Day Thirty-Five — Tatum Bunnett

Day 35

42.18 miles

2,189 ft (elevation gain)

1,393.7 total miles

Johnson City -> Austin

Today was a really chill day. We started the day around ten when we picked Barb and Tom up from their Bed and Breakfast. We then went to look at Lyndon B Johnsons house at the state park in Johnson City. We then put on a lot of warm layers and started the ride. Today the temperature dropped again to around 45 degrees (it feels a lot colder than this though), there was also a cloud cover and a little bit of rain so it made it a lot chillier. The ride started out really chill with the same rolling hills that we’ve hadn’t the past couple of days, but with a general downhill trend. Non of the hills were too difficult and we were able to get over them pretty quickly. The road surface was also really nice, but there wasn’t much of a shoulder on the road, luckily the roads didn’t have a lot of traffic. We rode through some residential areas, into spread out ranches and then we road through a state park. The road through the state park was really quiet, it was a single land road and kind of rough but overall really nice. At one point there was a big valley that we rode into at the bottom of it was a creek that went right over the road. It was a little deep though and dad and I both got our shoes wet. After putting in dry socks, we continued on on the quiet ranch roads, as we got closer to Austin we stopped to eat pizza, it was in a big open barn and was super cool and yummy. After getting all warm from lunch it was a little hard to get back on the bikes, but we continued anyway. We rode about 20 more miles into downtown ish Austin. Before we got into proper downtown Austin we got in the car to help mom navigate the city in the trailer. Before we reached mom, we had already done our cool down mile when we had to climb a 17% grade hill. It was massive, and was a little bit of a bummer go ride at the very end of the day, but we rode around the parking lot a couple of times to let our muscles cool down. We then drive about 3 miles to our trailer park in downtown Austin, it’s super cute. Overall today was great but we hadn’t our first heckling from a car, as we were riding to lunch a car going the opposite direction yelled at us and told us to ride somewhere else. This was a bit of a bummer but we didn’t let it get to us and kept in riding. Once we got to our trailer park we had to drop the car off at Best Buy to get a new stereo, our broke around two weeks ago and the cars been a little too quiet for mom, luckily we were able to get the car back tonight and we now can play music in the car! Once the car was dealt with we went out to dinner with our friends from Austin, it’s always nice to see familiar faces on this trip. Today was great and I can’t wait to explore Austin tomorrow. I also forgot to mention that Austin is the a little over halfway point of the trip! It’s so cool to have already riden this far, I can’t believe we are actually doing this, and that we’ve made it this far in such a short amount of time! I’m so proud of myself and the whole group!

Riding out of lunch a little chilly and very full.

Elevation profile.

Please help raise funds for Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) at https://www.firstgiving.com/event/rsds/Ride-Across-The-Country-For-CRPS