The day before the rally and Duncan emailed me and asked, “is 20 people too many?” I told him we’d need at least another rider on sweep to stay behind if there was a health or mechanical issue that had to be attended with. He found another person for me and I started thinking of parts of the route we could cut if needed.
Luckily, Saturday rolls around and I get into position and there were only 10 bikes. then two went off to breakfast and said they’d catch us later and 2 more decided to run a different route (the Northeast BDR section nearest to the camp site) so we were down to just 6 riders, myself included. PERFECT.
This did mean we were ahead of schedule the entire day and I had to add a couple of extra roads (bad idea) and we took a bit longer at the touristy spots. In my opinion, the ride was a blast and, because I like to learn and improve my skills and my place in this community, I learned a valuable lesson…one that I knew but never skirted so far to reality that it ever bit me in the butt.