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And how was your day? Mine was just fine, thanks. I spent the afternoon yoyoing off and on the back of the front pack of the slow group ride. That sounds like about the right station in life for a couple of hours.
Here we were hammering it by a cornfield. Keeping up is hard!
I love this. A John Deere tractor sitting out on the corner nearest the road. That’s a tool and a display piece. And it is a welcome site.
If I rode more I’d see more.
We found a spooky barn on our bike ride today. How often do you see a barn like this?
That’s probably a little over halfway along in today’s 30-mile route. It was at the top of a long slow climb. You get up there and before you can catch your breath you are wondering about the people that lived there. House on one side of the road, two little barns on this side, all right at the top of a round hill.
Which is better than being at the bottom of the hill, but you go through there thinking, Man, mechanized automobiles are great. Isn’t it great we didn’t have to haul these materials up here by hand?
Or that’s what I’d think, anyway.
Coneflowers we found somewhere else along the way:
We stopped four times on our ride today. And that’s OK. Great day for it. Everything is growing and in the full splendor of summer. It is a sight. You want to see it all, and hold it, and then find a way to keep it for forever, because you know the season and the beauty won’t last forever. But it should. Even when it shouldn’t, it should, even when you know why it can’t.
It’s not yet July, you shouldn’t be thinking about the winter.
I thought I would take a picture of my bicycle tire:
Seemed like a good idea at the time. I’d just mounted the thing, after all. Now I need to swap the other one, so the wheel doesn’t feel bad.
We pedaled out to one of the lakes this weekend. Going out there is nice. Getting out of the lakes is a different thing, because there are hills. We thought we knew hills. We didn’t know hills. But here’s the big “everybody goes here” lake:
Allie stayed home, thank you very much. She is enjoying her afternoons on the landing in the sun.
She looks like she’s in a scene of a kitteh noir, doesn’t she?
“He walked through my door like a hooman with no tuna, all slow and clumsy with excuses for hours. No Joe I knew would think to come here without tuna, and he knew the game, so the jig was up. His rap was tired. He had the kind of expression that told me he was a hapless sort. He had bad news written all over his face. At least the pets were pretty good.”
The Yankee made an apple pie.
When that happens you enjoy your apple pie. (It was tasty.)
We had a nice little 32-mile ride on our group bike ride this evening. Of course I took pictures of me chasing people. This is is off in the wilds of the farmland:
And here we are on the suburban stretch near the end:
I took a shadow selfie on the last road before our neighborhood:
Look at these speeds:
That’s a new personal best.
One of the guys in our cycling club invited us down to his town over the weekend for a ride. About 50 miles, he said, which got a bit longer somehow. Beautiful scenery:
There’s a lot of farming in this area, as you might imagine:
But that means quiet country roads, just a few cars, one moped and a few of these:
That’s Kyle in the foreground, and way off down the road is The Yankee. She’s fast:
I love the old barns and the greenery taking back the space, like nature’s revenge against some old farmer:
Smiley faces really bring in the casual yard sale traffic. Note the angle, this is going up a painful hill:
There’s a lot of farming to be done out there, though:
This one is going to be a banner on the site one day:
By this point, I was torched. We’d been doing high cadence pace lines and The Yankee was holding us up in the mid-20s for long stretches. That hurts after a while. Sometimes you ride so much that you want to ride more …
And sometimes you want food and a nap and to forget you own bikes. Today was a bit of the later.
