Day 1 : Is it too early to say this is awesome?

After what seemed like a trip through time getting to India, getting a bike for Matt, getting to Puducherry, getting our bikes together and not getting sick on the first day[s] of the trip we are finally ready to kick this off. What started 10 months ago in April of 2016 was really happening.

We started the day off at 6AM, checkout, grabbed our packed lunch and moved the boxes and extra supplies in to G's car. G is our driver who is local to Tamil where we are riding through. Im not sure we could have gotten any luckier having G with us on the trip. He is definitely the 4th Bombay Scorcher. On the day 0+ entry, the picture of the little love bear is in his car. I have to remember to take a pic with him before we go.



      

Matty boy leaving his room

Ride Stats
Strava Route: https://www.strava.com/activities/835971463
Miles: 62.2
Total Time: 7:21:32
Total Ride Time: 5:46:47
Pace per Mile: 10.8
Temperature: 86f
Start: Puducherry, IN
End: Mayiladuthurai, IN


62+ miles is the longest Shruti or I have ever ridden in one day. Matt has some experience riding upwards of 70+ in a day.


The first day as it worked out, I feel has the toughest route due to:

• the roads are mainly major highways or more metropolitan than the remainder of the days where we are on backroads and smaller highways.
• It is our first day and we potentially could have any type of bicycle mishap as we just put the bikes together without a longer test run
• for myself personally, adjusting to riding my bike on the left side of the road going with traffic. I started off on the right until Shruti told me, "you may want to get on the left." :)

The ride was fantastic. It was comfortable, the people were staring and all saying "hi", "Bye", "how are you", I think something like "hey bhai" where bhai I believe means dude or like in western areas we would say "hey man". We took some great pix and lots of videos of the ride with some children on the road. Matt with the puppy that was using his bike for shade or the lambs Shruti wanted to take home with her.




Once we made it to the next hotel at around 2:30pm local, we had a quick lunch at Happy Village which was good. Then we checked out the pool, had a chai, walked around the town, bought a couple of souvenirs [ just me :) ], fed a monkey a ti
ny banana, tried a red banana for the first time.




We had dinner and stopped for a local beverage called a Bovonto. Think of it as a Coke mixed with fruity cough syrup, but minus the alcohol and healing powers. :) I finished about 90% of mine. Matt abandoned ship at about 35%.




Back to the hotel to get ready, charge up all our gear and get some needed sleep, but first we flew Matt's drone off of the roof of the hotel where we freaked out some locals and recorded the area via ariel footage.




Overall a great first day, but I could have done without the 2 flat tires! I believe i set a new record for myself. Matt timed me on the first wheel and from flat and on the bike to fixed and on the bike it was about 13mins!


Let's do this day 2!!!

Some serious forearm action. Like Popeye

Matty at the pharmacy... we didn't ask. 0_0