No biking for me today. The rest of the team is heading to Colmar from Baccarat today and I've taken the van back to our hotel in Baccarat. I left my toiletry bag in Neufchateau and only discovered it after cycling to Baccarat. We had considered having the bag shipped to one of our future locations and discussed the difficulties of where to ship it to and such, when Mike suggested that I should just drive back today and meet the group in Colmar. It made sense. The group would get to Colmar, I would retrieve the bag and we would move the van forward to Colmar. As an added bonus, I would get a chance to drive for several hours in France.
Below is the weather forecast of the ride from Epic Ride Weather. As I had mentioned in a previous blog, The Epic Ride Weather app attempts to predict the ride conditions based on the ride route, as drawn from the RideWithGPS cycle routes plus weather forecast information in order to predict what you will experience during the ride.
The important part of the graphic today is in the upper right hand quadrant titled Precipitation and Cloud Cover. It has 3 trends shown: Cloud Cover %, Level of Intensity and finally Probability %. It shows that with the assumption that the group starts at 8 AM, there will be 90% cloud cover, a small probability of Precipitation and Intensity of Precipitation to be very light. So far, so good. But you move to 9:49 AM and you can see that the probability of Precipitation has increased to about 20% of light Precipitation. Finally moving to 11:39 AM the probability of Precipitation has increased to close to 40 with an intensity of moderate.
As the group left the hotel at 8 AM the sky was blue with some clouds, however as I was driving west to Neufchateau the rain was starting to hit the van by 8:45 AM and as I continued to drive the rain was increasing. I could imagine the effect the rain was on the riders.
The weather conditions did not dampen the spirits of the riders however. When they arrived at the hotel in Colmar at about 3PM they all commented how much they enjoyed the ride including the lunch stops at the peak of the climb and how exciting the long descent in to Colmar was.
Tomorrow we may have similar conditions so I'll be able to report first-hand this time tomorrow.
