We often have this conversation at night:

Me: Do you want to ride tomorrow?

The Yankee: Yes.

Me: How far do you want to go?

The Yankee: X miles.

Me: Where do you want to go.

We had this conversation last night, in fact. This morning she said “I want to go here and there, hill and dale and so on.”

She did not, but you don’t care about the street names. What you do care about is when she said ” … and then come back here to fuel up.”

Which, I’ve decided today, is the meanest thing she’s ever said.

See, I’d figured I’d do my 30 miles — because I am at a place where doing less than 15 is a joke, doing 20 barely seems an effort, but 30 is time well spent AND I can still function like a human being for the rest of the day. I’d do my 30 and then come home, rest, hydrate, shower, you know, that stuff. And then later this evening I could mow the lawn.

I am aided in this because, being from the north, the Deep South summer wipes her out. She decided earlier this week she can ride in humidity — it was odd hearing her admit that — but it is the sun that truly hurts. And, if you think about country roads, or even urban areas, rare is the spot where you can be in a lot of shade. July. Deep South. And so on.

So she starts out, and then I play catch up. I pass her. I get home and have a refreshing beverage and think “I’m done. She’ll get home and by then it will be serious July and no longer the early morning and that’ll be the day’s ride.”

But no.

She decides to go back out. And I’m stubborn, so I decide to go back out. She gets a head start. I catch her, and so on. She has a flat tire. I help with that. Turning right at the top of this hill — which I’ve climbed twice, because I had to go back for the tire — means going home. Turning left means we continue our pre-existing route. She turns left, figuring that, having done 45 miles, she’s pressing on.

There’s an expression we’ve learned in long duration exertion called bonking. It is defined as “a condition caused by the depletion of glycogen stores in the liver and muscles, which manifests itself by sudden fatigue and loss of energy.”

I think I had several bonks today.

But we rode 60 miles. SIXTY.

And finally we made it home. Now we’re not doing anything else for the rest of the day that requires coordinated muscle effort, because, really.

She made a delicious dinner. We had a late, large lunch. (Because we’d burned something like 4,000 calories pedaling around town.) And then we dove into Morgan Murphy’s Off the Eaten Path, which is a ringing endorsement for dives and out of the way places across the South (and, for some reason, Delaware and Maryland).

The Yankee’s mother gave us this book. We’ve been looking forward to trying most everything in it. Over the weekend we put sticky notes on each page marking a recipe we’d like to try. Basically we now have a book with sticky notes on most every page. That was a useful exercise.

Tonight we had chicken tortilla soup from Henry’s Puffy Tacos, in San Antonio, Texas. Delicious. Want the recipe?