Second Day: Bamidbar (Into the Desert)
Today, we entered the Negev.
Derek started early on an optional ride from Ashkelon to Sderot, which he did without me. From the beginning, we planned that he would probably ride solo for some of the time, since I simply don’t have his stamina. The rest of the riders left a little later on the bus, and got a tour of the JNF Indorr Recreation Center, which was built to provide a play space for local children safe from Gaza rocket attacks. That was a strange and sad thing to see. Least fun fact: everything in the building is designed so that every single person, and it accommodates up to 500 in a 20,000 square foot facility, can enter a fortified shelter within 15 seconds of the rocket sirens sounding.
At Sderot, we remounted the tandem and hit the road towards the desert. We started out with the middle (bogrim) group, because we didn’t want to go as far as the advanced (mumchim) group. Turns out that, while we (read: I) don’t have a lot of stamina, we still go very, very fast. Too fast for bogrim, as it turns out. For a while, we were leading that group. In fact, the guide for the group was drafting off of us. He said it was like drafting off a bus, which seemed like kind of a left-handed complement, to tell the truth.
So we hopped on to the mumchim and took off. We managed to work with the Chai Rollers of White Plains, really nice people who ride together a lot, on a pace line. Again, a few folks enjoyed drafting us, perhaps a little too much.
We rode up a highway paralleling the Gaza, and then turned toward the desert, stopping at aid stations set up at various kibbutzim. This part of the desert has been developed for agriculture, and, while very dry, is still fairly green, at least as best as I could tell from the road.
As we headed in toward the lunch break, my engine gave out, and we decided to skip the final 30 mile push to Mashabe Sade, where we’re staying tonight. Instead, we took a tour of Kibbutz Revivim, which was one of the pioneer settlements in the Negev, playing a key role in the War of Independence. It was a lot like going to a Revolutionary War monument, in that it’s clearly history written by the winners. But we did get to go into their bomb shelter cave, which had been an ancient cistern.
We still made about 29 miles on the tandem, and did it in well under 2 hours, so it was still a pretty good workout. But, pain.
Tomorrow, Derek gets to go mountain biking, and I get a jeep ride.