Saturday, 07 May 2005

After a couple of weeks where it was colder than I like for outdoor exercise, spring has finally arrived. I bicycled to work on Thursday and Friday. Today, Jackie and I repeated our longest ride of the year so far and once again bicycled to Philo and had lunch at the Philo Tavern.

Central Illinois is well known for being flat. It isn't really flat, of course, just relatively flat compared to, well, just about any place. On a bicycle, though, even pretty small hills are noticeable.

When I take visitors around, I like to point to the small geographical formations and say, "And people say Illinois is flat! Look at that relief!" This picture was intended for that same purpose. It's a photo of Yankee Ridge, a geographical feature which would not rate a name any place but Central Illinois, but which is, in person, perfectly noticeable. Once I got home with the picture, though, and compressed it down to something reasonable for the web, I discovered that it doesn't really make the intended point.

Trust me on this: It's not so flat as it looks in this picture. The next thing I did after taking it was to ride up that hill right there. Honest.

Before the ride I got new batteries for my cyclometer, a Cateye Solar that I've had since the mid-1980s. When I installed them, the cyclometer started up okay, but would reset itself whenever I tried to do anything. The only thing I could think of was that maybe the battery contacts in the cyclometer had gotten corroded, so I got out an emery board and sanded them down a bit. That seems to have done the trick.

After the ride we mostly lazed around the house, then went out and had dinner at the Basmati.

It was a good day.