Wednesday, 18 May 2005

Two days of good bicycling weather so far this week. I bicycled to work yesterday and today.

With graduation past, my favorite route to work is once again available. The students don't use the paths I like to ride on, but there's a lot of University-related traffic that backs up on Mattis across the place where the paths cross the road. So, I take a different route when school is in session.

There are three houses with dogs along that stretch of path, just west of Mattis. They like to bark at me as I ride past. I don't really mind. In fact, I kind of like the basset hound, who bays with a very pretty voice.

The right-of-way for the trail runs along with some small streams or drainage canals. Just before you get to the dogs, one of those streams runs into a tunnel. (I'm not sure exactly where the other end of that tunnel is, a fact that just occurred to me. Maybe I'll investigate.) A pool of cool air forms at the mouth of the tunnel. It's hardly noticeable on a cool day, but on a day when it's warm and still, there's a shock when I zip through this chilly patch of air. It just covers a few yards of the path, so I'm into it and then out of it again almost as soon as I notice it's there. Having experienced it again today, I remember it from past years, but I had completely forgotten.

Sunday we did our long bike ride--at 29.51 miles, about the same length as last week's.

It was cool and windy, so we took a different route, heading west out of town. That way, we could do the first leg into the wind and then have the wind at our back on the way home. We rode to White Heath, which doesn't really have much in it--not even a convenience store, as far as I know--so we brought a picnic lunch and ate it on the grass near the playground by the school.

Although the ride out was a bit of a tough slog, the ride home with the wind at our backs was great fun.

Up to now there hasn't been a real rush as far as getting our milage up, but we're getting to the point where we need to start increasing the milage if we're going to be able to do a 100 mile ride in mid-July. With that in mind we're tentatively planning to go to Monticello. That'll be about 45 miles round trip, and will include the Brown Bag as a lunch stop.