Tonopah! This place will always be remembered among our team and its because we all hate it so much! It was our first century ride (100miles) and was surprisingly not that bad. Some hills, some flats, but we cruised for a while until I had a flat. Than, I broke the new tube’s valve pumping it up, which slowed us down. The last 10 miles was awful though. We could see the town the entire time but it never seemed to get any closer. In addition we were going up a slight uphill with headwind to add.
We were given a tour of the Tonopah silver mine by a kooky old guy who claimed he and his friend saw a UFO flying around town. 500ft shafts, glory holes, old mining equipment, and a pile of century-old discarded rocks were the features of the tour. Tonopah was founded by a man named Jim Butler, found silver in a rock when he picked it up to throw at his wandering burro. The town was a big deal before WWII, but was pretty crappy now. Boom and bust town I believe.
Three Tonopah Lions served us a mediocre dinner of cold beans, a brat, and potato salad. They had old JOH shirts hanging in their lodge and that was cool to see. We signed ours and gave it to them. It is hard to express our dislike of Tonopah, but I am writing this entry a while after and it has grown to be the team joke. We blame any difficulty on Tonopah, and also replaced “Panama” with Tonopah in the Van Halen song. Tonopah!
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