CaDiva and I rolled out of bed at 5:30. We had very clear instructions from HRH not to try to pick her up until closer to 7 than 6:30 since she had to drop the little hrh off at daycare. But we needed to eat a little something, well I had to because of the diabetes. You don't mess with that shit, it kills you by inches, you know. And we needed to top off the tank and pick up a little ice for the liquids...hydrate hydrate hydrate...
We got everything done and showed up at HRH's house just before 7 but she wasn't home quite yet. I visited with the prince consort and he, once again, assured me that I would adore camping. I hear CaDiva and HRH talking in the front yard and head out to help load of the last of HRH's gear. Even the prince consort came out to help. Help as in he undoes everything that HRH had spent the weekend preparing and does it over again. HRH apologized for the smell of petrochemical since the prince consort lubricated her entire bicycle and, for an as yet explained mystery, her helmet. At this point, the word lubricate had not been banned from our vocabulary.
But none of this mattered as we rolled into Starbucks for the liquid portion of our breakfast and Mickey D's for fat, salt, and carbs. We are girl-tripping again and everything is good. Webster City isn't that far from home so we only have to stop one time to pee. Jillian, our GPS device kept us right on track until we got into the city. These layover cities, and even some of the pass-through towns, set aside much of the main drag for the bikers, vendors and exhibitors. Which means our poor Jillian just couldn't understand why we wouldn't follow her directions. We finally muted her when we couldn't tolerate "At your next opportunity make a legal U-turn" even one more time and followed the open roads in the general direction of the campsite.
Webster City had ambassadors staffing the odd little corners and if you slowed down and looked pitifully at one of them, he would point you in the right direction. Ours did warn us that the camp site we were looking for was pretty much filled up. This was one of my fears, since no one had actually given us a reservation, but we persevered. We needed to turn twice, following the detour but not go under the train trestle. We needed to turn into the road that looked like the driveway. And then there is the line of cars, one after the other being turned away.
I dig into my bag for the e-mail assuring me there would be plenty of camping sites. CaDiva rolls down her window and tells the young man we don't have a reservation but we had an e-mail. The young man says we have one team with over a hundred riders over that side and another with 30 on the other side so he doesn't know what he can do for us. But he takes the printed e-mail anyway and smiles. Well, he says, if the boss said we had a place for you we have a place, how many are you? We'll just one, we tell him. Actually we had three but only one tent so we didn't fib.
We drive down the gravel and then across the grass to find a place in the corner, as directed by the young man at the gate. Oh and such a corner. Tall trees, just off the bike path, which turned out to be the starting point for our riders on the next morning, between the road and river with a pretty steady cooling breeze. Ok, so it wasn't near the kibos, but that has a few pluses too. Not great ones when you have three overweight, middle-aged women who take magic pills, but there is the breeze.
We got the tent up and the car unloaded a lot faster than we ever imagined we could do in our first few practices. Ok, so the tent blew over one time...just once and that was only because we had both air mattresses and the bike on the same side of the tent. Besides, we had shifted position twice trying to find the least sun. Remember it was going to be 106 F on Tuesday.
HRH was glad we brought a camp chair for her too so we were able to get squared away before we headed downtown to find food and instructions. And more about that tomorrow, along with meeting up with neighbors, lemonade, and Three-dog Night.
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