Yesterday afternoon we clamped the bikes to the roof and headed a couple of hours North to stay overnight with Jim and his wife. Jim works at Tulane with The Wife, and they have bought a chunk of land and a couple of little run-down houses way out in the country. Cow country, to be specific. This place is far enough away from everything that you may as well just turn the cellphone off. They have been working on fixing up this little house, and have done a nice job with it. Nothing fancy, to be sure. The floors slope and the doors don't all latch, but the a/c works great and bed is soft and at night it is quiet. I mean, scary-quiet. For a guy who lives twenty feet from a six-lane highway, all that quiet takes a little "getting used to." So anyway, after we arrived we took the tour of the property. Along the way, the neighbor, who grazes his cattle on some of Jim's property, walked over with a little Catahoula Hound puppy, carefully working himself through the barbed wire fence. A bit later, his wife and their daughter walked across the pasture to join in the conversation. It seemed to mostly revolve around snakes. This guy's wife had been bitten by a copperhead a couple of weeks ago, and he had just killed a water moccasin (aka cottonmouth). So naturally, we immediately set out to pick blackberries, which is the one thing I know of that is always associated with snake bites. I guess it was just too hot for the snakes to pay us much attention, though, and we returned with a big pail of rather small blackberries (it's really late in the season for blackberries). That night, after half a bottle of Kendall Jackson Chardonnay, we hit the sack around 10:30. No fireworks, no gunshots, just silence. Spooky.
The next morning, The Wife and I headed out at 6:30 for a 40-mile ride. It's been a long time since we did a ride that long together. I had mapped out what I knew would be a really nice route, using most of the roads that we had ridden last winter on a training ride. Although we were two hours from New Orleans, most of the intersections had painted arrows on them from the Crescent City Cyclists' Century rides (or maybe just some Bob Hodges rides). Anyway, the roads up there were awesome. Lots of smooth asphalt and rolling hills and narrow tree-shaded country roads. I think we probably saw a total of ten cars in 40 miles. The Wife, riding her antique 5-speed Bruce Gordon with a low gear of 42x18, was definitely struggling on the steeper hills, but I resisted the urge to attack anyway. Just as we got to the last little hill, maybe 300 yards from the house, my front tire flatted. I was so close, I just wobbled in the rest of the way on the flat. Afterward, we helped staple up some classic country house ceiling tiles in one of the rooms they're working on.
So The Daughter went out and got new tires and a front end alignment on the Jeep to the tune of nearly $700, and that was with the tires on sale! Ouch. She paid for them herself, and we'll reimburse her, but it definitely won't be all at once!
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