Day 52 – Eureka to Austin

Seven days to San Francisco. You wouldn’t know it given how little civilization there is out here. Today’s ride went from Eureka NV to Austin NV, about 67 miles. In between, there was nothing. Seriously, not a thing. Route 50 has huge stretches of nothing through this section of the country. Again, I’m super thankful for Heidi and the MCC. Not sure how people make this section of the country when they’re self supported.

I got an earlier jump on the day (7:30) and once again the weatherman was way off. It was supposed to be 51, but it was 61. And within a few miles out of town, it was nearly 70. Good thing I put my arm warmers and vest on 😐

About 12 miles in to the ride, I climbed through a small pass. The wind through the pass was just _hammering_… a crazy strong headwind. Needless to say, I wasn’t pleased. Riding in to the wind is a bummer, and out here when the wind is really pushing you around and there’s NOTHING else to focus on, it’s just brutal. Fortunately, once I made it through the pass, the wind died right back down. Apparently as the rising sun warms up the air around here unevenly and causes huge drafts through the passes. I’ll keep that in mind for tomorrow and see what the early morning is like.

Route 50 through this stretch had its own quirks. The road has ~36″ shoulder, but the first foot closest to the white line is rumble strips. That means if I want to ride on the shoulder, I have about 2′ to work with. Sometimes more, sometimes less. I had a few close calls with drivers today (apparently checked out on this lonely highway) so I opted to ride the shoulder. It was like riding rollers for 50 miles. There’s a few inches to play with, but things get serious quick if you deviate from your line.

There was a major climb about 12 miles out from Austin (and apparently 122 miles from Fallon).

I opted out of the climb for a couple of reasons. First, 57 miles of flats is actually pretty tiring. There’s no rest at all. If you stop pedaling, you stop moving. So it’s just non-stop turning of the pedals. Nearly 4 hours of that today and I was ready for a break. The bigger reason, however, is that tomorrow we’ve decided to push to Fallon. Due to lodging issues, we’ve actually changed the end points for the next 4 days. And with those shifts, tomorrow has turned in to a 110 mile day. I haven’t put down a triple digit day this whole trip (tho I was close back east). I’m really optimistic that I can get all the way to Fallon… but I didn’t want to bust my butt up a 1,500′ climb in to Austin just before that. Soooo.. we’ll see if I make it to Fallon or if it ended up not mattering. Stay tuned tomorrow to find out.

Austin is probably the last real small town we’ll be staying in. In a few days, we’ll be staying on top of Carson’s Pass, but that’s pretty close to Tahoe, so I don’t think we’ll be nearly as remote as we are now. So this may be our last small town motel. The Cozy Mountain Motel is a fine place to finish out that trend. We’ve got a 2 bedroom room, tho the rooms are quite small. Dax is having a blast navigating the piles of bags and bike parts tho, so we’re all good.

Austin has potentially the coolest little kids playground in the country. It was a bit like climbing through a giant playmobile set.  We took Dax to it this afternoon and he had a blast. For anyone that knows Dax, he very audibly expressed his agreement. He was by far the loudest object in all of Austin this afternoon. I’m surprised they didn’t ask us to leave 😉

He’s becoming quite independent on playgrounds now, which is both good and bad. If you look closely at this pic, you’ll see me behind him waiting to stop his fall back to the ground. What you don’t see is when he actually climbed _inside_ this contraption and I had to basically suspend him in midair so he could play with it.

Tune in tomorrow to see if I actually got my century in or if I wimped out today for no reason.