Riding in the Rain

Hamilton, Ontario  67.73km

Yana: Well, our first day of travelling turned out to be surprisingly easy and pleasant, considering that we did literally set off at the "crack of dusk".  I can see this becoming a bit of a thing for us.  It was basically sunset at the start of our journey, and pretty much dark by the time we actually exited Kitchener Waterloo.  It's funny how you expect these things to be utterly gruelling, but you kind of forget that to a certain extent, you can make your bike do the work for you.  It was a bit of a blessing that for the most part, the terrain was flat.  Yes, we did labour up a few hills, but it was certainly not beyond our level of ability, even with our heavily laden panniers.  And boy, do those things give you momentum when you're coasting downhill!  Apparently, Sundance was doing 44.6km per hour at one point - at least, that's what our speedometor-odometer gizmo says.  Not too shabby!  Our cruising pace seems to be at about 20km per hour, which is nothing to be sneezed at, either.

The original plan last night was to just get to Cambridge, as we had started out so ridiculously late, but when we got there, we decided that we were still fresh, so we pushed on.  So far, the strategy of popping seven jelly beans every hour or so is working out surprisingly well - take that, energy gels!  Who needs you when we can get our sustained sugar high off good old-fashioned jelly bellies!  In any case, we made it to Dundas somewhere between 10 and 11pm, and stopped to ask where we would be able to get some sleep.  The camping thought had kind of gone out of the window, as campsites can be an absolute pain to locate in the dark.  The locals at the Winchester Pub were very helpful, and after we had ourselves a late night high-protein feed, we went in search of accommodation.  We ended up at the Hamilton Inn, which was a little more pricey than we would have liked, but turned out to be totally worth it.

We have also established upon waking up this morning that we aren't even sore!  Amazing!  Looks like we had actually underestimated ourselves, which is a relatively unusual thing to do on a trip like this.  Unfortunately, we also discovered that it is raining.  We've checked out of the motel now, but it looks like we'll just have to suck it up and put on our wet weather gear - it doesn't look like it's going to stop any time soon.  Curses!  Oh well, at least we're getting our adversity reasonably early on in the trip - we spent most of yesterday's trip riding at night, after all, so what's a little rain?  Okay, it makes for balance issues and slipperiness, but I guess we'll just have to wear our skid lids, and hope we don't smoosh our brains out on the tarmac.

Wonder how far we'll get today.