Not wasting a sunny December morning
I’d made plans to ride Kevin Brightbill’s Cuthbert Binns populaire this morning, and was pleasantly surprised to wake up to a clear (if cold) sky and no wind. So when I dragged the project bike out, I was actually somewhat hopeful that I could push myself up against 4 hours.
Alas, no, this was not to be the case. It didn’t help that I stopped downtown for a couple of minutes so I could get a photo of a tugboat shoving a barge full of sand or gravel upstream, but the main reason I didn’t bump closely up against 4 hours was that the windlessness of the early morning gave way to first a stiff east-southeast wind that sapped a lot of my energy (the project bike is much more of a sail than the midlifecrisismobile, so I slowly lost headway when I was coming back from both of the turnaround points on Sauvie Island) and which cruelly switched to a west-southwest wind just as I made the loop around the southern end of Sauvie Island.
And then, after I managed to pull my brevet average up to 16mph again, I was stopped for 10 minutes by a slowly moving freight train on Naito Parkway (the brevet clock had just ticked over to 4 hours when I was pulled up short by the (stopped on the crossing. Grrr!) train) and I ended up coming up to the ultimate control 4h27 after I departed.
So it wasn’t the speedy loop that I wanted. I suspect that for a speedy loop I’m going to have to use the midlifecrisismobile, which means I’ve got to braze up that rack ASAP. But, instead, it was a sunny December morning, so as long as I kept moving I could enjoy the bits of warmth that the sun provided and I could get quite a few railroad pictures in the sunlight instead of the traditional murky gloom of winter.
A++ loop, will ride again.
And this loop brings me up to ~12,000 miles and 11811 RUSA km for the year. I was hoping for 13,000 RUSA km by the end of the year, but that would mean I’d have to ride another 750 miles in the next 16 days, and I’m not sure but I think that my family would probably object if I went out and rode 6 200k’s during the winter break. I’ll probably get 3-4 of ‘em, but even with filling in odd mornings with one populaire or another I don’t think that will be enough. Oh well! There’s always next year, provided I can beg borrow or buy a tadpole to cover the 3-6 months I’ll be unable to ride a bicycle.
Pictures? Yes, right here.