Day One - Complete!

A great start to the tour today! Team Bob was so hyped after getting a great sendoff at the ACS start and to meet a very excited cheering section on Clifton & at the Lakewood Y. It was a beautiful day for riding - great company - terrific scenery & most importantly, delicious food! Team Bob is in great spirits on the journey so far. We've definately got all of you as a big gust of wind behind us!

Some Highlights:
- Pancake breakfast and sausage.... yuuum!
- send off from Ellen & Tim Grady at ACS
- Police escort through downtown Cleveland
- HUGE Team Bob Rocks & Rolls signs at the Mackay's on Clifton Blvd! Thanks JEAN!
- Lakewood Park cheering section - little Bobby & Nicholas Sessions join for a bit!
- Lakewood Y - Dan, Becky, Danny, Chris, & Tessa Gibel root for Team Bob... Lindsay Buckingham surprises Kelsey!
- Lunch stop with amazing BBQ pulled pork, chicken, slaw (food, always a highlight)
- Very slow man drafting Mary Ellen Grady. Seriously, sir? She is tired too!
- Bob Sessions text to Andy "Safe in Wooster, xoxoxoxoxoxoxo"
- Three mile walk around Wooster for an ice cold beeeer.
- "The Sarge", Mary Ellen Grady slow & steady makes it 77 miles to the finish!
- Dorm Life at the College of Wooster - Hot Showers, College Cafeteria, Bowling Alley, & Beer ... yes, we will all go back tomorrow - please!

Check out the ride here: PAN OHIO DAY ONE

Tomorrow will be our longest at around 105 miles. My last century ride was with my Miniwanca Odyssey Group starting in Stratford, Ontario. My co-leader, Christine Strawn, inspired all of the riders with the words below...

WHY DO WE LOVE CYCLING?
—Bill Strickland, from The Quotable Cyclist

There is no finer sport, few that are so close to the many moods of the human heart. Cycling is blur-your-eyes speed married to casual spins through sunny countryside. It is sprinting until you taste lung; it is halting on a single-track trail while silent whitetail deer cross one by one in front of you, the last one stopping and swiveling its head to look you in the eye. It is the contrast between the sleepy gathering of friends for an early-morning Sunday training ride and the Mardi Gras/Bastille Day rolling party that is the Tour de France's peloton-preceding caravan, which triples the population of every tiny French town it enters. That is why some of us love the sport.

Then there is the bicycle itself, an unparalleled merger of a toy, a utilitarian vehicle, and sporting equipment. The bicycle can be used so many ways, and approaches perfection in each use. For instance, the bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created: Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon. A person pedaling a bike uses energy more efficiently than a gazelle or an eagle. And a triangle-frame bicycle can easily carry ten times its own weight—a capacity no automobile, airplane or bridge can match. Perfection. That is why others love the bike itself.

What's more, the bicycle is a great equalizer. The clumsiest of us, the most overweight, even people missing limbs are among those who have mastered this simple machine. Blind people ride on the back of tandems to taste the thrill of rolling along under their own power, and paraplegics scorch mountain trails on fully suspended mountain bike wheelchairs. That's why some of us love the activity.

But I think what gives our passion an edge unlike any other is its sheer versatility: the fact that cycling can be so many different things to us, sometimes even all of them at once. It's a thing with lots of splendors, as someone once said a bit more eloquently.

Take your bike out for a spin tomorrow and think of use! We'll be thinking of you!

GO TEAM BOB!!!!!!!!