Day 3: Marysville to Wooster, Ohio 103 torturous miles. 913' elevation (but, oh, were those were steep feet!)

I've leave most of today's notes to the photos and their captions.

I won't presume to know why so many houses in this area have that star on the front or side .  No one in the group seems to know the answer either.  Any takers out there with a theory?

Two days ago, the forecast was for a sunny day.  Yesterday, it was rain.  Today, it changed again to cloudy.  Actually, we got all three.  Mist and rain in the morning, cool and cloudy much of the late morning and late afternoon, sunny just after lunch.

We passed through small country towns and a couple of larger cities.  Delaware was one of the latter.  Saw this abandoned train station as we were passing through.  A relic of a time when this city was thriving.

The lack of rain allowed me to get off the bike and take more pictures today.  Frankly, the picture taking also gave me the occasional respite from the killer hills.

Warrensburg, on the other hand, was one of the smaller towns.  While the incorporated town limits are much larger (probably owing to farmland), you're looking at the entire town, save for a house or two behind me when I took this shot.

And some were even smaller.  There wasn't a "downtown" Peru, just this Town Hall, circa 1901.

The rollers (rolling short, very steep climbs of no more than a quarter mile) on the road to Wooster are notorious among cyclists.  They rival the ones I rode last year in Missouri in both numbers and degrees of incline.  Today's climbs topped out at 14-15% gradients.  For perspective, the mountains I train on in Vermont may be 2-5 miles in length, but they never get beyond 6-9% grades.  Even the climb over Monarch Pass in Colorado (around 7 miles of climb) never got more than 6% on average.

It's not that they were very long.  It's that they were very steep and plentiful.  The large spike around mile 40 is in the town of Butler.  That's their ski resort.  I kid you not; they advertise canoeing and skiing on the same billboards.  How many other towns in America can make that claim?

Today's other highlight was getting chased by a dog.  I honestly didn't think I had anything left in the tank, but I was able to out-sprint the dog, who came up from behind me after it bolted off the front porch of a house along the roadside.

No dogs in this shot (although there was one just off camera who was barking at me when I got close enough to take this picture.  After a moment of interest, these guys just went back to their grazing.

Tomorrow, more rollers, but it's only 85 miles.  The joke at dinner was that tomorrow would be a half-day of riding.  Tell that to my lower back and knees!

As they advertise on the North Fork Century, on Long Island, "we ride for pie."  This cafe in small Frederictown is famous for its pies.  So yes, I stopped in to try a slice.  Peach crumb.  Yum!