Lost

Earlier this week, I sent Snapper and Smitty a link to a proposed route for an Equinox Century this coming Saturday.  (It doesn't seem desirable to do a route with 40 or 50 miles homebound heading into a southerly headwind.) 

Turned out Snapper was too LAZY (no wonder he is sometimes a Cheeta') to click on the link and look at the route or the mileage.  He sent me an e-mail asking "how long is the route? 168 miles?"

I responded:  "Look at the link."

He sent me another e-mail asking "how long is the route?  108 miles?"

I responded:  "Look at the link."  But also included the answer:  100.5 miles.

He sent an e-mail that he "had been trying to wear me down, and it worked."

I sent him the following message:  "I wonder what would happen if I "got lost" in the middle of Saturday's ride? Bwa..hahaha!"

Snapper sent back:  "If you got lost I would forever hold it against you. . . "

Which made me think of the following:

I did get lost once a few years ago ...

Year Month Date start / course comment _________Miles H.mm avg mph
2004 _Jul __24 _Neal School ___wrong turns ______44.2 3.23 _13.0

At the time, it was my LONGEST ride ever -- by 6 LONG miles. I thought I would NEVER finish -- it was soooo HOT, and sooo hilly.

That remained my longest ride until:
2004 _Oct ___9 _Blue Jay Pt. - Lake Loop w/ Lynn 53.4 3.39 _14.6

The course on Jul-24?
Was supposed to be:  essentially the Creedmoor-Grissom route.  I had a very vague idea of the route.
I didn't have a cue sheet.  But had ridden some of the roads with Lynn many years before when we lived in Creedmoor.
I missed the turn onto Pope Rd.  Si I turned off Brassfield when I got to Lawrence Rd.  That would have been okay.
But when I got to the Lawrence / Horseshoe corner, I didn't want to ride DOWN the big hill on Lawrence.
I figured that it was just going DOWN to the lake, again.  And I didn't want to have climb back UP.
So I went the direction with the shallower downslope.  In other words, I turned right onto Horseshoe Rd. 
I had a very vague idea of the route, but certainly not the road names.
When I got to Pope Rd, I knew I was cooked.  Cooked physically by the heat and mentally cooked because I going backwards.
But at least I knew how to get back to civilization: 
reverse the course, i.e., Pope to Brassfield (into Creedmoor) to Northside to ... to Cheek to Patterson to NC-98 to Neal School.
I had to stop on Patterson at the top of one of the endless killer hills.  In the scorching sun. 
I may have run out of water.

I don't think I've been lost since.  I might not have known where I was, but I wasn't lost.
And, on that day, I drove the course afterward, and really learned where I had intended to go.
Shortly thereafter, I discovered the beauty of electronic maps.

Last weekend, LT was recalling last year's Jul-03 Kerr Lake Loop on a route I mostly ripped off from ... MikeD's teeny tiny map on RTP.  (A few months later, we introduced MikeD to "Stovall Mtn", so maybe a "fair trade"?)
After we crossed the Kerr Dam, I knew we had to take the first available left, but I wasn't sure we were turning onto the correct road.
As LT noted last week, the road was quite narrow and seemed a bit sketchy.
Someone asked "are we sure this is the correct road?"
My response: "No, but let's take it anyway."
A few miles later, when we got to the next turn, we knew we had been on the correct road.

We hadn't been lost -- we just didn't know where we were, or if we were on the correct road.