Nevada Derby 50: Testing, Testing, 1..2..3

Redheadedendurance Blog - Full Story

by Bird
April 7 2014

Scrappy, Georgia my camp Chihuahua, and I hit the road early Friday morning with a rig full of waterproofed items, which turned out to be wise, as this was my view not 10 miles from home:
Snow in Donner pass area, but nowhere near as unfriendly as it got for those traveling later that afternoon!
I had confidently plugged some apparently random address into my GPS early on and about 3/4 of the way to the ride it suddenly occurred to me that I wasn't entirely sure where I was going. This was my first Nevada ride and beyond being "somewhere near Reno kinda" I wasn't totally clear on my destination. Fortunately I had past Reno local Funder just a phone call away and she quickly sent me the correct GPS address (totally not the one I had), which I was thrilled to plug into my GPS until said apparatus answered me immediately back with "6 hours and 31 minutes until your destination." I tried not to crash my truck in Reno traffic while figuring out how this could be possible, no really, HOW COULD THIS BE POSSIBLE??!?!

Just before total meltdown one last frantic glance at the GPS showed the tiny bicycle icon was lit up.

Huh. Hmm. Well, let's Push "car."

"51 minutes until your destination."

Alllrighty then.

Ride camp! :D
It was alternately blustery and alarming chilly and just warm and still enough to bring a sweat to your brow in ride camp, depending on the rapidly moving cloud cover. There weren't very many rigs there yet but a friend was and spotted my not-at-all subtle truck immediately and directed me to a perfect camping spot:
That's a peaceful picture above, isn't it? It nearly wasn't so. When setting up I pulled my neatly folded tarp out of my truck bed to spread it out and pitch the tent on...and discovered ants. Lots and lots of ants. There was a lot of spraying, refolding, smooshing, brushing, some GPS-bicycle-incident worthy cursing, and well, it came all right in the end and the ants never did visit my bedroll, luckily...

Read more here:
http://redheadedendurance.blogspot.com/2014/04/nevada-derby-50-testing-testing-123.html