Couch surfers showed up promptly in the morning, four of them.  A bit surprised, I had confidence they’d turn out to be good ones.  So far, they are.  After getting them all settled Dan and I dawned our outfits and loaded our bags.  Today we’d make another test run, this time not for time or distance but for strength.  We loaded our bags to the brim and added a little for good measure and headed north, up the hills.  One and a half hours later (including a long break to take a photo) we were at the top comfortable and ready for more riding.  What a pleasant surprise.  25 minutes later we were back at the bottom with a top speed from John at 56.0 kph and a top speed from dan of 57.8 kph.

There is a reason we bought bikes early.  Primarily we wanted to train, but truthfully we’d be stronger if we trained on our mountain bikes.  The important part of having bikes a month early was to test the components, break the bikes in, and make changes to the set up.  Today, we were happy to have failures.  Once back in the city, Dan hit a small cut in the road from construction and his bike came to a dead stop.  The deralur (sp) hinge had snapped and threw the mechanism into his rear spokes stopping the bike.  The impact of another cyclist into the side of Dan didn’t help the situation either.  Confused with what had happened we pulled aside and righted the chain and deralur and limped back to the Giant store.  A bit of negotiating convinced them that less than 300 km shouldn’t have component failures and they agreed and replaced it.  We hope to not run into that issue again.

We also accomplished getting a good photograph for our friends here to keep and to pass out to friends along the route.