1) Absolutely beautiful route, lots of rolling hills and large stretches of freshly paved roads with very little car traffic. I've only ridden in the Whitewater / Kettle Morraine area a couple of times in the past and I really loved it. I'll definitely try to find myself up in this area again.
2) Great Route markings. Fluorescent green with two markings before every turn and one marking after each turn as confirmation is great, I wish every invitational was marked as well. Even with the great marking I did turn the wrong way once, I think I was just following another rider that wasn't doing our ride, so on Little Hebron road, I turned West instead of East and ended up at Highway N. Had to backtrack and added about 3.5 miles to my ride.. At time it was okay ( except for the additional eastbound headwind I added) , but as I approached the High School and saw 103 on the odometer I was ready to be done. I felt that even more strongly as I crawled up those final big rolling hills.
3) Well spaced rest stops that were stocked with lots of varieties of mostly homemade goodies. I almost single-handedly ate the entire batch of peanut butter/chocolate chip cookies at the 2nd rest stop. They were awesome! For todays ride having those 3 final rest stops only about 13 miles apart was a blessing, due to #4
4) Mother Nature was both kind and evil today. Temperature was perfect! Was able to start the ride with just arm warmers and left them on until about 10 am or so. BUT about halfway thru the ride, the wind really picked up from a mere breeze to what felt like gale force winds out of the East. I'm sure it's part mental and physical but the howling of the winds usually resulted in my yelling out some explicative. Drafting for some reason didn't seem to make much difference but I must thank the Tandem couple Gary and Cheryl ( I believe) riding the Co-Motion and wearing Ragbrai 2008 jerseys that allowed me to sit in their wake and pull me along between the 2nd to last and final rest stop.... I struggled quite a bit with that wind since I'm built more like a football player rather than one of those fast,skinny biker types...
All in all it was a very rewarding day to actually finish this ride and I would definitely do it again... ( hopefully with 40 miles of tailwind!)
- John