Day 4 - How is Mike.

Let's cover this first. Mike was involved in a crash this morning. A rider in front of Mike went down. Mike got stopped, but a rider behind Mike was unable to stop. Mike ended up with some nasty cuts on his lower leg. The bike was fine and Mike was able to continue riding. He seems ok, but we'll see what tomorrow brings.

On to day 4. I spent the day with Carrie and Deb as promised. I was well taken care of. They made sure I was fed and hydrated. I'll tell you one thing, what one of them doesn't think of the other does.

We entered the meeting town about 8:30. Tenderloins seemed to be the choice and I guess that would serve as lunch. Wait a minute, what about breakfast? An obvious solution presented itself when the booth next door was serving pancakes on a stick. I decided to get one while I waited in line for the sandwich. It was a sausage dipped in pancake batter, deep fried and served on a stick. Delicious! The Tenderloin was great. After this feast Deb an Carrie felt it was time to get that first pie out of the way. They even bought it and helped feed me:) The apple pie was out, so I had to settle for pecan. Very good, but I wouldn't recommend trying this in the middle of a bike ride. It took several miles for my stomach to settle down. Steve, Joan, Mike, Lew, and Susan had started with us, but I needed to slow down a bit. Soon it was Deb, Carrie, Mike and myself. Mike wanted to hit the winery, so off the bikes and to the winery we go. Big, big party going on. We discovered something called wineritos (probably misspelled). They nearly caused us to miss the rest of the day. Delicious!

We were stopping at most of the towns along the way. It was once again fairly hot so frequent stops made sense. Carrie also an RN, had recommended alcohol as a pain medication:) Actually as it turned out the wine stop was it for adult beverages. We did make it to my first Beekmans ice creme stop. No line and plentiful shade. Very good stuff. The last town had opened the library to make use of bathrooms, water, and A/C. The funny line from this stop was with Mike wearing his Livestrong jersey, they assumed Mike was on Lance's team and wanted an autograph. They were disappointed to find out he wasn't. Carrie explained that Deb was in fact a librarian. I guess that fact would get us all the free copies we wanted. Time to finish this ride. It is hot, we're tired and only 5 miles to go. We find the host house and again we have the most gracious family to stay with. Beautiful home, fabulous yard. Best news yet is that they won't allow us to sleep outside. I think the temp will still be 90 at around 10:00 PM. It's unfortunate it is so warm because this would have been a wonderful deck to relax on.

Thank you to Deb and Carrie! I really enjoyed spending the day with you two! I was in excellent hands.