Riding to Work

This morning's training ride was a fairly typical one at first. Everybody was taking long steady pulls at moderate speeds, except for Sam who darted ahead and rode off the front for a while. Woody was with us for a while, but he was being careful to protect his legs ahead of his trip to Louisville tomorrow where he, Kenny and Scott K will be racing their respective m-nats criteriums. From today's time trials, word is already out that Mike Olheiser won his age group, but I haven't yet heard anything about the fate of our LAMBRA riders (Mat Davis, Mark Graffagnini, Stan Prutz, Charles Hobbs, Vivian Torres, and whoever else I'm missing). Anyway, for the return trip from the turnaround at today's ride, we all hopped aboard the "D" train as Donald pulled the whole bunch of us pretty much the entire way back at 24-25 mph. My legs were still feeling kind of sore from yesterday, so I wasn't inclined to rock that boat at all.

After a quick shower I headed off to work by way of the neighborhood bank's ATM machine and Maple Street Starbucks. At the bank I discovered that they had done away with deposit envelopes and that the new machines now simply suck in each deposit check one at a time, scan them, figure out the amount, and make the deposits that way. I was impressed that it could read the handwritten checks. So I headed down Short Street toward Starbucks, and for some reason decided to get my camera out. This is the street that I normally use to get to the bike path for my morning rides. The first thing that caught my eye was the brightly painted handmade sign at Sycamore St. that says "Slow your roll." There are a number of little signs this scattered about the lower Carrollton neighborhood, and although I have no idea who makes them, I like seeing them. A bit farther down Short Street, near Willow, is a particularly brightly painted little Camelback house, probably originally built as a simple Shotgun around 1900 or so, that I've always found interesting. The tropical plants around this house are further decorated with bromeliads, giving it kind of a Caribbean feel.

Every now and then, it's nice to look up from the handlebars for a few minutes.....