We woke up this morning to a steady rain that you could hear on the rooftop. One look outside at the gray clouds and you knew it was one of those rains that was going last all day.

Gordon, Nebraska is a very nice place to visit, but staying here another day and waiting out the rain was not an option. So, I got myself ready for a ride in the rain. That meant locating my raingear, which I haven’t needed since the first couple weeks of the tour when we had some fairly regular snowfall. I also needed to locate warmer gloves, a long-sleeved jersey, leg warmers, and cycling shoe covers because the air temperature was 58 degrees and it didn’t look like it would get much warmer. And it didn’t. The high temperature in Gordon today was 61 degrees.

After locating all this equipment, I went through my regular morning “get ready to ride” rituals without much urgency. I really hoped the rain would stop, or at least lessen, by the time we would be forced to get started (i.e., 10 AM which was the checkout time at the motel). So, we sat around and watched the local weather reports, hoping that the forecast would change. Occasionally, we would glance outside to see if the rain had stopped.

By about 9:30 AM, the clouds looked like they were getting lighter and the rain was letting up a bit. So, off we went.

Over the past five and a half months cycling around the country, I’ve learned that car and truck drivers will shift left a lane, giving a cyclist the entire right lane, if they can. “If they can” is, of course, the key phrase. Nebraska drivers are no different and spending the last week cycling on highway 20 has clearly demonstrated that to me. Wide lanes, a wide shoulder, good visibility, and little traffic make it very easy to give a cyclist plenty of room on the road.

I learned something new today though. When the weather gets bad like it was today, drivers are less likely to give you that full lane. They’re more likely to give you nothing at all.

The route today took us up to 3979 feet in elevation. This was at about 16 miles from Chadron. The last 16 miles was a very nice, mostly downhill run into Chadron which is at 3369 feet. Every day, the terrain gets a little more mountainous.

Finally, here’s some data from my cyclometer. I’m not sure why I haven’t been sharing this data all along. It could be because it might not be very interesting to anyone except the bicyclists out there. Let me know what you think.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 27th, 2006 at 6:30 pm and is filed under The Dream Tour, Bicycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.