Picked The Daughter up from the airport late Saturday night. By some sort of cosmic coincidence, her old teammate Kristi from Slidell, who was returning home from the University of Nebraska, was not only on the same flight from Chicago, but had the seat next to her. We got to the airport early because The Wife was anxious, and there were Kristi's parents. The only problem was that D had needed to run to make it onto the plane in Chicago because her connecting flight from Cedar Rapids had been late. Her luggage, therefore, spent the night in Chicago.
So Saturday morning I woke up pretty sore and stiff from Friday's dance with the asphalt, but I got dressed, pumped up the tires, and headed out anyway for the Giro ride. Well, I went about four blocks and hit the "abort" button. My neck muscles were so sore that they were hurting every time I hit a bump, and the prospect of riding three hours like that was not looking too good. So I made some rather bad coffee and figured I should chill out on the couch for a while and try again on Sunday. Picked up a Barista coffee maker for The Wife (special request) and then hunted around to find a Starbucks that had the metal filter in stock. I was amazed that they would actually sell a coffee maker that used paper filters! Got a great deal, though. The $99 coffee maker was on sale for $79 and they threw in a bag of Christmas blend coffee, so I'll rationalize by saying that I essentially got the metal filter for free!
Saturday night was Robin's Christmas party, and it was nice being able to chat with a bunch of people with whom my usual conversations consist of things like "Hole!" and "Bumb!" Had some nice jambalaya and heard the TurDuckin and gumbo were good too, although personally I was saving room for another glass of Beaujolais Nouveau and some of those little chocolate eclairs.
Sunday was another winter training ride across the lake and I wasn't too surprised when only Con and Rob showed up at the Morning Call to drive over. We ended up with five guys and about that many mechanical problems. First, Rob discovered that he had somehow lost the bolt that holds his front brake on, so we had to improvise, removing his brake shoes and using some packing tape I had in my car to tape the brake caliper to the front fork. Next, Con had to stop because his rear wheel was crooked in the dropout and so the tire had been rubbing the frame for the last few miles. About 30 miles out, as we were riding across a particularly rough stretch, Mark broke a spoke (and the rim cracked too?!) in his rear Ksyrium wheel. We secured the broken spoke so that it wouldn't hit the frame, but the rim was pretty wobbly and the tire was hitting the frame, so he headed back the shortest way while we pressed on to do a little loop North of Enon, which was great. On the way back, Rob's rear wheel was starting to look worse and worse. The last few miles, he was starting to hurt and when we got back to the car we found out why. His wheel was hitting the brake.
Anyway, despite all the mechanicals and the steadily escalating North wind, it was a beautiful 72 miles out in the country today and we had a pretty nice training ride under clear blue skies with temps between 40 and 55. This was the first weekend that it really started to look like Winter, and tonight will probably be the coldest weather we've had yet, which means that it will get down almost to freezing in the city. On the way back home, I stopped for a coke at a gas station and got one of those bottle caps that said I won a free one-liter coke!
WhooHooo, Merry Christmas to me!
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