Thursday July 11:  Richmond, Indiana to Marysville, Ohio
Distance:  106 miles
Total time:  8 hours 9 minutes
Riding time:  7 hours 2 minutes

If you ever have to ride a bicycle 106 miles, today was the day and Ohio was the place.  Today's ride was as enjoyable as an eight hour bike ride can be.  The weather was cooperative - low 80s and lower humidity than we've been accustomed to; rural scenery with little traffic; and nice, smooth road surfaces for the most part.  The dreaded wind?  Mostly a non-factor, and occasionally it found our backs and scooted us along at 20 miles an hour.

As usual we breakfasted (that is, shoveled in vast amounts of mostly anonymous calories) early and were loading our gear in the van by 6:45.  Here are Jamie and Steve getting ready to roll.

At only the three mile mark, we left Indiana behind and entered Ohio, the ninth state on our journey.  I found the sign to be pretty humble and unremarkable - most states do better.

We spent the entire day on the back roads of rural Ohio - no interstates, no four-lane divided highways.  It looked like this all day.  Yup, that's corn to the right, soybeans to the left, and Jamie and me in the middle.

The early start means we almost always bike into the sun for the first hours of the day.  Today we cut north for awhile and Michael was able to capture these great shadows.

It's hard to drink enough water when you're riding over 100 miles.  With only two SAG stops, we have to stop frequently for water, usually every ten miles or so when we've exhausted our two water bottles.  Here we are getting water from the van.

It's also hard to get enough calories when you are burning up 6,000 of them over the course of the ride.  Most of us are tired of the cookies, granola bars and trail mix at the SAG stops, so on the long days we stop for lunch.  We found this great place - Braden's - in the small town of, um, in a small town in western Ohio.

The wife and husband owners/operators were delighted to see us and took great care of us.  We probably lingered longer than we should have on a 100 mile day, but it was a welcome break.

As you see above, we lunched with the Brits and we rode with them for quite awhile as well, which doesn't happen everyday.  It's a nice change of pace in every sense - certainly the cycling pace picks up when we bike with them, but it's also a chance for a chat with guys you don't usually ride with.  Here's our rather informal looking pace line.  That's me in the rear chatting with Allan.

I presented Michael with this shirt at our daily meeting today.  He says "I'm just getting warmed up" every single day at about the seventy mile mark.  I made him promise that, if I bought him a shirt, he'd retire the saying.  So, Michael has said "I'm just getting warmed up" for the very last time.

Today was another day of milestones.  We rode our seventh and penultimate "century", and tomorrow we ride our eighth and last.  We entered Ohio, as mentioned above, and having covered 2918 miles we now have fewer than 1,000 miles left to go.  And tomorrow we'll break through the 3,000 barrier in miles cycled thus far.  As the map indicates, we're getting there!