Back to the Winter

The drive up to Iowa was long but uneventful, and since we hadn't left New Orleans until around 7 am, it was around 10 pm by the time we pulled into Iowa City. Along the way the bright greens of the southern springtime landscape gradually dulled to the uniform grey of the midwest winter. So Saturday morning was cold and windy and I decided that my best option was to shoot for a ride in the early afternoon. By then the temperature had gotten up into the 50s. I hunted around on the web for some information on where to ride and settled on the Sugarbottom route that I found on MapMyRide.com. It turned out to have been a good choice. Once I got a couple of miles north of I-80 I was on some nice low-traffic roads with lots of rolling hills and a couple of good out-of-the-saddle steep ones. Making the ride even harder, though, was the wind which was gusting at 20-30 mph. In fact, I didn't take many photos during this ride because taking both hands off the bars was a little too sketchy. Along the way I met up with a couple from the Iowa City Cycling Club, although they were just out for an easy spin checking out a new pair of pedals. Apparently a lot of the local racers were out of town at a race over near Illinois. There was also a group of recreational type cyclists on this road - safety vests, handlebar bags, etc. I was a little surprised to see such a group on this stretch of road because it was certainly not the easiest one around.

So I couldn't resist doubling back a couple of times on Sugarbottom Road so I could do some of those climbs again and by the time I looked at my watch it was getting kind of late. We were planning to head over to the stadium for the NCAA Regional Gymnastics Championships at 5:00 and I wasn't all that sure how long it would take me to get back. That's when I made a rather bad decision, which was to do the loop through the city that was shown on the map I'd seen rather than turning around and going back the way I'd come. So I headed off into more uncharted territory, stopping a couple of times to confirm that I was still on the right track. It took forever to make my way through the city because of all of the traffic signals, but I made it back more or less in time.

The meet didn't go well for Iowa, especially when one of their star gymnasts fell on floor and injured her knee, possibly tearing her ACL. After that we went to a team dinner and didn't get home until nearly midnight. The Daughter was handling the music for this meet, shuffling all of the various formats in which the floor competition is provided and dealing with all of the last minute changes and team assistants who were afraid she's screw up their floor music.

This morning it's 38F, brutally windy, with an 80% chance of rain. I'm supposed to go to a brunch in an hour, so it's not looking too promising. I hope everyone is having a good time at the triathlon back in New Orleans where the morning temperature is in the 80s, the chance of rain low, and the lake should be swimmable. I'll have to play it by early today.