Hagerstown, MD to Bethesda, MD

Today was our last full day of riding, and the riding today went pretty smoothly.

We woke up at 7:30, which was nice but we had so much to do and still had a 60+ mile day, we were fighting time.

I rode with Jason today and we basically kept changing pacelines. We started off with Jorge, but after he had 3 flat tires before 10 miles, he basically decided to rack. So Jason and I kept going until we met up with Stefan and Nick. We kept moving but we were hurting. Call it fatigue from the Appalachians, but we were for sure getting tired, and we had a very strong head wind. Even on the downhills, the fastest we could go was 10 mph. We kept pedaling and before we knew it, we were the first paceline. From last to first. We kept pushing ourselves knowing that time was not on our sides. After passing all but one crew stops, we made it to the 55 mile mark, where the crew had to serve us a crew chief lunch and then rack us up to lodging. It sucks that we couldn’t finish, but we didn’t have much options.

Our lodging for the night was the Landon School which was really nice especially for our final lodging of the trip. It was basically the preppiest school, which had money pouring out of it.

After getting ready pretty quickly the team set off in their route specific team shirt to go to the all team dinner. At the dinner we were able to catch up with the other routes and see a few frinds from the other routes. Like usual, we were the first one to arrive, and we eventually had to wait an hour for the south team to arrive. All three teams enjoyed pulled pork and chicken from Red Hot & Blue Barbeque at the St. Stephens United Methodist Church. After everybody was filled up, we began to go over plans for the big arrival tomorrow.

When we returned to lodging all of the team members laid their jerseys, maps, and anything else that they wanted autographed by the entire team in a line, and then we spent a good amount of time going through and signing each article. It is going to be nice having these jerseys and maps to look back upon and remember the great summer that we shared with everyone. Finally, we began by saying our goodbyes, to each one of us. I don’t know where the summer went by, but it was too fast.