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Getting out of Sparks was not fun. It's much less bike-friendly than anywhere in California, so we had to dodge traffic getting to the freeway, and there was a lot of traffic on the freeway for the first 10 miles or so. This section of I-80 is also concrete, and has what I will charitably assume are old-style rumble strips, cast in place. The shoulder is about 8 feet wide, but the rumble strips are about 4 feet wide, on the right hand side, forcing you to ride closer to the traffic than you might otherwise. I also have a hard time imagining how many accidents they might prevent, since by the time a car hits the rumble strip, it's practically off the road anyway. After about 10 miles, we got to newly-paved asphalt, with modern ground-in rumble strips just inside the shoulder - i.e. between us and the traffic.
Even though you're on the interstate forever, and the scenery doesn't change a lot, you have to stay alert for truck-tire schrapnel. A lot of people got flats from stray wires from the steel-belted radial tires. I didn't, but I was pretty anal about running my glove over the tires every time we passed through a bad patch. There was a nice long section of salt marsh outside of Sparks - lots of grasses and occasional pools, with all sorts of birds nesting. It floods in the spring, just a few inches deep, but over a very broad area. I've seen it flying into California, and it always looked neat. That eventually gave way to barren clay and sand, and we entered the Fourty Mile Desert, the most dreaded section of the Emigrant Trail. Rode today with Dan (except when he dropped us - yes, I was dropped by a one-legged man with a sprained ankle), Andy, Carol, and (later) Marnie. Marnie's knee was still bothering her from the climb, so she didn't mind hanging back with us old folks, even though she's a racer, and she's riding a carbon-fiber Trek Postal Team bike. |
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The cue sheet was pretty straight-forward: get on I-80 for 77 miles,
get off on the Frontage Road, paralleling I-80 for 12 miles, then go
through town to the motel. The next week is going to be pretty much
like that - we're on I-80 all the way to Salt Lake City.
Bud had a sidewall blowout 13 miles out, about 10 minutes after the
sag van passed him. The next time the van came around, he was more
than 10 miles behind the last rider, so it turned around and missed
him again. He ended up sitting there for an hour and a half before
the van finally got to him. (He wasn't stuck there alone - Cindy was
sitting with him.) At the route rap, Bruce talked about how spotty
the cellphone coverage can be in Nevada, and how important it is to
carry your own supplies. What he didn't mention, but everyone knew,
was that cellphone coverage was just fine where Bud was, but they
didn't have the phone turned on in the van.