55.9 mi / 12.0 mph / 1169 ft. climbing
Home: Carolina’s AirBNB

With an extra six (uphill) miles to ride due to our AirBNB host’s location screw-up yesterday, we set the alarm for 5am, hoping we could beat the day’s headwinds. We must have been especially motivated, because we efficiently got ourselves out before 7am, and returned to Ruta 5. The legal way for vehicles to go south on the divided highway was to head north for two miles to the next exit, loop around, and then start south. We definitely didn’t want to add another 4 miles onto our extra 6, so Plan A was to ride up the shoulder on the wrong side of the highway for 1.5 miles, go the wrong way up an exit, cross over the bridge to the other side, and then still do 4.5 miles to get back to where we had rode to yesterday.

But before we even started pedaling, a couple of oncoming trucks revealed to us that wrong-side riding would be dangerous for a reason we hadn’t anticipated: their wind blasts were strong enough to blow us off of our bikes. If we wanted to continue that way, our survival would require us to stop every time a truck approached, put both feet on the ground, wait for the wind blast to dissipate, and continue on. But with a pretty steady stream of big rigs, that would have taken forever.

We quickly switched to Plan B (literally, I had planned these contingencies, out to the 4-mile-adding Plan C). We took all of our panniers off, and during breaks in traffic, ferried them and the bikes to the other side of the highway. That involved crossing a grass median protected with guardrails on each side (whose metal edge I nicely scraped my leg across on one of the crossings). Since we managed the task without either of us getting creamed by a logging truck, Plan B quickly became the optimal choice, since now we could take advantage of those wind blasts to propel us forward (and we did the transfer nearly as fast as it would have taken us to ride backwards up through the interchange).

“Maybe traffic will be lighter in the morning” had been a contributing factor to “wrong-side riding” being designated Plan A, but it turned out that it was significantly heavier, at least with trucks, which must have constituted 80% of the vehicles on the roadway. But after converting to Plan B (and for the rest of the day), that heavier traffic became a boon. Yes, it made the riding louder, but it locally cancelled out the headwinds that we otherwise would have been facing.

In a final insult from our AirBNB host’s screw-up, we were forced to pass a dead dog in the roadside that we had already passed yesterday. But then finally, fifty minutes into our day, we reached the point we had gotten to yesterday, and could then once again proceed into uncharted territory.

After 47 miles on Ruta 5 (which we were done with a little after 1pm), we branched off toward Temuco while the highway bypasses the city. There we felt more how much the slipstream from the trucks had been helping us with the headwind, but also it was the time of day when winds were due to increase anyway. The road initially stayed highway-like, and eventually we were given a bike path, but that disappeared right at the point where traffic completely filled the two available lanes. So we took a zig-zag route through some side streets, which had the benefit of bringing us by a residential fruit-and-vegetable shop, where Rett was glad to stop and up some cherries. By the time we were forced back onto the main road, traffic was so clogged up that it was safe to join it again (and then it became so bad that we hopped off our bikes and walked the last few blocks to our AirBNB.

The doorman who let us into the building had no problem with us putting our bikes in the elevator, so I brought them up and found a spot for them in the small but cute apartment.

Over the last 17 calendar days since we departed Valparaiso (which includes 15 days of riding), we have accumulated 59 hours and 38 minutes of pedaling time. That is easily a new “record” for us; we have to go back three-and-a-half years to find 2nd place (55h34m), which was when we raced our past-selves on a repeat of our ride from Chicago to Skaneateles. As people who learned early on into this life as full-time bicycle-based nomads that pushing too hard on the physical side is damaging to our mental and emotional side, this is not a record that we’re exactly proud of. But it’s hard to not take at least some satisfaction in the knowledge that we’ve been able to execute this kind of push when necessary, especially since we’re more than three years older than we were when we established our previous record.

But that meant it was definitely time for a day off, especially since the long days were not going to let up in the near future. Just like our last day off in Buchupureo, the contrast made it feel unusually spacious, like three days off at our “normal” pace would feel. It probably helped that our AirBNB was nearly as special as the house in Buchupureo had been, even though it was much smaller, and in a high-rise. But it was decorated very warmly and personally, with a lot of scrap wood crafted into decorative walls, ceilings, and furniture.