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I want to make one thing perfectly clear.  I didn’t twist her arm or otherwise coerce her to ride today.  In fact, she’s the one who suggested we go.  What a woman!

We called off our early morning ride with Mike due to drizzle from the remains of Isaac.  By the time we got up the second time, it looked like we might have a small window of opportunity.  The drizzle had nearly stopped, radar looked like the back edge of the storm was trying to circle back around and get us, but looked to be a ways away.  Pam suggested we go out for a “20” mile ride during the window.  We tried to call Mike, but couldn’t reach him, so we started getting ready to go. 

As we pulled out the driveway, we were seeing just a faint drizzle on my glasses, but nothing to be overly concerned about.  In fact, I was more concerned about the wind than the drizzle. 

By the time we were riding down Sunshine, however, the drizzle started up again and would end up turning into a full blown rain before all was said and done. 

Shortly after, Pam decided we should stretch it to 30 miles so I made a slight course correction in our route to Strafford to make that happen.  At that point, we were cruising pretty easily on the tandem due to the strong tailwind from the leading edge of the storm band.

We only stopped long enough in Strafford for me to grab my rain jacket out of the bag on the back.  By that time, I was soggy enough that I knew riding into the wind would cause me to be cold.

One thing we need to learn to do is put our rain gear on early enough.  We had Pam’s rain jacket and pants, and my jacket, but Pam’s went unopened and I only put mine on half-way through the ride.  The cycling jacket she had on is mostly water resistant, but she would have stayed drier with her real rain gear on.  We joke about being so dumb about that, but we really do need to do that better.

From Strafford back to the house, we were battling a strong wind.  It was the kind that would demoralize a person if they tried to fight through it.  As it was, we’ve learned to just gear down and spin into it.  We could see our average speed dropping rapidly, but we made it home without really suffering.

We pulled into the driveway with exactly 30 miles behind us.  When we looked at the radar, we could tell the leading edge of the storm had gotten to us way faster than we expected, and as I write this several hours later, it looks like we’ve still got several more hours of rain to contend with.

Here’s the only real casualty of our ride today:

Luckily, I expected that and grabbed a pair of older socks!

You can click the map above for the full GPS route.

God bless….

TW

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This entry was posted on September 1, 2012 at 4:18 pm and is filed under bicycle, Cycling, Fitness, rain, tandem. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: bicycle, Cycling, Fitness, Hurricane Isaac, rain, tandem

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