Today we were faced with a longer ride of 80 miles. I rode with Adam, Dan Kiel, Don, John, and Joel. We are entering the desert area and we left earlier and left camp at about 6:40 a.m. We wanted to avoid the worst of the afternoon heat. We started with a difficult 18 miles climb out of Redlands. That was tough right off the bat in the morning. I generally like to have about 8-10 miles to loosen up my leg muscles, but did not have that chance as the climb was from the beginning. After the climb we had generally flat or downhill the rest of the day, but it was really hot by late morning. We had a long stretch of steep downhill coming into the Palm Springs area and also had a strong gusty tailwind from the mountain canyons. We were coasting at speeds into the 30s and one of our guys reached 40 mph. It was too gusty for my liking to try to open it up more. Without the downhill and tailwind, it would have been have been almost impossible to complete the day, as it was getting so hot. We have some bikers that followed a wrong turn instruction and ended up on a lot longer route and were in bad shape when they finally arrived at camp.
We passed through Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Indio, and several other towns, all linked together. By the time we arrived in camp it was about 100 degrees. We camped at Jordan Ministries and had a pool available, but it was too hot to even change into our suits. I have included a photo I took of a California environmentally conscience cell tower. It is manmade to look like an evergreen tree. Leave it to California!
We passed through very exclusive areas and golf resorts and ended up on the edge of all this in an agricultural area that was the other end of the economic scale with much immigrant housing, who work in this large irrigated agricultural area. It was a vast difference from either end of the wealth scale.
We decided as a group to move up our start time for tomorrow to 5:00 a.m. breakfast and 5:30 start time for riding, to avoid the heat predicted.
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