Thursday, September 18, 2014

August 13, 2014

This is the day before the last day of our ride. We rode from Lincolnville to Ellsworth, Maine. 5 hours 2 minutes, 55.04 miles, 3501 feet of climbing. It was drizzling rain all day. We are tired and have sore muscles and sore knees.  We could have finished today, but decided we would be too tired and it would be too late in the day by the time we finished to enjoy the celebration, so we opted to finish tomorrow.

Manny and Bev got a nice motel for us. They gave us the name of the motel and we found it on our phone/gps and were in Ellsworth going in that direction when I realized I had a flat tire! DANG!!! We had been doing so well for so long, but I guess it was just meant to be.

I was able to pump it up enough to ride and started going again. But, pretty soon it was flat again.  I pumped it up again and started riding again. Went flat again, so I decided to change the tube. Changed it and rode the rest of the way to the Motel. Whew!  I repaired the tube and we went out to dinner with Bev and Manuel and had a really nice time.



Tomorrow is supposed to be thundershowery in the morning and then nice the rest of the day.  We only have about 22 miles to go and we will be done with this journey.

The Maine coast is just beautiful! We didn't take very many pictures, so you'll just have to take our word for it.  Or, better yet, come and see for yourself. The picture to the right is one of the bridges that we rode across. It is really cool looking. It is the Penobscot Narrows bridge which crosses part of the Penobscot River to an island, then a less spectacular bridge goes to the mainland.. Belfast was a tourist town. Many of the tourist towns here used to be fishing villages and boat building goes on in some of them as well. Belfast has a boat building factory. They build some fairly large yachts. The other two pictures are looking toward Belfast from a walking bridge.
This is the map of where we went that day and underneath that is the elevation profile. In other words it shows all the ups and downs.  As you can see, Maine is not flat. It is very hilly. This was not the worse day in Maine, but it was a lot of work. Some of the climbs were as much as a 14% grade which is steep enough to make most cars shift down into low gear.