A wet day in Ohio

July 5, 2013

Cadiz, OH to Coshocton, OH

Last night the church's alarm went off in the middle of the night because they forgot to turn off their motion sensing alarm system. Someone tried to get up and go to the bathroom and they were met with the sound of an alarm almost immediately. Some people slept through it, but I woke up and was really confused. It was pretty faint, and for a second I thought it was our morning wake up music. A little later, our leader got up and in walked a police officer shining his flashlight and asking who we were and what we were doing here. It was very strange. Needless to say, I was pretty slow in the morning and went with a group to get coffee (well actually I had hot chocolate since I'm not a coffee drinker). The days have been pretty overcast and today was no different. Pretty soon into our ride, one of the guys I was riding with suggested that we go swimming in the lake we were biking around. We found an entrance that locals clearly used frequently and jumped in! The water was the perfect temperature and we stayed in for almost half an hour. We wanted to wait for the group behind us to get there so they could take a group picture of us swimming, but they took forever so I got out and attempted a few group shots.  

After our dip, the ride was relatively flat with a few killer hills to get us huffing and puffing. Generally the larger hills had nice downhills after though that made our ears pop. On one hill I hit 40 mph! My highest yet! I didn't even realize that I was going that fast until I looked down at my bike computer and saw it. It was super fun though. The ride through Ohio has been pretty scenic so far with lots of farmland, despite the cloud cover. 

One of the highlights of the day was having lunch at Cy Young's grave in a town in Ohio. On the way there, we stopped a couple times either looking for food or taking a bathroom break, and almost every person who talked to us about our trip told is we would be going by Cy Young's grave. They were clearly very proud of it. 

The rest of the ride was relatively pleasant with farmlands and rolling hills. At one point I stopped with a few girls I was riding with to say hi to some farm animals!

Today was the first day we started a fun thing called sweepstakes. The last two people riding are called sweep because they are responsible for making sure everyone arrives at the host site. Sweepstakes is a game where sweep comes up with a challenge for the rest of the riders and at the end of the day they judge the submissions. Our first sweepstakes was "best picture with a local". You were allowed to interpret the challenge however you want. This is the picture we took and it came in 3rd place. 

It made the ride very fun trying to figure out the best picture. The winner was a picture of a group of girls on the ground with a turtle. With about 6 miles to go before we were at the host site, it started downpouring. We were going down hills and biking next to small rivers basically. Even though we were soaked, it was actually so much fun. The rain just kept coming and it felt like it was getting harder. We were laughing at our own situation and we could see other drivers laughing at is too.

After dinner, we went outside and played with sparklers! It was a great way to end a great day.