July 23 Day 53 Glidden Wisconsin 58 miles 5:05 riding

We encountered an organized tour (a stark contrast with ours). Twelve riders going from Anacortes, Washington, to Bar Harbor, Maine. It's a very diverse group. Tim is the leader. He's an RN. Linda is a Scot from near Edinburgh. Richard is a retired electrician from San Francisco. Bruce directs a theater company in Charlotte, North Carolina. Eid (that's phonetic, probably misspelled) is Dutch, retired from Shell. Janet is a retired teacher who grows olives and keeps some farm animals near Chico, California. Clyde is from New Zealand. John is from Maine. He rides to raise money for the Lung Association. Ann and Dave are the youngest, in their late twenties. Eid and Clyde are two of the three oldest. They smoke everyone else, averaging seventeen or eighteen miles per hour (I think our best day, wind-assisted, was a hair over thirteen)! Janet will have her 70th birthday next week. This is her eighth coast-to-coast ride, her first with a group! All the rest were solos.

The group members rotate cooking, clean-up, and purchasing responsibilities daily. I have to admire this group because they have stuck together. I have heard (though I have no certain knowledge that this is true) that forty percent of the members of a long tour will drop out, generally over personality conflicts. They all impressed me as very nice people.

We camped together at the city park in Glidden. The school board was meeting, so they held the gym open for us to take showers. If you choose to believe the scale at the gym, I have lost about fourteen pounds so far. Sausages for dinner.

Running into this group was important for Michele. For one thing, it was new conversation. Every detail of our lives, things we would never tell our therapists, has been trotted out for discussion just for conversation, to the point of exhaustion. We finish each others' anecdotes from memory. Finally, a fresh audience. More importantly, there were women. We saw one woman bicycling to New Jersey with her boyfriend a month ago. Yesterday, there was a woman going the other way with her family. Apart from that, no women, leaving Michele ample time to wonder, "What is wrong with me that I am out here when no other women do this?" Suddenly, three women to provide validation, to listen to her complaints about men, to talk women-talk with. Hooray!