mev

I've seen segregation of snorers happen on other extended group rides such as TDA in China or Africa. That type of recurring trip with a group makes it easier to identify who snores and enough nights that people start to adjust.

It is a bit tougher on an organized group ride like Ride the Rockies, because the group size is larger, the duration is shorter and I expect people to switch up a bit more.

I do recall two other types of disruptions that interrupted sleep on these rides...
- One night in Pedal the Plains many of us were camped on the ball fields when the sprinklers came on. Apparently, someone from the host community had forgotten to adjust the sprinkler schedule and they were now going with several hundred campers. It seemed like a long time before they went off again - had to find someone in town who had the controls - though it probably wasn't as long as we thought.

- I've also had sprinklers come on in Walden at the park, though that was a smaller group and apparently not uncommon for that location

- In China I caught the last six weeks of the original Silk Road ride. It had been a tough ride and some tensions were a bit frayed - and the group had also formed different cliques. Enter into this brew - the introduction of firecrackers available in some of the initial Chinese cities. Some of the younger clique were first to find them. People would be sitting at camp and then here a long sequence of bang/bang/bang followed by some younger members having fun.

That was all fun and good until one morning early about 4am or so, there was also a sequence of loud bangs waking people up. One person was particularly pissed and he verbally reprimanded one of the younger riders in a rather condescending tone. At it turned out - that rider had nothing to do with the firecrackers and instead it was another older rider that had lit off the fireworks.

Frayed tempers and several days later - we had another tough riding day when things erupted again. There were two things that made this a tough riding day. We were going through coal country and there was a fine layer of coal dust everywhere (from passing trucks) that was kicked up from our tires making faces dirty. There was also some construction in one of the bridges that led to a 40km long backup - and our support trucks taking a long way around. Fortunately, we could still cycle past the stopped vehicles.

When we got to the hotel - the trucks hadn't arrived, so we with our dirty coal faces waited outside for rooms and chance to wash. At this point, there was suddenly a reverberation of fireworks with a bang/bang/bang - along with a rider (big Dave) walking away and snickering. This also wasn't one of the younger riders - and some figured this had also been who had woken everyone up the nights before. So one of the other riders without the best social skills decided to curse out the fire cracker culprit. Unfortunately that escalated to the point at which they were about to duke it out and big Dave pushed back the cursing rider onto the ground.

At this point, others sprung into action to separate the riders and keep this from getting worse. That night when the TDA staff arrived, they considered what to do with this incident. We were told that big Dave had violated his rider agreement by physical altercation and was kicked off the tour. The cursing rider was still there - though much more meek after that.

That should have ended things - but what got weird was we still had two weeks of riding to Beijing and big Dave decided not to go home. Instead, he "shadowed" the group and it was rumored some others from his clique were also carrying some of his baggage. In any case, each evening when we arrived in a town, big Dave would also arrive, having cycled there by himself but still using some of the same itinerary as rest of the group. This occasionally made things awkward - though fortunately only two weeks remaining.