Sunday morning I got up early to see Wifey and B off on their trip back to Pennsylvania. I’m not one to want to waste a perfectly good lazy Sunday morning, so I quickly returned to the Chamber of Farts to sleep for another hour as soon as the car was out of the drive.
Once up from “second sleep,” I immediately got sucked into watch le Tour while drinking coffee. With a beautiful sunny Sunday morning now wasted, I started gathering stuff for a dirt road ride.
As I got my gear together I noticed two things: that noon sun was a bit warm, and that the wind sure was blowing. Figuring there are worse things in life than being baked by warm sun and slowed by a steady wind, I kitted up and headed out.
Exiting the cul-de-sac onto the main road I rolled by two women loudly talking about cake pans. I said hello, and was properly ignored. “Screw you and your cake pans! Talk to me! LOVE ME!!” I thought and continued on.
Once I turned and headed west I was immediately greeted with the aforementioned wind, and found myself struggling just to stay at 12 MPH on a false flat. This went on for 10 miles before I finally headed north and was greeted with a much more doable crosswind.
The bright sun was intense and I found myself soaked with ham grease sweat, and hitting the bottles hard just a third of the way into the ride.
I headed a bit further north than usual to mix things up a bit and was greeting with a photogenic fawn that wasn’t quite sure what to do once her mom sprinted into the corn field and it was confronted with a sweaty human ensconced in lycra. I took a few photos of it as it finally headed into the corn, but they didn’t come out, because the Fuji X-T1 doesn’t do auto focus (well) when things start moving. Damn!
A friendly older gentleman on a quad rolled up to me as I was putting the camera away to talk about the fawn and how there were two others he used to see all the time last year, but then he found the bones of one of them near the beans in his garden, apparently eaten by a coyote. Well OK then…
With the camera put away I settled in an enjoyed the tail wind and rolling at 23 MPH for the next 10 miles or so.
Once I headed south towards home the sun was intense, the south/west wind started making things a bit slower, and the fresh gravel and soft dirt started getting deeper and harder to plow through. I looked down and saw that once again I was struggling to keep speeds at 12 MPH… “OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE!”
31 miles later I was home; sun burned, baked with salt, covered in dust and soaked with sweat. The ride was not one of my better ones of late, and hardly any of my photos were worth the time it took to take them, but moving at 12 MPH into the wind on a sunny Sunday afternoon is still pretty darn OK.
Later.