were the rest stops.

    The first one was maned by two high school boys.  As I came down the road, and before they saw me, I watched as they threw rocks at something across the road.  Then they saw me and scurried to their chairs behind the snack table and looked as nonchalant as they could.

    “Hi guys,” I said as I rolled up.  “Many riders ahead of me?”

    Five or six they told me.  I asked if they were cyclists themselves and they said no.  “What?  You guys don’t ride bicycles?  Don’t you know all the hip and groovy people ride bikes?”    

    They didn’t know that and they probably figured if I’m hip and groovy, they don’t want to be.  So I asked if they were in band and they said no.  I told them my youngest son played in marching band in high school and the oldest played in jazz band.  They didn’t play any instruments, but one of the was on the football team -- JV -- and the baseball team -- varsity.  I left them so they could go back to throwing rocks and I could go back to riding my bicycle; hiply, of course.

    More roads, more hills, more wind, more bridges, no more riders, and I was upon another rest stop.  This would be the last one because Asheboro was not far away now.  As I pulled up, I saw that all the snacks were laid out in rows with similarly sized packages of various products in groups and with the size of the packages increasing from left to right.

    “Oh, look how you organized all the snacks,” I bellowed at the girls in the chairs next to the table.  One of them looked at me suspiciously, but the other one was the girl who gave me my packet at the start and the sugar donuts earlier in the day.  She remembered and asked me if I’d eaten the donuts.  I told her I’d eaten four and had two left.  Then I found some peanut butter crackers and thanked them for having something salty.  I filled one of my water bottles, not because I needed the water, but because it was cold.  

    I asked if they were bicyclists and they said they weren’t either.  

    “What’s the deal?  I asked the two guys at the rest stop back down the road and they don’t ride bikes either.  How did you get roped into this?”

    “We work for the Parks department; full time in the summer and part time during the school year,” one of them told me.  

    That explains it.  I took their picture and told them I’d probably finish before they got back so I wouldn’t see them anymore this ride.  I should have asked for their names, but these days when a guy who will be 54 in three weeks asks hight school girls for their names, all kind of alarms start going off.  If by chance you’re reading this, thanks for the snacks.  I ate the other donuts on Sunday.