Some light rain overnight did nothing to help the swampy conditions of the dirt roads, but the warm-ish 40˚ temps were enough to poo poo an indoor workout and get out for a quick Better Than The Trainer Ride™ (Plèasant – Bêal – Plèasant road ride edition) before another round of “wintry mix” moves in.
Excuse me while I sing one of my favorite lines from one of my least favorite songs…“ITTTTT’S the most WWWWONDERFUL time of the yyyyyear….” Yes, the holidays, barring New Year’s Eve, are OVER! Can I get an amen??
Wednesday morning the Unit and I took off to the Fatherland (western Pennsylvania) for the Thanksgiving holiday. Most of the next four days would be filled with visiting family, eating, driving, eating, visiting family, arguing, driving, eating, and driving. My hope for Black Friday was to get up at the ass crack of dawn and head out to Walmart to get my hands on one of two 90″ Sonie™ flat screen TVs for $19.99. I’m joking of course, my goal was to sleep off my turkey coma, continue our family visiting, and if I was lucky get a window of opportunity to drive up to the mountains for a hike. Goal accomplished.
Friday and Saturday this week were like night and day. Friday it was 70˚ and I rode 30 miles in shorts and short sleeves under a blue sky and sun. Saturday it was dark and gray, the wind was gusting, and it was blowing rain and snow most of the day.
Lumber
verb
lum·ber \ˈləm-bər\
1: to move ponderously [Ponderously, what the hell does that mean?]
Ponderous
adjective
pon·der·ous \ˈpän-d(ə-)rəs\
1: of very great weight [Seems about right]
2: unwieldy or clumsy because of weight and size [Yep, still seems right]
3: oppressively or unpleasantly dull [OK, that seems a bit much, but two out of three wins]
Wednesday night I had one of the best night’s sleep all week. Meaning that I didn’t spend the whole night mouth breathing and dealing with flu-like aches and pains for eight hours. Given that I haven’t done any physical activity since Saturday I knew I needed to do something–anything–outside. I was feeling better, but I also knew that a ride was probably not the best choice just yet, so I found my heavy (but water proof) crap hiking boots, and headed to one of our nearby county parks to lumber around the wet woods for four miles and take some photos.
I didn’t exactly burn four days’ worth of comfort foods and pity alcohol off my Merriam-Webster defined clumsy, oppressive, unpleasantly dull body of great weight and size, but I did get outside, took some photos, and enjoyed the first day of the week that I didn’t just want to sit in a vat of scalding hot chicken soup and pray for the end of days tethered to this planet.
Each day, each week, each ride, fall continues to fall upon central Michigan. More and more fields are now bare; crops harvested and carted off to become Doritos, Big Macs, and corn flavored gasoline, leaving the landscape wide open for crisp winds to travel 3,800 miles from the Witch’s tit (located on a small island in the East Siberian Sea) all the way to rural Michigan to turn the nipples on my sagging pecs into glass cutting diamonds as I lumber along dirt roads on my bike.
Thankfully there are still some crops hanging on, and leaves remaining on the trees to keep all that from happening quite yet, but each day we creep a little closer to death, er, I mean winter.
As fall continues falling on Michigan, I continue to try to get as many rides in as I can. I also continue to be lost for words to write. Not sure if any readers would actually think that’s a bad thing given my lack of writing skills, spelling, punctuation, and interesting topics, but it’s a situation that I find odd.
I wouldn’t exactly call it writers block, but in the past I seemed to have no problem writing about crap subjects including the gym locker room, my lunch, bad product reviews, and cheap jeans.
Basically, I think the “problem” is that (for better or worse) I’ve become more interested in photographing things in my life rather than writing about it, and with that I’ve learned to let the pictures do the talking, and save everyone the grief of experiencing my verbal diarrhea.
So let’s look at some pics from three of my rides at the end of last week…
Last week featured a series of wet, foggy rides. Since then the sun has returned and the temperatures seem to have become a bit more moderate. Both welcome events.
Since my last post, I’ve been a bit busy, yet still managing to get some rides in. Three so far to be exact, starting with a short one last Saturday. A ride that I really didn’t feel like doing, but after some encouraging words from B-Man, and knowing that Sunday would be filled with driving down to the Detroit suburbs and back for a soccer game, I figured I’d better roll while I could.
Wednesday and Thursday brought two more dirt road rides. Wednesday’s ride was finally in some sun south of town on the PrOcal, and Thursday’s ride was a muddy slog north of town on the Fatterson in dense fog.
After three days off the bike traveling for B’s soccer, crap weather, busy-ness, and/or general laziness, I found myself back on the bike Tuesday morning for a foggy dirt road ride on the PrOcal.