Two Wheel Blogs

Last night I commuted home, and this morning I commuted back to work.

The distance from work to home is only about 8 Km, so typically I do not take the direct route. Last night I headed over to the club ride that starts from a location about half way between my work and home. It rained on me the entire way to the park where the group meets so I was fairly certain that only a few would show up.

As I rolled into the park a big storm was rolling in behind me. My hunch proved accurate in that there were 3 people at the park, Jason and two others that did not even have their bikes out. Jason was committed to ridding and so was Mertens (who showed up moments later). At least one other potential rider showed up in their car with no bike to tell us that we should *not* ride. I really do not understand this since we are all fairly capable of making our own bad decisions.

I guess it turns out that our decision to ride was the better choice. I may have been hit by a sprinkle or two while on the club ride (a stark contrast to the drenching I got on the way to the ride). I figured it was 90 degrees so a little rain would only cool me off and feel nice. Unfortunately, we did not get any more. The one nice thing about having only a few crazies in attendance on this ride was we were able to turn out a more challenging route than a larger group dynamic would allow.

I pulled off the ride a few K from the park and headed for home. All in my evening commute was stretched to a little over 50 K. It was a great ride.

This morning I woke up to scattered showers and the realization that I had only my bike for transportation to work. So after brewing up a nice pot of Project BDJ 31, I headed out to take the more direct commuting route and hopefully shoot the gap between clouds.

The direct route to work basically involves riding on Business Loop Hwy 50 (a.k.a. Missouri Blvd) end to end. This is one of the more traveled roads around here as you might imagine and it has more than a few traffic signals to keep your shifters clicking away. I climbed the hill out of my sub and turned onto the boulevard and started pounding. I figured I might get wet but it was only about 8 K and I would go fast to get it over quick. Would you believe that I managed to run the gauntlet unscathed? I managed to soar through every traffic signal on green (all 9 of them)!

Perhaps the rest of the day will go as well?