cycling


27
Jun 16

The search for the Maltese tuna

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.)


23
Jun 16

I wanna go fast!

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.


22
Jun 16

A 67-mile bike ride

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.


16
Jun 16

Slow stones, fast rides, long suns

On our bike ride today, we stopped and regrouped in the parking lot of this little church.

The place is basically carved out of the woods. The new place, that is. I don’t know where the “old one” was, though. But you think about when that stone was ordered, sometime in the 1950s or later. Whoever placed the job, do you figure they were up against a per letter budget, or there was a committee or a severe case of writer’s block.

I chased her …

And I chased her for 34 miles …

Now, she’s riding pretty well right now, and I’m doing what I can to hang on, but I think my app might have malfunctioned. It says my maximum speed for today’s route was 452.4 miles per hour. And it thinks I did that for about four miles. The precision in the error is what I like. Point four.

And, finally, this picture:

What is significant about this picture? I took it at 8:37 p.m. It would be some time later before the sun went down. That’s a nice feature.


14
Jun 16

Happy Flag Day

We have a flag. It is not yet on display. We’re still displaying other things. Allie, meanwhile, has found her first favorite spot:

The Black Cat is a creature of habit. She’ll spend part of her day here or there, following the sun, being around us, watching the outdoors, curled up asleep. I always wonder what makes her pick her spots. Well, the sunshine is an easy one, but the rest seem like something just short of chance. And, after some amount of time — forgive me, I’ve not charted this all out — she’ll rotate into entirely neat spots for whatever reason. That landing, where she can catch a bit of the early afternoon sun, is her first spot.

Here’s a scene from a quick 18-mile bike ride yesterday:

We’re still learning roads, and so it was no surprise that it was a surprise that we wound up at a place where this could happen:

I’m not a taker of street signs, but that’d be a neat one to see on a wall somewhere, wouldn’t it?

Also the 300-700 feet footnote … I’m sure that has to do with seasonal water levels, but it does seem a bit vague, doesn’t it?

So many mysteries.