Fifth Wheel

Before I get started on today's blog, a quick road update. We had one flat tire today (Jonathan), and we ended up for the night near Chippewa Falls, which is a bit further south than we'd planned on. That means that we had to ride an extra 11 miles, and tomorrow morning we have to decide whether to backtrack to the highway and ride from there, or just ride from Chippewa Falls, which makes for a century ride. I rode back to check on Jonathan and Ryan, then called Bryce to give him the status. The two boys did a good job putting in a new tube, and we were back on the road in no time. Otherwise, an uneventful 90-mile ride.

In yesterday's blog, I wrote about the four riders on our team. But we wouldn't even be on the road if it wasn't for the fifth member of the team, Pat Wollner, our support driver. So let me tell you a bit about the dynamic she adds to the team. First, though, I'll tell you how she came to be on the team in the first place.

Pat likes to bicycle. She hadn't ridden in awhile, and decided to look for some fellow riders for a leisurely weekend ride, so she looked on a local (Astoria, Washington) website for a group called the "Old Spokes." She saw someone looking for riders, so without further ado, she showed up at 9:00 on a Saturday morning expecting "Old Spokes." Instead, she found 16-year-old Bryce Nurding and some of his friends. She rode with them, and only later discovered that they had a grandiose scheme to ride across America. If you know Pat, you can just hear her saying, "That sounds like fun. I'd drive along and help support you." Well, pretty soon, the other support driver dropped out, the ride developed from grandiose scheme into grandiose reality, and Pat, foot firmly in mouth, felt committed. When she commits to something, she does it whole-heartedly, I've discovered.

She bought a half share in her brother's GMC Suburban, organized camping gear (she hadn't camped since she was a young girl, and she's my age), and started planning how to fit in all the coolers, food storage bins, personal duffel bags and camping gear for all the riders, including putting a luggage rack on the roof and a heavy-duty bicycle rack on the back. She spent 40 years as a surgical nurse, so fortunately had very good organizational skills. The first two weeks on the road, we played a game of trying to figure out something that she had forgotten to pack "just in case," and there was nothing we could dream up that would have been useful that she hadn't already packed. A masterful job!

So what does she do on the road? Only just about everything except ride a bicycle. She's up by 6:00 am to start the water boiling, get the breakfast ready for the boys to inhale as soon as they get up, and to pack up her own personal gear. She now has the boys (and me) trained to repack the truck pretty much the way she wants it, so that all the heavy stuff is loaded, the tents and other camping gear securely tied on the roof, and all but the light stuff ready to go before we hit the road, usually by 8:00 am, sometimes earlier. She then finishes packing the van, does a quick check of our campsite or wherever we've been staying, then she jumps in the Suburban, does the grocery shopping, buys gasoline, then drives until she passes us, usually around 25 miles down the road, and pulls over to provide water and gatorade refills, snacks, and any further instructions for the road, including where and when we think we will be for a lunch break. Then she cleans up after us, drives to the designated lunch break area, and lays out a spread for our picnic lunch. During her "spare time," she's on the phone firming up our future nights' stays, texting status reports to the parents of the boys, and squeezing in any personal errands she has to run. Is it any wonder that she developed a case of painful carpal tunnel in her wrist? The rest of us learned pretty quickly that we had to step in and do the heavy lifting so that Pat could do the organizing. As I said, we wouldn't be on the road without her. And once we're off the road, she still has to organize dinners, get the dishes done, get her own tent set up ... and all this on a volunteer basis. Glad that all I have to do is ride a bike for 3500 miles.

So anyway, this is an addendum to yesterday's profiles of the four riders. We wouldn't be on the road if it weren't for the fifth member of the team. Pat was told by a doctor that she should have surgery ASAP on her carpal tunnel. The boys were concerned when Jonathan's mom talked about possibly joining us to give Pat some relief, and then Ryan, always the generous-hearted gentleman, said, "This trip just wouldn't be as much fun without Pat along." It wouldn't even be a trip without Pat along, so a big round of applause to the fifth member of the team, who doesn't even have the chance to spend a day on the bicycle with the rest of us. And now you understand why Pat wants a vacation as soon as everyone is safely delivered to their families in New York City in the middle of August.

Now it's time for the rest of us to get some rest so we can tackle nearly 100 miles tomorrow. We know where Pat will be ... planning the support logistics for a 100 mile ride.