Day 3 - Monday, 22nd March 2004 - Tuncurry to Bulahdelah

To borrow a quite from the Simpson's "Worst day ever".

It rained yesterday afternoon, last night and early this morning. When I got up at 5:30am, everyone hoped that the worst of it was over. As I had time before breakfast I struck the tent, but didn't put everything into bags. I had breakfast and I was washing up when the heavens open up again. I ran back to where I was camped and hurriedly finished packing everything up.

The rain stayed up for quite a while and people where packing up their tents in the rain. I left camp in the wet and then got help up for a supervised bridge crossing. I was in the first group across and then applied some pace. Rod, who was first in yesterday soon caught up with me and I was able to draft him. We soon got caught in a passing shower and there was a bit of a headwind. We passed Morning Tea without stopping, and about 5-10kms short of lunch we caught up to the police car that was the official lead. We hit lunch at about 8:45am and because of the weather, both at lunch and ahead, the route was in doubt, it wasn't long before I was shivering and I had to keep moving.

Luckily the police were going to take a group through, but at their pace. There were about 10-15 of us and once we were moving I was fine. It drizzled on us fairly consistently and this had made the roads reasonably wet. We were always kept to a slower pace downhills because of this. We stopped briefly at Afternoon Tea and a water stop to see if we could continue. We found out that they were stopping the riders at lunch and were going to bus them to town. We were 1 of only 2 groups that managed to ride out of lunch.

There were 2 climbs at the end of the ride today and both were challenging, but not too difficult. Once over those we had a short stint on the Pacific Highway again before getting to Bulahdelah. We unloaded the luggage trucks into a shed, while it really rained. There were a few spots that were undercover for camping, but I missed out because I wanted to see what was going to be organised. Subsequently I set up the tent on a hill out in the open.

I can only hope that the weather clears up a bit otherwise it is going to be a very miserable finish to the week. I don't mind riding in bad conditions, but it is nice to have a dry area to get to when it is all over. If it stays like this to the rest day in Newcastle, I think that they will lose half the field, I might be one of them. If it is raining tomorrow in Raymond Terrace, I will be looking pretty hard for a Hotel Room as well. My spirits are still pretty high, but whether they remain that way depends on how much more rain we see.

Distance	72.1 km
Average	26.28 km/hr
Time	2:44:39
Maximum	58.50 km/hr

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