6/21 - part 1: the last climb

Today was out last day of riding. As usual, it was hot and exacerbated by the fact that we had to be driven to Stari Grad for the start. By the time we got started, it was around 10:00.

We stopped at a war memorial. It was really hot. That's Mario in the middle with the red shirt. There were lots of casualties from the same families.

The wall is straight - the pan makes it look curved.

We did a pretty flat and easy ride to Jelsa where we stopped for a picnic lunch that Matej had prepared. In Jelsa, we looked for an art gallery that is owned by this guy that Mario grew up with. The feature of this gallery is a creation called Lavendar Man (this is not a misspelling). Lavendar Man is a cartoon character who has super powers but is forever confined to the island of Hvar where he parties and hooks up with Czech girls. He appears to be the creation of someone who smokes a little too much weed. This guy apparently does not have many bills to pay because he does not keep regular hours. And as Mario warned us, the shop was not open even though it was the middle of the day in the middle of a work week. This was too bad because Mario said that the owner will automatically give a 30% discount on anything in the shop if you walk in naked.

Here is the town's nod to Lavendar Man.

After lunch, we started the return that had three options. About a half dozen of us chose to climb the ridge that bisects the island back to Hvar. This was the same road we traveled the day before but in reverse. The climb out of Stari Grad is about 4.5 miles long with an average gradient of 5% that translates into about 1100' of climbing. It doesn't sound like a lot but the length of the climb in the heat makes it pretty tough. Strava calls it a category 2 climb.

Stu had been thinking that he would skip the climb because his knee was bothering him so he volunteered to pull us to the base of the climb. He was riding strong and I couldn't keep up with him and Mike on the small uphills but I was able to catch up on the descents.

When we reached the bottom of the climb, Stu was feeling good enough to tackle the hill. Mike left the Stari Grad bus station with Peggy. I left with Stu and Mike S. Dan left a few seconds later and easily caught up with us.

Mike S and I stopped about half-way up the hill to get some sugar in our systems.

I stopped near the top and Stu and I rode in together. I completely missed this interesting structure the day before going down.

My time on this segment was 40:12. That put me in 449th place on the leaderboard.

Tom paced Walter on his ebike.

Walter came in at 42:44. I didn't have my camera ready so I asked him to go back down and do it again.

Dan crushed it at 31:34. This bumped me to 450th place.

Mario did it in 30-something minutes. In sneakers.

The KOM is some guy who did it in 18.04.

The QOM time is 22:24.

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Final stats for the day: 31.6 miles, 3176' of climbing.